Modern rhetoric

Educator and critic Cleanth Brooks was born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford universities. From 1932 to 1947, he taught English at Louisiana State University and then moved on to Yale. At Yale, Brooks helped to articulate the principles of New Criticism, which dominated literary studies in the 1940s and 1950s. The New Criticism argued that the literary work was an organic, complex whole to be evaluated on its own terms, without reference to extraliterary concerns such as biography, authorial intention, or historical and social context. Brooks claimed that literature's powers are unique. In Brooks's view, what determines the force and specialness of literature is irony, created primarily through paradox and metaphor. While at Yale, Brooks co-edited the journal Southern Review with Robert Penn Warren. An outstanding and revered was his book Modern Rhetoric, a favorite of the writer.