Thanks to Nigel Beale for his kind reference to Novel Readings as “stimulating” in his recent post in the Guardian‘s book blog. When he was working up the piece, Nigel asked me whether I had any thoughts about “why academic writing is so abstruse,” remarking among other things that academics “don’t have to appeal to the average intelligent reader” and that they avoid making aesthetic value judgments. Nigel quoted me accurately, but being an academic, of course I answered a bit lengthily, so in case anyone’s interested, here’s my full response to his inquiry:

I suppose the first thing to be said, as neutrally as possible, is that every area of specialized inquiry develops and requires specialized language (or jargon) that can seem opaque or abstruse from outside that specialization. In that respect, academic literary criticism is like other kinds of writing aimed primarily at other specialists. (The audience for academic criticism is not, generally, students, but other academic critics.) And of course literary criticism has become intensely specialized, in its academic versions, because of the demands of professionalization. There’s a great deal of pressure to publish (in academic, peer-refereed journals), which means finding things to say that have not been said before, which of course can and does push forward the frontiers of knowledge, put new ideas and texts and theories into circulation, etc., but which also means micro-specialization or niche scholarship, and increasing levels of self-conscious commentary or metacriticism. Whether these developments are good, bad, or simply inevitable, is of course much debated (including in some other posts on this blog), but within this context, it’s clear that as an academic, the audience you are trying to be ‘interesting’ to is not usually the broader public or the ‘average intelligent reader.’

I think you are right, in general, that aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an appropriate) aim of academic criticism. We are too aware of the shifting nature of such judgments, for one thing, and of the many reasons besides aesthetic ones for finding a text worth studying. If asked whether a book is good, an academic is likely to reply ‘good at what?’ or ‘good in relation to what?’ or ‘good for what?’ It may be that this insistence on refining the question, or examining its implicit assumptions, is part of what makes academic criticism less appealing to the ‘average intelligent reader,’ if what they are after is actually a recommendation (if so, there are lots of Top 10 lists around they can go to for that). But many non-academic readers would in fact like to think in more careful ways about their reading. Here’s where academic expertise presented in an accessible manner comes in, or could or should…but it’s not clear how such work would be rewarded professionally, and so we come back around to my first point.

There has been a pretty extensive comment thread following Nigel’s post already. Related posts on this blog appear under the labels ‘literary criticism‘ and ‘writing for readers.’

There’s a fascinating and detailed analysis of Keats’s “To Autumn” by Tom Paulin in The Guardian:

Opening a school anthology, I find this note to Keats’s ode “To Autumn”: “The magnificent ode is justly famous, and is often regarded as the most perfect of Keats’s poems. Its structure is quite complex, but after a couple of readings it will not be difficult to see that the first verse describes the ‘positive’ side of autumn – the side that looks back to summer and brings it to fruition, while the third verse describes the ‘negative’ side – a suggestion of chilliness, a series of thin sounds, and the sadness of approaching winter. The middle verse balances these two with four glimpses of a figure representing both the spirit of autumn and a farm-worker engaged in a series of typical autumnal activities.”

This describes, clearly and sensitively, how the poem has been read since its publication in 1820, but in recent years a group of historical critics has offered a more complicated, political reading of Keats. He was passionately interested in politics, and it would be surprising if that interest didn’t shape his writing. As a radical, who read and contributed to John and Leigh Hunt’s famous weekly journal, The Examiner, he would have seen not so much a “farm-worker”, as a member of the rural poor, a gleaner, who has scraped up the grains of corn left after the farm labourers had gathered in the harvest. Gleaning was made illegal in 1818, so by personifying autumn as a gleaner he is characterising the season as a proud and dignified young woman. (read the rest here)

The piece is an advance taste of Paulin’s forthcoming book, The Secret Life of Poems. It’s a compelling reading, at least to someone who’s not a Keats expert; I particularly enjoyed its balance of attention to fine textual details and historical and intertextual contexts. But I can see someone reacting quite differently, along the lines of the discussion that broke out recently in the comments to this post at The Valve. A sample exchange:

LB: That is to say, let’s imagine two critics who write the same excellent account of the formal, stylistic, and thematic features of Blake’s “The Tyger.” Then let’s imagine that while critic 1 stops there, critic 2 builds on that account and shows in clear, well-supported terms how these features connection to biography, cultural history, economics, etc. In that case, critic 2 has clearly added something that critic 1 cannot offer.

