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The Ontological Turn in Literary Criticism and Some Challenges It Faces

I was sent three books on contemporary poetry to review. Each emphasizes the significance of moving from epistemological issues involving the role of imagination as the core of poetic thinking to ontological issues involving psychological and ethical conditions of embodiment. In the heyday of the New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom could produce an essay entitled “Wanted: An Ontological Critic” (1941). Now his wish has come to fulfillment in terms he would both admire and deplore. David Jhave Johnston explains that an early section of his Aesthetic Animism (2016) “outlines a history of materiality’s ascendancy to become the dominant literary criticism methodology, and also proposes a merger of hard materiality with soft ontologies, a healing of the poetic divide between brain (conceptualism) and body (inspiration)” (30–31). Nathan Brown observes: