That is what is at stake for Coleridge. This writerly critical tradition continues to flourish, both in and outside the academy. Of course, nowadays even nonacademic literary criticism I mean criticism written for a general audience has been shaped and influenced by formal literary study. Serious Noticing gathers essays and reviews written over the last twenty years.
Most of them are long book reviews, published for a general audience in general-interest magazines or literary journals The New Republic , The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. These pieces belong to the journalistic or writerly critical tradition that comes before and comes after the academic critical tradition; they are marked by that academic tradition but are also trying to do something distinct from it. I like the idea of a criticism that tries to do three things at once: speaks about fiction as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and appeal, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back towards the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there, mindful that the traffic between inside and outside the academy naturally goes both ways.
Such a threefold critic—writerly, journalistic, scholarly—would ideally be doing this kind of triple thinking; that, at least, has been my aspiration over the last twenty years, and probably since , when I wrote my first review for the Guardian. What, ideally , does this kind of triple thinking look like? But for that to communicate you have to see it too.
When I write about a novel or a writer, I am essentially bearing witness. Most of the time it feels pretty unheroic, to be honest; but it certainly feels vicarious. You are trying to get the listener to hear or see the same thing as you, to have the same kind of experience. Criticism is just such an adventure in sameness. After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at t while re-describing it.
This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny. Sometimes all we remember of a teacher is a voice, and that is as it should be.
We warn students—for perfectly good reasons—to avoid merely retelling or rephrasing the contents of a book. But we should encourage students to do it better, for there is a quality of implicit intelligence in subtle paraphrase that is itself an act of analysis.
Of course we all remember the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the twists and turns of Waverley or Vanity Fair or Under the Volcano! Yet the journalistic review is an act of primacy; to paraphrase is to dare a kind of innocence; subtle paraphrase is a kind of wise unlearning.
And paraphrase is witness. I have called this kind of critical re-telling a way of writing through books, not just about them. This writing-through is often achieved by using the language of metaphor and simile that literature itself uses. It involves a recognition that literary criticism is unique because one has the privilege of performing it in the same medium one is describing.
They are speaking to literature in its own language, a large part of which is metaphorical. So we perform. And we perform in proximity, exulting in the fact that, dolphin-like, we are swimming in the element that nourishes us.
Our prose is our connection to the work of art we are re-voicing. Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of view, and determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.
Literary criticism in essays shortened from their original published versions can be found in the first two databases. Full text databases follow. If you already have a newspaper citation, and need to locate the article, use the following steps:. Librarians: ask dickinson.
It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Introduction This guide will help you locate criticism for Literature, Film, and Drama. Literary Criticism Databases Literary criticism in essays shortened from their original published versions can be found in the first two databases.
Coverage: Gale products published through June Citations Only. Gale Literary Criticism Authoritative source of literary criticism, summarizing authors' lives and works. Includes excerpts from scholarly articles.
So three theoretical chapters articulate and defend the method, borrowing resources from the philosophy of art in the analytic tradition and from methodological debates in the history of ideas.
In the second, I argue that reading for the intellectual content of literature can be a way of recognizing its historicity: acknowledging the historical dimension of a literary work does not require privileging its formal features.
And in the final theoretical chapter, I pull out the implications of the view for what the point of literary criticism really is: at the end of the day, much literary criticism is a way of pointing.
The critic highlights specific features of a work while minimizing others and accordingly shows how to experience it in a certain way. To paraphrase the ideas in a novel like Daniel Deronda is thus to try to make available for other readers a particular way of engaging it.
And in the last analysis my book stems from the feeling that much of what is valuable in books like Deronda is what they have to say, and that emphasizing the ideas is in such works is not a violation of their aesthetic nature but a way of respecting it. You can find out more about his new book, Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature on our website.
Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. The Special Pleading of Literary Critics The problem is compounded when one considers a few obvious issues with the answers most often implied in contemporary scholarship.
An Example: Jane Austen on Love Undoubtedly crude and unfair as this characterization of the field is, let try to me offer as a hopefully neutral example of this problem my own work.
Shuffling the Formalist Canon Taking this way of experiencing literature seriously also involves a reconsideration of the evaluative standards that have structured literary history. Criticism as Ostension But developing the observation that paraphrase is not in fact a heresy into a method for conducting literary criticism requires more than just examples. On translation and exegesis in the Zoroastrian religious tradition.
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