How I Was Taught to Do Literary Criticism

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Clarissa

April 24, 2012

That’s the way I was taught to conduct literary criticism:

As feminists at odds with our culture, we are at odds also with its literary traditions and need often to talk about texts in terms that the author did not use, may not have been aware of, and might indeed abhor. The trouble is that this necessity goes counter not only to our personal and professional commitment to all serious literature but also to our training as gentlemen and scholars, let alone as Americans, taught to value, above all, value-free scholarship.

Forget about ideology, leave aside the actual meaning of the words, and concentrate on how nice they sound and how beautifully they are arranged into sentences.

I hated that approach.

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15 responses to “How I Was Taught to Do Literary Criticism”

Wirbelwind

April 24, 2012

“talk about texts in terms that the author did not use, may not have been aware of, and might indeed abhor” what the ? Isn’t this the kind of trick various security organs pull off to put people in jail ? I mean, seriously.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 24, 2012
  
  All authors abhor literary critics and give endless and boring interviews about what they “really wanted to say.” It always sounds very desperate and very funny.
  
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  1. the twisted spinster
    
    April 24, 2012
    
    I thought the author was dead. You know, the whole “author intent doesn’t matter.” Has our impulse to be nicey-nice meant the pendulum is swinging the other way and now we’re going to shut up and accept whatever the author claims their book “really” meant? Because the hell with that. Here’s the thing: if people are coming away from your work with a completely different impression of what it meant than you, the author, intended them to take, then it’s your fault, not theirs. You know: “I didn’t mean my book that is full of ‘studies’ showing that blacks have lower IQs than whites to be used to promote racism.” “My romances that all have bland, insecure female characters falling in love with domineering, controlling male characters are totally feminist! How can you say they’re not!?!” And so on.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      April 24, 2012
      
      “Because the hell with that. Here’s the thing: if people are coming away from your work with a completely different impression of what it meant than you, the author, intended them to take, then it’s your fault, not theirs. You know: “I didn’t mean my book that is full of ‘studies’ showing that blacks have lower IQs than whites to be used to promote racism.” “My romances that all have bland, insecure female characters falling in love with domineering, controlling male characters are totally feminist! How can you say they’re not!?!””
      
      – That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying. You always makes me feel very understood, twisted spinster.
      
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  2. Wirbelwind
    
    April 24, 2012
    
    There was a funny case here a couple of years ago: WIsława Szymborska, our poet, was given a couple of questions concerning her poetry (the “what author was trying to say” kind). And she failed ;P
    
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el

April 24, 2012

//need often to talk about texts in terms that the author did not use, may not have been aware of, and might indeed abhor

You *do* think doing that is A-OK, right?
I’ve always thought one of central parts of Literary Criticism was doing just that.

//value-free scholarship

What does “value-free” mean?
As not a scholar, always thought Literary Criticism = talking about ideas (and symbols and ways those ideas are expressed).

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 24, 2012
  
  I agree with the first senstence and have gag reflexes when the 2nd sentence starts. 🙂
  
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Dame Eleanor Hull

April 24, 2012

Total tangent: I dreamed last night that I was offered a job at your institution and I was so excited about having you as a colleague. Then I realized I’d have to leave my metropolitan area and wasn’t nearly as happy. Then I woke up.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 24, 2012
  
  Oh, that’s so nice! Although I totally get you on the geographical area.
  
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2. NancyP
  
  April 24, 2012
  
  Paleographically Perfect Gravatar!
  
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Jonathan

April 24, 2012

“For instance, assumptions such as the one that makes intuition and reason opposite terms parallel to female and male may have axiomatic force in our culture, but they are precisely what feminists need to question.”

Yet many feminist critics take those parallels at face value, accepting that axiomatic force as a feminist principle.

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musteryou

April 24, 2012

Is this a critique of New Criticism and the like in favor of a socially informed criticism? I don’t feel in favor of either side of the division, so I cannot comment. I think ideas are either more or less insightful, but that it is also possible to misunderstand ideas if one does not appreciate their cultural and historical contexts. My principles of literary criticism, which are more principles for appreciating the value of any text are largely contained in the following aphorism from Nietzsche:

“Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble?—Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other. That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands itself,” a people. In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each other on the basis of the former, quickly and with ever-increasing speed—the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to misunderstand each other when in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their interactions. With every friendship or love affair people still make this test: nothing of that sort lasts as soon as people reach the point where, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, or fears something different from the other one. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent genius which so often prevents people of different sexes from over-hasty unions, to which their senses and hearts urge them—and not some Schopenhauerish “genius of the species”!—). Which groups of sensations within the soul wake up most rapidly, seize the word, give the order—that decides about the whole rank ordering of its values, that finally determines its tables of goods. The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar needs, similar experiences, then it would generally turn out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary were and always have been at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to cross this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further training of human beings into what’s similar, ordinary, average, herd-like—into what’s common.”

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NancyP

April 24, 2012

Surely no one person has a personal and professional commitment to ALL serious literature. We are allowed to hold up a piece of “canonical” literature and state that it bores us silly even though it may be a masterpiece of its form. There are some grand passages in Paradise Lost, well worth recitation by a trained actor, but few people read P.L. for pleasure. Why can’t we have a personal and professional commitment to SOME not-so-serious literature, even in preference to SOME “canonical” literature. I may date myself by stating that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was considered “canonical”, at least in the American Literature survey courses. I would rather have read pulp mystery stories eg. by Chandler.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 24, 2012
  
  I agree completely!
  
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Anonymous of course

April 24, 2012

Rush Limbaugh Issues DMCA Takedown To Censor Video Criticism

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120424/01324118624/rush-limbaugh-issues-dmca-takedown-to-censor-video-criticism.shtml

Streisand effect : let’s go forth and multiply this video rush hates

THE VIDEO: Rush Limbaugh 53 Smear attack Against Sandra Fluke

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/8409924/

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqcn0f_rush-limbaugh-53-vile-smears-against-sandra-fluke_news

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v312900415n3F97bG ( currently processing )

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