audience for Humanities Day at Chicago some years ago. I thank my hosts for these opportunities, and the audiences for some searching questions. Thanks, too, to Deans Martha Roth and Anne Robertson for granting the research time to complete this book. I should add that it consists almost entirely of previously unpublished material, but a version of my discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “Casualty” appeared in Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015). At Wiley-Blackwell, I have worked with many editors and members of staff, from Emma Bennett, who first commissioned the book, to Liz Wingett, who saw it through the press. I thank them all for their flexibility and professionalism. Last by not least, Eric Powell, my research assistant, logged hundreds of hours on this book in the course of both my researching it and preparing it for publication. The book owes a great deal to his meticulous work on it.
CHAPTER 1 Doing Criticism/Doing without Criticism
1.1 Functions of Criticism
Our word criticism comes from an ancient Greek word (krinein) meaning both to separate and to judge. Those two ideas, connected as they are, provide a usable working definition for most purposes. To see the intimate connection between discrimination and evaluation in the critical act, consider the anecdote offered by eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume in an essay that explains criticism in philosophical terms. The story is one that Hume himself borrowed from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and it is told by Sancho Panza about his kinsmen, who were reputed to be great judges of wine.
Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it, and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.1
Hume, whose Greek was very good, means us to understand by this story that analytic competence—the capacity to distinguish the elements in a composition—supports evaluative authority. Assessing the quality of something requires discerning its separate qualities. This is why Aristotle, in the Poetics, broke Greek tragedy down to its six component parts and, in judging some tragedies better than others, analytically isolated special kinds of moments (like reversal and discovery). The relationship between analysis and judgment was crucial to his pioneering efforts in criticism.
Criticism has sometimes been accused of pressing too hard with its analytic tasks and of coming down too hard with its judgments. The poet Wordsworth hints as much, with some irony, when he has one of his characters exclaim: “we murder to dissect.”2 The American critic Wayne Booth once even turned this worry into a witty question: “Must Critics Kill?”3 These days the news is more likely to be about the demise of criticism itself, though there is reason to wonder about what that might mean. One guiding question for this book about doing criticism, indeed, is what to make of the thought that we might do without it. The question is not an idle one, for such a prospect has not long ago been raised by Ronan McDonald in The Death of the Critic (2005)—though he raised it in the context of a defense of criticism. There was a time when only cultural conservatives made such defenses. Yet recently, even a left-leaning cultural warrior like the Shakespearean Marjorie Garber advocated reviving criticism in her book The Use and Abuse of Literature (2011), proposing a method she calls “centripetal” reading.4 Or consider the unlikely testimony of literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who now laments the near extinction of an intellectual practice that he sees as formative in his own career: “Like thatching, or clog dancing,” writes the Irish-Briton Eagleton, “literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art.” It has been dying, he explains, for at least two academic generations: students don’t learn it because their teachers don’t teach it, not having been taught themselves. In a moment of candor, Eagleton acknowledges that “the charge may seem pretty rich, coming as it does from a literary theorist,” adding: “Wasn’t it literary theory, with its soulless abstractions and vacuous generalities, which destroyed the habit of close reading in the first place?”5 The question, one suspects, is tongue-in-cheek.
Eagleton’s formulations are especially useful on account of his all-but-explicit connection of criticism with the practice of close reading a poem. This connection provides a key to understanding the current situation. To see why, let’s first remember that, like history and philosophy, but unlike post-Enlightenment disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, or biology, criticism is an intellectual pursuit that has in fact been around since the time of those ancient Greeks who coined the term. Indeed, criticism dates back almost as far in the Western tradition as the invention of writing and theater, further than Aristotle’s Poetics (fourth century BCE), which already makes reference to still earlier ways of inquiring about poetic objects—earlier, even, than those of Aristotle’s teacher Plato. This fact alone ought to give pause to those who expect criticism’s imminent demise. It is true that in English departments around the world, a course in the history of criticism that begins with Plato and Aristotle and comes down to the present is no longer the standard offering it was eighty, fifty, or even thirty years ago. It may thus be reasonable to speculate that criticism has undergone some change in status—or at least in “function”—within the last two or three academic generations. Post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory: these have all shaped what it means to do criticism in recent decades. Yet, altering its function is something that criticism has been recognized as doing for a long time, certainly since Matthew Arnold’s famous 1864 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”
In that seminal essay, Arnold argued that Romanticism had decisively changed the game for those who call themselves critics by casting the creative and critical principles in opposition, with perhaps the further insinuation that the latter was parasitical on the former. Arnold thought this story misleading in that it underestimated the role of criticism in cultivating the ground on which poetry flourishes in the first place. “The burst of creative activity” in English Romanticism, he wrote, “had about it in fact something premature”: “the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough.” Diminished by both the French Revolution and English utilitarianism, the Romantic poets had thus left behind even more diminished prospects for poetry. Criticism in 1864 thus needed all the more to provide the environments of thought and knowledge—what Arnold called simply “culture”—that might allow poetry to flourish anew.6 We needn’t accept either Arnold’s diagnosis or his specific prescription to agree with the idea that criticism changes function over time. Arnold’s own “time” is not so distant from ours, but, taking a longer historical perspective, we see that criticism has changed in many ways over its long history. There have been moments when criticism has been more aligned with rhetoric and communication (as in the case of ancient Rome), or more aligned with poetics and craft (as in Aristotle’s Greece), or more interested in the rules of art (as in neoclassicism), or more oriented toward the author’s life and values (the nineteenth century), or more oriented toward “the poem itself,” as T. S. Eliot said criticism must be in his twentieth century.7
Eliot’s notion of “the poem itself” came to be a kind of shibboleth for what is called the New Criticism, a movement inspired by the important early-twentieth-century British thinker I. A. Richards. Richards boldly established literary criticism at the center of an ambitious campaign to rehabilitate cultural values in his contemporary Britain, and he established the study of poetry at the center of literary criticism. The story of how he set out to achieve this goal is by now a familiar one. In 1925, the year after he published Principles of Literary Criticism, he undertook some far-reaching pedagogical experiments requiring students to respond in writing to clusters of poetic texts from which all markings of date or authorship had been removed. He attracted to his project some of the best