Doing Criticism. James Chandler

This is easy to see in a quick sampling of titles, as in the case of the volume bearing that very title, Critics and Criticism, in which the Chicago Aristotelians produced one of the most weighty essay compilations of the mid-twentieth century.¹⁸ We might also think of landmark books such as Georg Lukács’ Writer and Critic or Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic; or the major anthology by Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, New Feminist Criticism; or Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers.¹⁹ In every case, “criticism” means by default “literary criticism.” This explains why, when commentators like Eagleton speak of the death of criticism they tend to mean, specifically, “literary criticism,” even as they take poetry as its primary concern.²⁰

One important support for this familiar disciplinary category is a developed notion of “reading” that is assumed to be foundational for all literature. On this understanding of things, the practice of criticism teaches us to read better, to read on a higher level than even that of an advanced literacy. It enables us, as well, to produce “readings” of the works we engage. A major Black feminist critic of our moment, Hortense Spillers, also betrays an assumption that criticism means literary criticism but does so in a way that also helpfully makes the link between reading and producing a reading. Addressing “the relationship between the critical work and that which it contemplates,” Spillers contends that “the literary work describes, or carves out, an arena of choices, and in doing so, the writer suspends definitive judgment.” Conversely, she continues, “the critic’s task, as Northrop Frye observes, is to speak or explain where the work does not, to supply the right questions for a proffered riddle.”²¹ This “speaking” or “explaining” is the production of a reading, and Spillers’ and Frye’s emphasis on the role of questions in that process points to an issue for the doing of criticism that will be central to my discussion in this book.

Spillers’ book, which addresses fiction by Tony Morrison and Ralph Ellison, drama by Langston Hughes, and the poetry Gwendolyn Brooks, also dramatizes the point that, within the conception of criticism that takes “literature” for its default subject matter, there is nonetheless a considerable range in what counts as literature. And the reasons for this range of understandings are not far to seek. Consider the cases of poetry and drama. Within the discipline of literary criticism, as practiced in the wake of Richards’ New Criticism, the lyric poem often retains a central place and paradigmatic role: one need only think how often a poem like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” becomes the occasion for an illustrative exercise for what criticism can do or how it should be done.²² Yet there is something odd about this development at the heart of Richards’ reinvention of literary criticism, since poetry in its origins is anything but literary in the strict sense of the term: occurring in the medium of letters. Poetic composition, as has been amply demonstrated in the anthropology of nonliterate societies, does for such cultures the work of mnemonic codification and conservation that would be taken up by writing itself in the transition to literacy. Some of the most significant features of written or printed poetry—its constitution by rhyme, by rhythm, by sound—are residues of an oral function, a sign of the fact that poetry is precisely not literary in its origins. Poetry, after all, is intricately connected with song, and this is true for both lyric and epic poetry.

Much the same could be said about drama, which has long since come to be considered as central to what we count as literature. If plays like Hamlet or King Lear do not lie at the heart of the field we have long called “English literature,” then what does? Drama, however, is no more reducible to “literature” than poetry is. The very urtext of the Western critical tradition, the one that tends to appear at the beginning of any historical anthology of “literary criticism,” is Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet Aristotle’s primary objects of consideration in that pioneering treatise—the plays of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, for example—were theatrical works composed and staged in Athens in the decades before he wrote. Moreover, the categories of “rhythm,” “song,” and even “spectacle” were explicitly used to identify the basic “parts” of tragedy as Aristotle analyzed it (along with plot, character, diction, and thought).²³

      Clearly, this expansion of the scope of Richards’ approach to practical criticism beyond the paradigm of the poem on the page had ample precedent, and it was conceptually important for shaping the discipline of “English” in the twentieth century. A second, much broader expansion of the scope of practical criticism would draw on the post-Enlightenment discipline of aesthetics, in which criticism was understood to extend beyond “literature” (even in its broadest sense) to the wider range of what we sometimes call “the fine arts.” In the eighteenth century when both the category of the fine arts and the discipline of aesthetics began to take shape, these other arts included painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Each of these arts boasts a considerable—in some cases even venerable—body of critical commentary. The criticism of painting developed rapidly in Arnold’s nineteenth century. Among English critics who excelled in it we might think of Walter Pater (whose book on the Renaissance remains a classic), but literary types like William Hazlitt and Charles Baudelaire were also drawn to the criticism of painting.

Architecture criticism in English also boasts a rich tradition of writing that includes such minor masterpieces as John Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic.” In that brilliant analysis, Ruskin took issue with the view that classical architecture, with its salient regularity and unity of design, should be considered superior to the medieval style of cathedral making, with its equally conspicuous idiosyncrasy and asymmetry. He argued the case on the grounds that classical architecture enslaved the worker’s imagination to a master plan, while the Gothic approach allowed different levels of relative autonomy to local guilds and to the craftsmen who work in them. That, he explained, is why not all gargoyles on a medieval cathedral look alike, nor even all porticos or spires. Beyond his influential work on architecture, Ruskin himself wrote extensively about poetry, prose, and painting.

“The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter from an extraordinary book about late Renaissance Venice, is often included in anthologies devoted chiefly to literary criticism.²⁴ At a certain level of abstraction, of course, some principles or tendencies of criticism can be said to obtain across a wide spectrum of the arts. Such generalizations might be loosely grouped together under the category of aesthetics, understood as the study of what it is that constitutes something as a work of art in the first place: the presence of made beauty, for example. Aesthetics, Ruskin showed, can have a political or ethical dimension, and his concern for the role of labor as a decisive consideration in critical judgment survives into the present. We encounter it again just below in the unlikely setting of a New Jersey convenience store in an argument favoring one Star Wars sequel over another on the basis of the fate of the laborers in each plot.²⁵

This more generalized idea of criticism, as practiced across many art forms, emerged forcefully in the movement known as Aestheticism, an important forerunner to the Modernism that brought with it such influential critical voices as Roger Fry in Britain and Clement Greenberg in America. Criticism is still understood in many contexts as a category that embraces all the arts, including the arts that have developed since the mid-nineteenth century such as photography, cinema, and the new media arts of our own moment. There are in fact good introductory books to be found—such as Noël Carroll’s On Criticism—that deal more generally with music, painting, and sculpture, as well as literature, drama, and cinema.²⁶ However, as will become clear, the scope of the term criticism for the present book is not as broad as what is implied in aesthetics generally, nor yet limited to literary criticism in the narrowest sense of the term. To explain what it includes and why, I turn to the second of the two questions raised by Richards’ guiding program for practical criticism: how to generalize the benefits of criticism beyond personal pleasure and moral profit.

This second question requires that we consider how the practice of criticism matters to the practice of a given art in society at large. Looking thus broadly at culture, we might observe that a public that has developed a competence for doing criticism with (say) a