Literary Criticism

[Eric]

Something said on another thread made me feel that a discussion about literary criticism, as such, would be interesting.

What can, and cannot, be said about works of literature? Is there any structured way of approaching a work of art that doesn't reduce the argument to purely subjective liking or rejection?

I found a book dating back to 1953 where it is suggested that criticising literature is more than merely counting syllables (in the case of poetry). The "dissection" argument against literary criticism is discussed in the introduction. The book is called Literature and Criticism, by H. Coombes. It has chapters on rhythm, rhyme, imagery (i.e. figures of speech), poetic thought, feeling and diction. Without reading the book, these terms may all blur and merge. But it is a systematic way of approaching literature.

Is all this "bottling and de-bottling" of ideas about books worth it? I've vacillated on that one all my adult life. Does criticism help us read, or hinder our enjoyment.

[Heteronym]

Literary criticism is a phenomenon of the 20th century: no other century before put so much emphasis on analysing what's written, how it's written or how it's read. Interestingly, it appeared around the same time began the middle class began consumming literature, some argue to give the impression they were cultivated people who could rival the old aristoracy. Literary criticism became necessary to explain what they were reading. And when literature became hermetic, with the likes of Proust and Joyce, to keep the ignorant masses away, then it really became necessary since people continued to buy them anyway just to prove they were smart as hell.

So basically literary criticism appeared to explain complicated books written by writers who didn't want to be understood but were read by people who didn't want to read them in the first place but did so because it was socially rewarding.

In between are the people who just like to read, and if they don't like a novel, just move on to something else.

[Eric]

I'm glad someone's replied to my little question. And Heteronym certainly has some intriguing things to say. I've always had my ambiguous attitude to criticism, because ever since I was about twenty, I (a 20th century middle-class being) was hoping that literary criticism would enlighten me about books, about why and how to read them, and so on.

But I agree with Heteronym that some contributions have simply sought to explain works that Heteronym so aptly says were written in the first place as a way of putting down the masses and other riff-raff, to show the innate superiority of the guru-obscurantists that wrote unreadable novels (e.g. Winnegans Fake).

The lower classes need not apply. Intertextuality, added by the bucketful, is often meant to keep the uninitiated at bay. Reference upon reference - but no bleedin' plot.

I like to read, but occasionally I get curious as to why I am enthused by one book, but put off by a similar one. So: lit crit. Then I start reading books about books, and begin to think that the critics have simply picked a number of subjective things, listed them, and try to browbeat the rest of us into thinking that certain works are important, because...

But then I again begin wondering whether there are objective criteria. And so my mind oscillates and vacillates.

[jackdawdle]

literary criticism forces students to express thoughts rather than feelings and in that sense its indispensable.

as to its relation to science, there is an entire lexicon of literary terms to play with, but to indulge in it is not nearly as scientific as thoroughly knowing the literal meaning the author wished to convey.

[Mirabell]

literary criticism forces students to express thoughts rather than feelings and in that sense its indispensable.

as to its relation to science, there is an entire lexicon of literary terms to play with, but to indulge in it is not nearly as scientific as thoroughly knowing the literal meaning the author wished to convey.

literary criticism is called "Literaturwissenschaft" in German, "literature sciences", and much thought has been expended as to how that works since literature is so different from the subject of natural sciences. In ENglish, I think, you could be worse off than reading a translated book by Dilthey, whose works on the Geisteswissenschaften are exemplary in showing what knowledge and insight means in terms of non-natural sciences.

If you speak German, I find the best pointers beside Diltey are provided by Peter Szondi. I wrote a short essay on this once.

Look here: s*: Wissenschaftlichkeit der Literaturwissenschaft nach Peter Szondi (http://shigekuni.blogspot.com/2007/10/wissenschaftlichkeit-der.html)

[Eric]

Some of us are too old to be students. I would like to see books of criticism that engage with those of us who don't just want soundbites for our Master's dissertation, but actually want to find an activity that helps us read books.

As a translator, I think there is a divorce between people who read literature and those who went to university thinking that the study of literature would be illuminating, but find that they are in fact involved in a rat race, trying to excel in quoting sources they only half understand in order to impress their tutor and get a two-one.

Translators bring foreign books to Brits. Some academics write about foreign books that have not yet been translated and never will be, in order to maintain an ivory tower stance to European literatures.

