Yet Abrams begins with Socrates's three beds. The Romantic poets, like the Classical poets, can be summarily combined: both are Old (and Young) White Males. How old-fashioned Abrams' concern with writers and lit crit appear under the International Space Station of political and racial and gender studies. Then itself was displaced, in the American Academy, by Race and Gender studies. The French import stretched comprehension and discussion well beyond Classical versus Romantic. It was an age when distinctions between imitation and expression sufficed, before the onslaught of the French Disease, déconstruction. Its fine, clear distinctions positively bask in an age when literary endeavor and discussion redounded through the halls of the academy, as economics and computers and medically-related programs do now. Read parts as an undergrad and most all in grad school in the late sixties. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard.
He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. He went into English because, he says, " there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to the University of Cambridge, where his tutor was I.A. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.Ībrams was born in a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S.
In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp.
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