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Preface
This is a book about the act of criticism, about what might be worth saying in the encounter with a poem, a novel, a play, a film, or a television series. This act of saying can assume many forms, but I attend most keenly to it when it assumes the form of a critical essay. At the same time, I also stress that there are no fixed rules for what counts as a critical essay. An essay can be a short review, an artful fragment, a course paper, or a long scholarly article. Sometimes the critical essay appears as a dialogue—as in Henry James’ published Conversation about George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Scripted critical conversations can also be embedded in a film, or a novel, or a television series episode. Think of critical discussions of contemporary poets in the Bath sitting room of a Jane Austen novel, or arguments about the relative merits of contemporary rappers on the Brooklyn streets of a Spike Lee film. Such embedded moments, indeed, can convey a sense of criticism’s relation to everyday life, how it matters in and to everyday life—a recurring theme in this book.
The critical essay can assume other forms as well. In a once familiar but now unfashionable case, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), composed by the poet in heroic couplets at the age of twenty-three, it takes the form of a poem, one that includes the following memorable couplet:
’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, but each man trusts his own.
Pope’s witty conceit allows me to pose another central question of this book: what makes criticism tick? The question of course presumes that criticism is actually still ticking, which perhaps does not always go without saying these days. I address that question about criticism’s possible demise, too, and also, though less explicitly, that of why it is that the analogy of critical judgment to the mechanism of an eighteenth-century timepiece, with its underlying assumption of fixed rules in both cases, is ultimately inadequate.
This book began with an invitation to write one toward a slightly different title, How to Do Criticism, for a series at Blackwell. Prior entries in the series had included David Damrosch’s How to Read World Literature and Wolfgang Iser’s How to Do Theory, books that proved it was possible to get a lot done in an introductory format. Blackwell’s specific proposal to me offered the prospect of doing something in support of what had come to seem a beleaguered intellectual enterprise. My only condition, on accepting the charge, was that the book must embrace both literary criticism and criticism in the screen arts, especially cinema. Although it eventually evolved beyond its initial brief, the book also profited by that first conception. The ambition was to reach a range of readers, including undergraduate students and non-academics, with an accessible approach to the subject, but without confining discussion to strictly elementary matters—and yes, to include some “how to” advice for undertaking criticism in the present time.
The book that emerged—Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts—thus keeps faith with the original objectives of How to Do Criticism, which had included advice not only about how to engage productively with a critical object—a poem, or a novel, or a film—but also how to sustain analysis in argument, how to reach judgments, and how to support them. Over time, however, it became a book not only about the hows of criticism, but also about the whys and wherefores, the whats, the whens, and even the whethers. It came to concern itself, that is, with criticism’s reasons and motives, its objects, occasions, and sustaining conditions. Such questions are addressed most directly in Part 1, but they are also elaborated in the introductory sections to the four chapters in Part 2, where a range of specific categories central to my approach to criticism here are identified and explained: conversation, adaptation, genre, authorship, and seriality.
From the start, it had been part of my plan for the book not only to prescribe guidelines for effective criticism but also to perform them, to offer examples of criticism in action. Each of the four chapters of Part 2 thus also includes not only an exposition of a critical category—genre, say—but also a pair of critical essays that I have written for this book. If I have done my work well, these essays should both illustrate how the five categories of Part 2 are actualized in practice and lend a more concrete sense to some of the “how to” guidelines discussed in Part 1—especially Chapter 2’s advice about the essay form itself as a vehicle for criticism. To be clear, these essays are not offered merely as illustrative exercises. In each case, I have sought to produce an original piece of critical work on a topic I take to be of genuine interest. I have, in other words, tried to strike a balance between lending a degree of autonomy to the essays and ensuring that they play their role within the larger framework of the book.
There is also another balance I have tried to strike. On the one hand, I view criticism as a recognized field of codified endeavor with an ancient pedigree extending back two and a half millennia. On the other, I acknowledge that criticism has seen many incarnations and reorientations over its long history—changing functions with the changing times. The criticism that flourished among the slaveholding male culture of the ancient Greeks and the criticism that draws energy from post-structuralism, feminism, and Critical Race Theory diverge dramatically on many scores. Although the varieties of criticism have been many over the centuries, many more than I have been able to acknowledge here, even some of the most divergent practices, as I try to suggest in the book’s final pages, may be seen as part of a larger disciplinary frame of reference involving the critical relation of analysis and judgment.
Because this book has always been about the doing of criticism, it finds a special point of orientation in the work of I. A. Richards, the Cambridge polymath who is generally credited for establishing the discipline that he himself called “practical criticism.” To rethink the work of practical criticism anew here, I found myself inevitably going back to Richards’ bold pedagogical experiments of nearly a century ago at Cambridge, and to his democratizing efforts to challenge large groups of (almost exclusively) white male patrician students there at the level of their most fundamental intellectual formation: how they read.