So, I'm still looking for illuminating books of literary criticism that involve some theory as well as the inevitable history of a period. But I have a bit of a hangover from reading about what the structuralists didn't like about the semioticists, about the Daiches school, the Leavis school, the Kermode school, the Wellek & Warren school, the suspension of disbelief, the pathetic fallacy, discourse, deconstruction, Wimsett, Bakhtin, Fowler, Luk?cs, Brooks, Benjamin, Bachelard, Bataille, Eco on James Bond, Lotman, Tynyanov, Propp, Jakobson, stylistics, Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Mukarovsk?, Todorov, Adorno, Marcuse...

For someone like me, a book explaining a novel, an author, a movement, a national literature, is more satisfying that these forays into theory, that seem to vie with and contradict one another, in a huge game. I've read some of most of the authors listed above, but after 35 years, I have never gained any insight-baggage that I can carry away with me and unpack in relation to specific works. I just have a memory of a confusing array of bits that either explain one work in great pull-to-bits detail, down to sentence-level analysis. Or, at the other end of the scale, vast generalisations. Some ?sthetics looks promising, but I'm still not sure where I'll find the grail of theory.

In other words, I have still not found anything unifying and satisfying written about the workings of literature as a whole. I still hope to find something. But whether Dilthey with his hermeneutics and embedded subjects will be an "ahaa" moment for me, I cannot tell. Poetry and Experience looks promising, but will I yet again be disappointed with a book that does not get to the core of what it sets out to elucidate?

Life is too short, Mirabell, to be so gr?ndlich with so much explanatory material. So I fall back on my simplified background for any novel or poetry collection I read: its national context, period setting, period ?sthetics or genre or style. And then read the book.

[fausto]

So you want to hear about litcrit and yet don't want to hear about all the people who made litcrit in the last hundred or so years. Weird. What exactly are you looking for? I mean, you ask a question, Mirabell give a partial reply and then you just change the question and ask for something else. What exactly are you looking for?

[jackdawdle]

the vast majority of literary criticism are written with a specific audience in mind, fellow scholars, aspiring scholars and the like. unless one is versed in the nomenclature, i doubt the material would illuminate, much less captivate, the general reader.

if a scholar undertakes to write a book with mass appeal, scholastic rigor is inevitably compromised and the scholar's standing among his peers degraded. it's small wonder then that most scholars prefer to safeguard their careers than play russian roulette with the market.

[Mirabell]

the vast majority of literary criticism are written with a specific audience in mind, fellow scholars, aspiring scholars and the like. unless one is versed in the nomenclature, i doubt the material would illuminate, much less captivate, the general reader.

if a scholar undertakes to write a book with mass appeal, scholastic rigor is inevitably compromised and the scholar's standing among his peers degraded. it's small wonder then that most scholars prefer to safeguard their careers than play russian roulette with the market.

this is not an easy point. there's no need to resort to "writing the difference", of course, although that'a also a factor. But t?t reminds me of an interview with Doris Lessing I just saw, where, asked about her Sufism, she declined to answer, as she feared she would misrepresent it, this is easily done. Without writing copious amounts of explanation a setting in "easy" terms is hard to do sometimes, because the "rigor" is compromised, as you correctly note.

And it's because a strand of literary criticism has become more like philosophy. Not newspaper reviews and the like, but what we call Literaturwissenschaft. And although I am woefully aware of the simpifying streak of especially American philosophy, philosophy is hard to read, because it redefines words. Any decent Nietzsche comment will discuss what perfectly normal German words mean with Nietzsche. Same with most other philosophers. Philosophy, since it is about language as well as consisting of language is creative, moulding the language as it uses it. That makes it hard to read, and litcrit, since it left the path of simple literary value judgments (remember Empson telling how flabbergasted critics were by his book, which contained no value judgment at all which critics of his time considered the main task of litcrit) to analyze the workings of literature.

Personally, while loving much prose criticism (there's some good stuff about Melville, dude), find poetry criticism really helpful. Willard Spiegelman on Clampitt, Keller on Ashbery or Auden, Kenner on Pound, Axelrod on Lowell, Travisano on Bishop, I on Merrill, Vendler on Graham, these are all very enlightening. And there's lots where that came from.

Criticism is bound to be most helpful when the text is most difficult. This may sound trivial but it's important. Literary criticism is an exercise in thought, not a handbook. Saying that so-and-so's not very helpful isn't very meaningful and should elicit a shrug and a "so?" from the listener. And yes, it's not easy to 'get' the exercise in thought sometimes, because of dense arguments and jargons and alien concepts, but the more difficult the book is the stronger a reader should be advised to seek out criticism. AFTER finishing the text, though. I consider it infinitely harmfukl to read criticism befiore the text in question. And yes, density has helped some idiots (Perloff, anyone?) to smuggle their weak thinking into the critical canon. That happens and it has happened in other areas, it comes with the shrinking number of people who are educated enough to understand the criticism well enough to see through it. All too often things are debunked as bullshit by people who just have not understood them.

