for criticism. In the end, however, this book departs from his programmatic approach to doing criticism in three crucial respects.
The first has to do with the fact that Richards restricted his focus to literature, to reading—more precisely, to reading poetry on the page. I care deeply about the criticism of poetry, and it is my starting point here, but again my aim in this book has always been to broaden the scope of practical criticism to include not just literary arts but also screen arts. The stakes here are perhaps somewhat greater than they might seem, in that Richards made it clear that he saw the proper study of poetry on the page as the solution to a cultural problem for which he thought cinema partly to blame. The second departure is that where Richards insisted on taking the critical object in isolation—“the poem itself”—I stress the importance of considering critical objects in connection with one another, what I here call relational criticism. All five of the major rubrics that organize Part 2 of this book—conversation, adaptation, genre, author, and seriality—can be understood as relational in this sense. And finally, Richards did not much attend to the art of writing criticism. Instead, he gathered his students’ responses to poems in the form of what he called “protocols,” relatively informal reactions to the unidentified texts he distributed in his classroom experiments. This book, however, both discusses and illustrates the doing of criticism as a kind of craft—again, especially in the form of the essay, a literary genre with both a long history in its own right and a strong connection to the practice of criticism.
There are many worthy goals that this book does not pursue. It does not claim to offer a systematic method for criticism. Nor does it try to ground what principles or guidelines it offers in a general theory of criticism, though critical theory does inform the book at all points and is sometimes addressed directly. While working on this book, I have published essays in scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry (on I. A. Richards and Raymond Williams) and New Literary History (on the question of critical sensibility) that pursue some of its key issues for readers interested in theory and the history of criticism; these are cited along the way. On another front, it must be acknowledged that there is little or no attention here to non-Western traditions, though important lines of criticism and commentary can be traced back centuries in many civilizations around the world. Many good books can be found about these traditions, and many more about how some of these traditions have overlapped and interacted with criticism in the line of the Greeks and Romans. I am not competent to undertake such tasks.
Indeed, it will be clear at some points, I’m sure, that my own intellectual formation, before broadening my literary horizons and ultimately joining and then chairing the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, was in the study of Romanticism, especially Romantic poetry. Some of the critical views that receive the most attention in this book belong to the poet-critics of that moment. Part of what has always been compelling for me about the Romantics, however, is their ongoing role in generating critical ideas and practices, even as they resisted the assumption of fixed rules on the part of writers like Pope. I. A. Richards himself was steeped in the poetic thinking of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, and he recognized that it had broader implications for literature, media, and culture. It is surely fair to say that many subsequent developments in criticism over the century since Richards made his breakthrough have been made by scholars who began their work in the Romantic field. Romanticism may not have the same importance for criticism and theory as it once did, but it is still, I find, an intellectual and artistic movement to be reckoned with. I hope this book bears me out.
Acknowledgments
In a book that emphasizes the critical importance of seeing works of art in conversation with each other, I have perhaps not attended as much as I might have to the conversation that takes place within criticism itself. Aspiring to reach a wider readership than I typically have in the past, I have not always specified precisely how arguments in this book might matter to the various subfields in which they are explicitly or implicitly situated. To be sure, the book has plenty of footnotes—perhaps too many to suit the taste of some readers—but they tend not to stake claims within a larger critical discussion, nor even to admit the extent of my debts to it. A book premised on the value of criticism should fully acknowledge the importance of existing critical work to its making. I hereby offer that acknowledgment.
This book has also profited by conversations in the most literal sense of the term with many friends and colleagues over the years. At Chicago, I would like to salute Tim Campbell, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Maud Ellmann, Frances Ferguson, Norma Field, Berthold Hoeckner, Patrick Jagoda, Heather Keenleyside, Jo McDonagh, Rochona Majumdar, Françoise Meltzer, Tom Mitchell, Dan Morgan, Richard Neer, Debbie Nelson, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, Jacqueline Stewart, Ken Warren, Lisa Wedeen, David Wellbery, John Wilkinson, and the late Marshall Sahlins. At Chicago, too, I was able to teach courses related to the topics of this book to the most intellectually committed students imaginable—courses on film and fiction, Irish literature and cinema, literary typologies, satire, melodrama, the literature of empire, media aesthetics, and, to be sure, Romanticism. It was a great boon to co-teach some of these courses with such talented colleagues as Martha Feldman, Jennifer Pitts, and Christiane Frye. Beyond Chicago, I wish to acknowledge colleagues whose learning and critical acumen I have come to depend on: Dudley Andrew, Ian Baucom, Homi Bhabha, Bradin Cormack, Peter de Bolla, Ian Duncan, Penny Fielding, Debjani Ganguly, Luke Gibbons, Sara Guyer, Paul Hamilton, Bill Keach, Margaret Kelleher, Rashid Khalidi, Declan Kiberd, Nigel Leask, Sandra Macpherson, Simon Schaffer, Laurie Shannon, Vincent Sherry, Ron Thomas, Domietta Torlasco, Katie Trumpener, and Clair Wills. I will sorely miss my conversations about criticism over the years with the late Seamus Deane in the bar of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. Beyond the academy, I have enjoyed discussing films, over Zoom during the pandemic, with the brainy Hyde Park Film Group, who have helped me to imagine how to broaden the reach of this book. It was Iain McCalman who encouraged me to try such a book in the first place, though he is unsurpassed in his ability to craft one.
Very special thanks are due to that “fit audience … though few” who read and commented on the entire manuscript once it was drafted. This generous crew includes two press readers, Deidre Lynch and Garrett Stewart, as well as Claire Connolly and Joseph Bitney. Together they saved me from errors large and small and decidedly improved the book overall. My friend Bill Brown, alas, was unable to read a full draft of this book, as he has so generously done for me in the past, but he did offer some shrewd advice about it, for which I am all the more grateful in the circumstances. My thanks go to Allyson Field and Michael Chandler for giving me the benefit of their considerable wisdom on the Spike Lee chapter. Eleni Towns did a timely bit of archival work for me on that same chapter. Catherine Chandler helped with matters of tone and tact, and her sons, Jack and Sam, have been a constant reminder of what it means to live and learn with what the great critic William Hazlitt called gusto. Elizabeth Chandler, beyond everything else, read and listened to much of this book, and assessed a number of key passages for clarity. Her judgments were unfailingly helpful. I’ve learned most intimately about doing criticism from the teaching and generosity of four scholars (only one officially my teacher): in literary studies, Jerome McGann and the late Marilyn Butler; in film studies, Tom Gunning and the late Miriam Hansen. To them as well, as the poet wrote, “I may have owed another gift”: the example of how to take real pleasure in such work. This book is dedicated to my students at the University of Chicago, from whom I have learned much about criticism, to be sure, but also, especially in recent years, about resilience in the face of challenging times for the humanities. Many have succeeded in becoming the teachers of others, some the authors of books of their own, but the pride I take in all of their accomplishments is both enormous and unwarranted.
I was invited to rehearse some of the arguments and commentaries of this book publicly in a variety of venues. Among them I wish to acknowledge the CRASSH Center at Cambridge; the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University; the Glasscock Center at Texas A&M; the University of Iowa; the University of Cardiff; Yale University; Chawton House; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pennsylvania; Northwestern University; Princeton University; Trinity College Dublin; and the Paris Center of the University of Chicago. It was particularly helpful to deliver a version of