DG: Perhaps, if you’re more interested in biography, cultural history, and ecomonics than in art. I’m not, so the critic who provides such an account does nothing for me.

It seems a tailor-made example, actually. Paulin reads Keats’s Ode as critic 2 would. But is his therefore a better analysis than a fleshed-out version of the one in the ‘school anthology’ would be? The school anthology has described the poem an ordinary (i.e. non-specialized) reader would be familiar with; Paulin argues that this simpler account is inadequate, even wrong on some counts, and supports his more ‘complicated’ reading with a lot of specific evidence. Both readings address what is “actually there” in the poem (a phrase all who teach poetry to undergraduates are familiar with)–that is, both infer the meaning of the poem from the words on the page–but Paulin is less literal and inquires further afield in search of its meaning. I think that the result is a richer appreciation of Keats’s art. What do you think: is it fair, or reasonable, or problematic, to consider that you can “understand the poem perfectly well” without knowing any of the additional material or ideas Paulin brings to bear on it? Do you just understand it differently, or do you understand a different version of it? Also, how far does this dispute over the limits of “the poem itself” encapsulate the difference between academic and non-academic approaches to interpretation? And how far do readings of this sort, that set out to correct ordinary readings as simplistic or inadequate contribute, to the dislike ordinary readers sometimes express towards academics?

Further to an earlier post on David Masson’s British Novelists, here’s another bit I came across today in my proofreading that I can add to my file of Victorian observations on the relationship between philosophy and literature. This one is from an 1848 review of Jane Eyre that appeared in the Christian Remembrancer (hence its ultimately tendentious conclusion):

With [novelists] it rests to determine, each for himself and according to the measure of his gifts, whether so powerful an instrument of moving men, as fiction is, shall be used to move them for good or evil. Are the poetic and artistic faculties given to man purely for his amusement? Are they alone of all his powers not subject in their exercise to the legislative or judicial conscience? Curiously enough, we believe no moral philosopher has yet given a complete scientific answer to this question. A philosophical account of that part of man’s essence which is neither moral nor intellectual, but lies midway between the two, both in itself and in its relation to the moral and intellectual parts, would we believe still be an addition to the Moral Science. . . . [T]he position that the poetic and artistic faculties are subject to conscience, is a truism in theory which seems to be metamorphosed into a paradox in practice. We suppose, for instance, that Mrs Marcet considered herself to be uttering an acknowledged truth in saying that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village,’ being poetry, is none the worse for being bad political economy. Yet if this is so, neither is Don Juan, being also poetry, the worse for being bad religion. Goldsmith intended, or at least he foresaw that the effect of his poem would be, to raise certain sentiments and impressions relative to certain social questions; and if those sentiments were morbid and those impressions wrong, his poem is as plainly vicious as the most rigorous scientific treatise, embodying the same fallacies, would have been. This may seem an exaggerated instance. It is an experimentum crucis, certainly–but where is the line of demarcation to be drawn? . . . We do not mean to say that the writer of fiction is called upon to play the part of the preacher or the theologian. Far from it. What he is called upon to do is to hold up a clear and faithful mirror to human nature–a mirror in which it shall see its good as good, its evil as evil. His pages must give back the true reflection of a world of which morality is the law, and into which Christianity has entered.

Some good questions, along with a number of assumptions few critics today would entertain about literary merit or morality–though I enjoy the idea that morbidity is somehow an objectively measurable (and obviously undesirable) quality.