[nnyhav]

Mirabell dictu! Many of the points on my mind touched upon there, esp poetry and philosophy. It's far too broad a topic to draw generalizations about, though; for example, thevalve.org has been addressing the 'Literary Theory' subset for quite some time.

Interpretation is not an innate skill, nor is the end determined by the means. Litcrit provides plural perspectives (13 ways of looking at ...). Beyond guidance, Empson's concept of 'argufying' is important. Opening up ways to engagement isn't getting married to one view.

Many great writers were also critics of some sort: amongst my favorite writers, there's Poe, Borges, Nabokov, Eco. Much great (and not so great) literature comments on prior art.

To philosophy: hermeneutics and semiotics are crossovers. Rorty did both philosophy and litcrit. Bakhtin disguised philosophy as litcrit.

Fodder for many threads here ...

[rabbitfast]

I'm probably (umm...make that very likely) in waaay over my head here but...I just wanted to briefly respond to the idea that intertextuality is meant to keep the masses away. I'm sure that's true to some extent but can we really escape some kind of intertextuality...or I guess citationality? What is truly original? I mean a lot of the stuff out there is based on previous works, the Bible and various ancient myths before that etc.

[Mirabell]

I'm probably (umm...make that very likely) in waaay over my head here but...I just wanted to briefly respond to the idea that intertextuality is meant to keep the masses away. I'm sure that's true to some extent but can we really escape some kind of intertextuality...or I guess citationality? What is truly original? I mean a lot of the stuff out there is based on previous works, the Bible and various ancient myths before that etc.


you're completely right of course.

[spooooool]

Freccero's briliant Augustinian reading of Dante, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.. and Christopher Ricks on Beckett. It's a joy and a privilege to watch them thinking. Same goes for Robert Hollander and probably a fair number of books, people i've forgotten

[Eric]

Fausto, you say:



So you want to hear about litcrit and yet don't want to hear about all the people who made litcrit in the last hundred or so years. Weird. What exactly are you looking for? I mean, you ask a question, Mirabell give a partial reply and then you just change the question and ask for something else. What exactly are you looking for?


I've read, as I stated, something by all those names I named. But I have not, to date, got any guidance. Merely a thicket of contradiction and "sophisticated" close analysis, and one-upmanship. I do not think I am too unintelligent, or blinkered, but gradually begin to think that there is too much theory out there. I am looking for a coherent theory that will explain why some books grab you, whilst others, often very similar on the surface, don't. Where the ?sthetic and stylistic reasons lie that make you prefer one book over another.

I am suggesting that a lot of literary criticism approaches works at sentence level, or generalises about whole genres, movements or centuries. But that neither approach really explains anything at that middle level of groups of works. Whole university departments seem to be kept busy by analysing, while a pathetically small segment of world literature is actually read by the analysts who then go on to encourage others to read by their descriptions. Everyone re-analyses the canon endlessly and browbeats the groundlings with their findings.

I tend, here, to very much side with Jack Dawdle:


the vast majority of literary criticism are written with a specific audience in mind, fellow scholars, aspiring scholars and the like. unless one is versed in the nomenclature, i doubt the material would illuminate, much less captivate, the general reader.

if a scholar undertakes to write a book with mass appeal, scholastic rigor is inevitably compromised and the scholar's standing among his peers degraded. it's small wonder then that most scholars prefer to safeguard their careers than play russian roulette with the market.

I find it amazing that a suffocatingly hermetic academe, shutting out most of the world as it does, will read lots of theory about theory. But when it comes to living literatures, the great scholars fall silent. I wish someone would do a Cuckoo's Nest on some of the more abtruse (and well subsidised!) nonsenses that are so heavily promoted in an English-speaking world, where hardly any of the novels, poems and essays analysed are actually read by non-academic people - because they are not translated so that the non-academic classes have access to them.

The "haven't understood them" ploy is a smokescreen worthy of Potter (Stephen, not Harry). Often, it isn't a question of understanding texts, but unthinkingly regarding them as canonic. I used to believe in all this, but have begun to realise that there is a lot of suggestion involved. There's a big con trick going on, a put-down for those who don't "understand". I like Borges an Nabokov. But their names should not be used in a ritual of: "if you like these, you belong; of not, you're an outcast". I remember how it was at UEA, when I had discovered Gombrowicz for myself, but the postgrads couldn't accept any change to their German-language canon. No one from outside what the lecturers had taught them counted. No independent thinking.

