Literary criticism

Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The Practice of Reading lies somewhere in between standard academic literary criticism and the more populist ‘books about books’ that I’ve been reading for my ‘writing for readers’ project. I suppose its main audience is an academic one, but its project and contents are quite miscellaneous and so it contributes more by modelling Donoghue’s idea of good reading across varied examples than by intervening incisively or extensively into any particular critical or theoretical debate. That said, Donoghue does present his ideas about reading and criticism in some detail in the first few chapters, and his broad aim is to make a case for aesthetic criticism (according to his careful definitions) against the various ideological versions he tags as the “New Thematics.” He advocates an aesthetic criticism that restores due emphasis to the ‘lived experience’ of reading texts, or to the element of ‘performance’ (qualities or properties that can’t be sustained in a paraphrase or plot summary). He calls for a “recovered disinterestedness,” a putting aside of our immediate selves and prejudices in order to release the imagination: “the purpose of reading literature,” he says at one point, “is to exercise or incite one’s imagination; specifically, one’s ability to imagine being different”–an ability inhibited, he argues, by the pressures of identity politics, among other forces. While I am in sympathy with much of this strain of his argument, I have questions (answered, perhaps, in his other writings) about what knowledge, experience, or education he thinks is required to achieve a “lived experience” of a text that deserves being written up or shared with others. He points out himself that, for some texts, our selves are insufficient for good readings–“information is required.” Some knowledge of literary history and genre is certainly necessary for the kinds of readings he offers, and yet at some points he seems to take sides against those who insist on the relevance of historical context. How well does his version of aestheticism work on texts that, themselves, look out to their historical world, novels such as Bleak House, for instance? (How far is his a “poetics” for poetry only, or literature of a certain kind only, that is not itself overtly social or political?)

I liked his breakdown of critical modes into Arnold, Pater, and Wilde (interesting that his prototypes are all from the 19th century), and he is convincing about the way much criticism driven by “High Theory” follows the ‘Wilde’ approach in which the work of art ostensibly under examination becomes a “suggestion for a new work of [the critic’s] own” (here he is quoting Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist”). He goes on to suggest that such criticism (including much of Derrida’s, for example) is best understand as a separate literary genre–perhaps autobiography. In a slightly different context, he argues that recent critics of Macbeth “reveal what is happening in criticism more clearly than what happens in Macbeth.” I think he is right, but both conclusions might prompt the student of literature to wonder why she would bother with this kind of criticism, the lives of critics or the history of criticism being rather separate inquiries.

Most interesting and potentially useful for me are the ways he distinguishes between criticism that (taking an Arnoldian approach) attempts to talk about what the text is overtly about (“the object itself as it really is”–admitting all kinds of complications, of course) and those whose critical goal is to “rebuke” the text for not being something else, or at any rate to evaluate it based on an external standard. His discussion of Marjorie Levinson on Wordsworth reminds me of the discussion of Spivak in Freadman and Miller’s Re-Thinking Theory (also on Wordsworth), and his line on recent critics of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is my favourite in the book for the way it captures a particular (today, almost ubiquitous) approach to a literary text: “Yeats is not allowed to have his theme: he must be writing about something else.” So too is Charlotte Bronte often not allowed her themes in Jane Eyre, or Jane Austen, lately, in Mansfield Park, or George Eliot in Middlemarch in some recent readings (Elizabeth Langland’s, for instance).

I wonder if Donoghue offers the kind of aesthetic criticism Daniel Green (of “The Reading Experience”) would like to see more of.

Thoughts on This Project–and a Question for You

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I began writing up my quick ‘notes on current reading’ about a year ago , partly for fun, partly as a way to answer questions from friends and family about what I’d been reading lately and what I’d thought about it, partly as an exercise in non-academic writing about books. I didn’t (couldn’t) take a lot of time over my comments, and indeed I decided not to allow myself to rethink and revise, to free myself from the many forms of self-consciousness endemic in professional criticism. For some years, though, in my professional capacity, I have also been brooding about the nature and purpose of that professional criticism. I wanted to increase the value and relevance of the research I was doing, and to bring to my scholarship the kind of excitement and motivation I feel about my teaching. On my sabbatical this term, I have been continuing to think about this issue, and trying to imagine an alternative form of literary writing that might be of interest and use to a wider audience than the narrow readership of a typical academic article or monograph. As my previous posts here indicate, one way I have been pursuing this question is through reading books about books aimed at general audiences. I have also begun exploring web resources, including online magazines and literary blogs. Of course, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of such sites now; every one I arrive at points me towards more and more.

On one hand I have been finding all of this very stimulating. It’s wonderful to see how lively and widespread the virtual conversation about books is, as well as to see that there is a big market for intelligent books about reading. It is also a salutary reminder, as if I needed one, of how small the academic literary world is, or can be, and how specialization works against the kind of general knowledge and broad cultural awareness that characterize the best of the sites and books I’ve looked at so far. It’s even a bit shaming to realize how oblivious I was to all this activity.

On the other hand, I am starting to get something of the same sense of futility here as I did with academic criticism, though for different reasons. If academic criticism fails to engage a wide audience because it is too specialized, too professionalized, too removed from the interests of ‘common’ readers, all this other material seems unlikely to engage a wide audience because there’s just too much of it. How can someone filter through it all, especially when much of it is updated daily? While the academic peer review system serves very different purposes than those embraced by reviews and blogs, out in cyberspace it’s an intellectual free-for-all, and the ease of setting up a place to comment (even I could do it!) makes it possible for anyone to put forward an opinion as if it should be considered on an equal footing with anyone else’s. Further, even supposing someone has the smarts and the training to offer insightful commentaries, how likely is it that blogging is the best way to express them, given the apparent pressure to say something pretty much every day? What really are the expectations here? What is the purpose of all this chatter?

I’m not about to retreat to my Ivory Tower, but I do feel a certain queasiness setting in. I’ve found a number of sites that strike me as worth keeping an eye on, but it’s hard for me right now to imagine making a great effort on, say, my own blog–because it’s hard to imagine it standing out, whatever approach I took, among all the others.

One other note here: In my reading around, I have noticed that my own impatience with literary criticism is echoed emphatically by a lot of writers out there, many of whom are not just impatient but positively vitriolic about English professors. Daniel Green of the blog The Reading Experience, for instance, writes about “academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict the miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons” (see his article “Critical Conditions” at the Center for Book Culture). Ouch. While I find a lot of lit crit dreary to read, I do think there’s something to be said for expertise. Green talks about seeking a middle ground for “sustained and careful, but also lively and accessible criticism,” to which I say “hear hear” and let’s not underestimate the training and education it takes to be truly “careful.”

This post actually represents a break from another resolution I had made, which was to keep my blog about books, not about me. I’m curious though, in case anyone does read these pages: what does a widely read, intellectually serious lover of literature want from literary criticism? What makes a review, or a blog, or any commentary interesting and useful to you?