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Monday, June 19, 2006
Poll: How to Write Literary Criticism
This poll is an adjunct to John Emerson’s recent post on literary writing. One could argue—many have, many times—that the proper function of literary criticism is to illuminate or explicate the text, or body of texts. As such critical writing should be readily understandable to (sophisticated) readers of those texts. It is unnecessary and improper for criticism to require specialized knowledge and vocabulary beyond that needed to enjoy the literary texts themselves.
This is not my view. I don’t know whether, as stated, it is John Emerson’s view, though it seems to me consistent with what he argued. What I want to know is whether or not it is your view. I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point, I’m mostly looking for a show of hands. If you more or less agree, but don’t like my formulation, you might want to offer a different one. If you disagree, you might want to say why, though you need not do so at Holbonic length.
Comments
No scholarly writing should be any more difficult than it needs to be. At the same time, I think we mean various things by difficulty, from “mind-numbingly scientistic” to “jargon-heavy” to, in the case of someone like Homi Bhabha, “misguidedly circuitous and allusive.”
One major question is Arnoldian: what “common culture” can a critic assume in his or her readers? Here are two phrases I just made up:
“Given the problematizing of phallogocentric rationality . . .”
-or-
“Following Zukofsky on the relationship between poetry and music . . .”
Many people will write off the first phrase as jargony, when it simply entails an allusion like the second phrase. But many critiques of academic writing assume that an allusion to Julia Kristeva is “jargon,” while an allusion to Seneca is sweet and just. But the larger question concerns what a critic can assume the audience knows.
My view is that there is no “proper” function of literary criticism. There is room for many different types of criticism. It depends on the intrests and needs of the particular audience.
I don’t think ‘propriety’ or ‘impropriety’ is the criterion here. Genuinely complex critical prose may not win, or deserve, a large audience; but it surely isn’t improper. Me, if I have to stick up a hand for one or t’other I’d go along with the idea that critical prose should be accessible; but sometimes, if the subject is genuinley complex, accessibility can become itself a distorting thing.
Incidentally why limit this to literary criticism? Shouldn’t all writing aim for elegant, expressive clarity? Take scientific papers. If Darwin can manage that with The Origin of Species then shouldn’t all scientists be capable of the same thing?
My post crossed blah’s in the mysterious etheric ambit of the Valve. I could have saved time by writing ‘blah: ditto’.
As for my own actual opinion—and I’m not saying Bill misrepresented me; my statement was messy and not entirely clear, and perhaps I learned a few things during the discussion:
1. I do not think that writing about literature should privilege objectivity, facticity, science, etc. Literary ways of writing and thinking are imperiled everywhere, and it would be fine with me of objectifying writing about literature were sent outside the English department—to the history department, for example. I don’t actually want to forbid anything, but rather to preserve certain turf (specifically the English departments) for literary ways of writing and thinking.
2. I think that evaluative and appreciative approaches to literature provide clues which enable a better analysis. They should not be bracketed out for the sake of objectivity, universality, and science.
3. I think that methodologism leads to a lot of bad writing, and it’s very possible that good writing is discriminated against in some departments. I think that scholars in the humanities often try to make themselves into scientists, but I think that that’s a losing game. I really doubt that literary scholars have or ever will have the technical chops that physicists do, and that’s OK with me. But I think that sometimes they concoct theories in order to seem more profound. (I am equally unhappy with “Theory” of the continental sort and with more positivist anglo-american stuff).
4. Methodologism tends to lead to monoparadigmatic writing. The virtue of literary ways of writing and thinking is that they are are mixed. I would not be terribly unhappy with a mixed critical discourse which included highly technical sections, but I’ve recently read several first books in English on certain excellent writers (Dom Dinis in Portuguese, Cao Chi in Chinese, and Aloysius Bertrand in French) which had seemingly been purged of everything but the methodologized analysis.
My model for expository writing is Joseph Needham, author of “Science and Civilization in China”. He was a second-rank scientist at Cambridge (i.e., ranking immediately below Crick et. al.) and went to China during WWII and learned Chinese. There he became fascinated with the history of Chinese science, and began a mammoth 20-volume project which pretty much dominates the field of comparative science.
His field is doubly technical. I understand the Chinese end, but not always the scientific end. His writing, however, is always as clear and useful as possible for an intelligent general reader. There is little or no added obscurity.
And he also adds little unscientific paragraphs about how lovely a certain temple ceremony is in a certain year, or how rosy the cheeks of the peasants were in a certain area of China, and so on indefinitely. His purely literary writing did not in any way detract from his other stuff.
I don’t mean to pick on John, but here’s something I’d like to propose for Valve-commeting style: you may no longer put an ordinal before “rate,” “rank,” or “tier.”