Rigidity and literary conservatism does not expand one's horizons.

An "Augustinian reading of Dante". So: first explain what Augustinian means; then explain why this clever scholar is saying anything pertinent about Dante. No cheap ploys such as "you're too thick to understand, anyway", thank-you.

Drop all the names, like clothes. And, naked, think for yourself. The clothes-names merely prevent you from thinking, but help you name-drop with the "greats".

[Mirabell]

oh lordy. I hear an army of headaches charging upon my head.
Note to self: stop reading that man's posts.

[nnyhav]

Rigidity and literary conservatism does not expand one's horizons.
Indeed they don't. As I said elsewhere, "[p]eople willingly circumscribe themselves, and their world, in various ways." But autodidacts often feel more of a need to justify their blinders.


I wish someone would do a Cuckoo's Nest on some of the more abtruse (and well subsidised!) nonsenses that are so heavily promoted in an English-speaking world, where hardly any of the novels, poems and essays analysed are actually read by non-academic people - because they are not translated so that the non-academic classes have access to them.
David Lodge? (of course there's a whole bunch of academic satire out there, and the humanities are the easiest target) Alan Sokal?


I have still not found anything unifying and satisfying written about the workings of literature as a whole.
Tall order. Like something unifying and satisfying written about the workings of mathematics, or physics, or history, or economics, as a whole. You could do worse than Eco's The Open Work.

add: if you think I've gone too far afield, try: or painting, or music, or architecture (fave Elvis Costello quote: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture")
also: Auerbach's Mimesis is similarly wide in scope.

[lionel]

What is truly original? I mean a lot of the stuff out there is based on previous works, the Bible and various ancient myths before that etc.

Exactly. I don?t remember the exact quotation, but the novelist B. S. Johnson said that even the three-headed monster of science fictions involves the concepts three, head, and monster: nothing comes from nothing. That might not go a long way to explaining the origins of the universe, but it helps us in our search for where some writings come from.

Until relatively recently, English Literature was severely burdened down by Leavis?s legacy. Leavis was creating a new God out of Literature, and unfortunately it too had no umbilical cord. Along with almost all kids in the sixties, I was taught Leavis at school, although his name was never mentioned: he was a God-like presence whose shadow loomed over everything. Most of the time, my teacher was the novelist Stanley Middleton, now mainly remembered for being forgotten, and who told me very recently that Leavis was indeed of colossal importance to him.

My argument was that we were taught that Literature comes from nowhere, exists in a vacuum and had to be studied in its own right with reference to nothing and no one else. We were told nothing of a writer?s history and usually knew nothing of the context in which a poem (as poems were ideal for this purpose, of course) was written. Two or three years ago, two university lecturers in Literature told me that, to their exasperation, they found that many of their undergraduates are still taught that way today.

Literary theories are ways of grasping a text, tools for examining a work under a particular light. It may now be evident, for instance, after Chinua Achebe?s criticism of Conrad, why a postcolonial study of Heart of Darkness can shed light on the text, although it might still be less obvious why queer theory can be of interest to the study of Tennyson. One of the earliest feminist criticisms, Kate?s Millett?s Sexual Politics is a savage (and very amusing) attack on such writers as Mailer, Lawrence and Miller, (and also Tennyson?s The Princess in passing).

Having a different lens to play with can be a rewarding way of understanding a text, as even Stan Middleton had to admit, but I too must admit that he also had a (minor) point when he told me that he feared that literary theory tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[fausto]

Having a different lens to play with can be a rewarding way of understanding a text, as even Stan Middleton had to admit, but I too must admit that he also had a (minor) point when he told me that he feared that literary theory tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Do you really feel it's a minor point? I don't. I think Jane Smiley's treatment of Huck Finn is a case in point. However, the problem is obviously not lit theory but certain practicioners of it.

[lionel]

Do you really feel it's a minor point? I don't. I think Jane Smiley's treatment of Huck Finn is a case in point. However, the problem is obviously not lit theory but certain practicioners of it.

I'll still settle for 'minor' because we've gained so much through modern literary criticism, although there are of course examples which are obviously top-heavy with their own (perhaps creaky) argument.

Sorry, but I can't help thinking how many kids have been, and I'm sure still are, deterred from pursuing Literature further because some teachers make it sound so flat.

Unfortunately, I've not read Smiley's take Huckleberry Finn, although I'm alarmed that some Americans want to ban it.

[lionel]

Sorry, but I can't help thinking how many kids have been, and I'm sure still are, deterred from pursuing Literature further because some teachers make it sound so flat.

