Murray G. Krieger

Murray G. Krieger
Name	Murray G. Krieger
Birth date	1923
Death date	2000
Occupation	Literary critic, theorist, professor
Known for	New Criticism, literary theory, poetics

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Murray G. Krieger Murray G. Krieger was an American literary critic and theorist associated with developments in twentieth-century New Criticism, literary theory, and poetics. He helped shape debates at institutions such as Harvard University, University of California, Irvine, and the Modern Language Association, influencing scholars working on figures like T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Walt Whitman. His work engaged with traditions from Renaissance literature to modernism and intersected with movements involving structuralism, deconstruction, and aesthetics.

Early life and education

Born in Brooklyn, Krieger came of age during the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal, circumstances that paralleled intellectual currents in departments at Columbia University and Harvard University. He completed undergraduate study before pursuing graduate work influenced by scholars at Princeton University and critics associated with The Sewanee Review and PMLA. During his formation he read canonical texts by John Milton, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Emily Dickinson, while tracing critical lines from I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot to contemporaries at Yale University and Stanford University.

Krieger held teaching and administrative roles that connected him with centers of literary study such as University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, and the Modern Language Association of America. He collaborated with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Chicago and participated in conferences alongside scholars from Duke University and New York University. His career included editorial work for journals similar to Critical Inquiry and involvement with professional bodies like the American Comparative Literature Association and the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Krieger’s theory emphasized the autonomy of the literary sign and the role of form in producing meaning, dialogues that invoked thinkers in the line of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. He debated issues central to formalist and New Criticism practice as exemplified by figures such as Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, William Empson, and Raymond Williams. His major essays engaged with poetic voice and metaphor in relation to critics like Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams, and his polemics addressed later movements including structuralism and post-structuralism represented by Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Krieger explored how aesthetic categories intersected with texts by William Shakespeare, John Webster, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry James, aligning his arguments with traditions traced through Gregory Bateson and Roman Jakobson.

Krieger influenced subsequent generations at institutions such as University of California, Irvine, Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University, mentoring scholars who went on to positions at Columbia University, Stanford University, and University of Chicago. His writings were discussed by critics publishing in New Literary History, ELH, and Poetics Today and debated in conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Debates about his positions implicated thinkers including J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Edward Said, situating Krieger within dialogues about canon formation and the study of modernism and romanticism. His legacy appears in curricula at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and major American research universities and in textbook treatments alongside authors such as T. S. Eliot and William Wordsworth.

- "The New Apologists for Poetry" — essay engaging debates with Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom. - The Literature of Loving (monograph often taught with works by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan). - The Tragic Vision (collection discussed with essays by Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams). - Essays in journals comparable to PMLA and Critical Inquiry addressing William Shakespeare, John Donne, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.