Well, he wasn’t in the first rank, so he was in the second rank. As in ranks and files. He coulda been a Nobel contender once, but it turned out he really wasn’t one any more, so he went into somethingelse.
No, he was differently ranked.
I don’t get your point. There were a certain number of scientists in the first (Nobel-contender) ranks, and behind them were other scientists who were not Nobel-contenders, but almost (or once were). Imagine them all lined up in military formation.
I don’t think that the word “rank” has the clarity you think it does. To me it’s not even a dead metaphor.
Correction: “first (Nobel-contender) rank”
One could argue—many have, many times—that the proper function of literary criticism is to illuminate or explicate the text, or body of texts.
I agree, broadly, with those who’ve already noted that there is no “proper” function of literary criticism per se. So anyone arguing it should be limited to this or that “proper” function should be promptly boxed about the ears.
However, I find some applications of theory more interesting than others. So:
- I tend to be fond of “Theory” of the eclectic (and sometimes continental) sort, in part because I think it often touches on methodological questions of how to approach texts and the ways in which they can function which are not adequately explored in disciplines like history or, to an extent, philosophy.
- I share John Emerson’s aversion to “science envy” in the humanities, and tend not to care much for the mimicry of scientific categories in the study of texts and ideas; the result is too often bad metaphor in the service of sloppy thinking ("memetics" would be a recent example).
- I don’t like to be proscriptive about it, but I tend on average not to be fond of literary criticism whose only goal is to “explicate” texts for “sophisticated” readers, because too often it seems to lead to stuffy pretensions to authority on behalf of uninteresting commonplaces. (Ironically not dissimilar to the sort of charge that’s routinely been laid against the “continentals” and “postmoderns” over the last few decades but which often seems truer of the critics than their targets.)
What Luther and Blah said.
Same as Luther, Laura, Adam & Blah...looks like that might be the beginnings of at least some sort of consensus?
Except I’d want to add that John made a very good point re “monoparadigmatic” writing - something that I think is almost always falsified by the very real complexity of the Humanities. In which case, “wrong” rather than “improper” is the key descriptor…
Me, I’m dittoing Doctor Slack. And just wish to add that necessary intellectual precisions need not preclude clarity or even grace of expression. (I dislike the word “accessibility"). For example, I’m told by One Who Knows (Celan’s translator Pierre Joris) that Derrida in French is a brilliant stylist. The poet JH Prynne’s critical prose is a model of precise writing, giving the lie to those who claim that he’s wilfully obscure (his poetry might be described as necessarily obscure). Edward Said (is he scholarly? I am not longer sure) is again precise and clear, and consequently very enjoyable to read. And so on.
Being the primitive, lazy, know-nothing (and proud of it) that I am, my questions when assessing a work run along the lines of…
Was it written to inform or impress?
Was it written to invite or intimidate?
Does the author know what he’s talking about?
Does it work? Does it communicate what the author wished to communicate?
Does it engage the reader? Does it draw the reader in and awaken an interest in the subject where none existed before?
Now, a number of people have been talking about objectivity. On other blogs I’ve seen posts on discrimination. Posts that point out that we all discriminate. We all have our biases, our preferences. It’s the way we are.
We prefer the people we know over the people we don’t. The food we know over the food we don’t. The entertainments we know over the entertainments we don’t. And this bias extends to everything we do.
I’m pro-evolution, convinced by the evidence and the fact the theory of evolution explains so much about our world. I’m biased in favor of evolution over any other proposed explanation, because I find it convincing.
At the same time I can understand a creationist. He is convinced of his explanation, because it fits into his world view. Any attempt at persuasion that ignores this fact will fail.
The same argument can be extended to literary criticism. Every reader brings his biases to his reading. Every reader has his own preferences, what he wants out of his reading. Whether for pleasure or business we all get out of what we read what we want to get out of what we read. Our experience tends to be positive when we agree with the author’s position, and to be negative when we disagree with the author’s position. Even more so when we assume the author is talking about what we think he’s talking about. (Oh, Those Awful Orcs anybody? :) )
Which all is a rather lengthy, wordy, and roundabout way of asking; what are your biases? What are the author’s discernable biases? Where do your biases and his biases agree? Where do they differ? How do his biases help or hinder his message. How do your biases help or hinder your understanding?
So at the end it comes down to, did he speak to you?
BTW, Tim Burke has an interesting post about the need for informative critical review of video games. He says:
An architecture critic has to write in such a way that you can imagine a space, and the effects of being in that space. A mainstream game criticism would have to write about video games so that you could understand the experience of playing a given game. I tend to think this is the more profound problem with inventing mainstream video game criticism: not the cultural image of games, but the technical issues involved in inventing a rhetoric and voice for that criticism.
I agree.