Article: When "life ... becomes literature": the Neo-Aristotelian poetics of Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It."

That it is a great temptation to read one's own critical system into any literary work is well known. Recall New Critic Cleanth Brooks's finding "irony as a principle of structure" everywhere, in works by writers as diverse as Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Randall Jarrell. Often, as in the case of Brooks, the reasoning seems to be that since critic X knows how literature in general must be written, author Y must have written specific work Z accordingly. Critics who follow this line of reasoning are in danger of becoming slaves to "ruling hypotheses" that may dictate what they must find. But what if critic X and author Y are one and the same? In the present - perhaps ...

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