I must hasten to add that the above was not intended as a criticism of Stan Middleton's teaching, which was often amusing, and his love for his subject was obvious. He's also a really nice person. (It's just a pity about the Leavis thing, but when Middleton was educated that is all there was.)

[Eric]

I think that Lionel puts a calm case forward in #17. Literature is not born in a vacuum.

Postcolonial ways of looking at books can be very fruitful, given the number of ex-colonies dotted about every continent. Confining postcolonial literature to only African novels about how the Brits did them wrong is, however, somewhat limiting when many, many European countries, from Iceland to Lithuania, the Czech Republic to Catalonia, Finland to Greece, have suffered colonial rule, totalitarianism, condescension, and so on, over the centuries. Postcolonial examinations of history and through the prism of literature are here to stay. But they must be done on a worldwide basis.

I can't really look at literature through the prism of queer theory or feminism. But I'm happy to read what others say from these perspectives, through other people's lenses. I'm less happy with Marxist ways of turning literature into the superstructure of economic relations, only for more Marxists to come along and debunk all that, creating every more complex routes between base and superstructure, in order to justify their theories still being called Marxist. Surely, Marxism is as burdensome to the examination of literature as was Leavisism. (I won't convince Mirabell, but he promised, in #15, to henceforth ignore my posts, so I don't have to accommodate his views.)

Leavis may have been a guru regarding English literature, but that's the problem: his "great novelists" (apart from Tolstoy) appear to have written in the English language, as if God granted this language as the only one the world should have. A man who is so locked inside one language only surely cannot have anything pertinent to say about things written the world over, by people coming from very different backgrounds. And that is what world literature is. When examining authors and their works, the empirical base from which you take your sample authors is, surely all-important.

Here's an interesting article, comparing Leavis with Luk?cs:

http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/moralityandart.html

[nnyhav]

Literary criticism wasn't born in a vacuum either. The New Criticism is old news; Northrop Frye kicked off Theory in the 60s, and the Theory Wars persisted through the 90's (Terry Eagleton capitulated 5 years ago). NewCrit was itself a reaction to the imposition of prisms not only of Marx, but of Freud (and Jung), Darwin (and its social strand, cf Carlyle), Einstein (and extrapolations into relativism of all sorts). It does no good to conflate different eras and errors in a vacuum.

A sketch from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas takes it up to Frye:
Dictionary of the History of Ideas (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-71)
It skimps however on the Romantic notions of aesthetics of the sublime and on Victorian imperatives for moral instruction (traceable back to Samuel Johnson IIRC).

Literature itself deals with criticism as it deals with itself. I've unpacked the relevant strands in one exemplar of this, Nabokov's Pale Fire:
Stochastic Bookmark: The Antinomy of Criticism (http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2005/10/antinomy-of-criticism.html)
Stochastic Bookmark: The Garden (http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2005/10/garden.html)

After Frye, that's another thing, for another time.

[Eric]

Nnyhav provides, in his first URL, a useful overview of literary criticism.

I'm afraid that the writer of this first URL that Nnyhav points us to makes Frye out to be some kind of megalomaniac, whose sole aim is to unify the world of art in one all-inclusive system, that just happens to be more than a theory of literature, but a theory of everything.

My problem is indeed that no one, maybe including Frye, has ever established a satisfactory way of looking at literature as a whole. All the attempts mentioned in that article are piecemeal, except for Frye's, that seems to err in the other direction - that of going far beyond literature and taking in the whole world.

It appears that one critic would base everything on psychology, another on politics and social relations, on economics, on empathy with what the literature contains, on the aim of the author, on the reception of the reader, on a kind of objective ?sthetics, social responsibility, and so on.

My fundamental problem is that this is all an enormous study in itself, but one which seems to use books - the things we're supposed to be reading - as a huge empirical cracker barrel out of which to pull examples, rather than giving us a kind of reason to read literature and explain aspects, putting the novel or poem first.

As all these theories tend to approach works of art from different angles, all I would imagine you would end up with after, say, a two-year MA course in Literary Criticism, is lots of interesting glimpses, but unless you embrace some kind of all-embracing Frye-ian or Marxist theory of what literature is all about, you end up with lots of bits of theory that you can't tie together. You end up with a basic and unresolvable clash between subjective and objective standards, as is pointed out somewhere in that article:



There appears to be a tug of war between the main trends?judicial, personal, scientific, historical?a tension which was still continuing unabated in the 1960's.


Not only the 1960s, but the 2000s!

I think that is why, in my heart of hearts, I am happier reading and translating books rather than analysing them. The former two activities get you somewhere, while analysis can be done from so many different angles, yet the results remain inconclusive.