17 posts tagged “criticism”

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Oh man, this really is how it's done. Remember how an account can be detailed and historically grounded without being reductive about it? Remember?...

One thing this has finally brought me to articulate is that if you're going to talk seriously about lit and philosophy, you have to distinguish between philosophy and poetics - that is the poetics are rules of art which may imply a philosophy but need not necessarily do so - they are a background for the construction of forms and are not identical with philosophy any more than life itself - though both life and poetic form may be subjected to the interpretive art which aims to distill out the unspoken propositions of philosophy drop by drop - All this needs much more room to spread like the pattern of a Persian carpet into the length and breadth of the treatise I hope to complete if I am granted the time - and yes I have been reading the letters of Keats and have contracted his epistolary style. Gentle Poet! - yours ever - adieu

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984.

I decided there was no reason to keep blogging all the Henry James business, especially when bunches of it turned out to be disappointing, but I guess this is general interest if you're a bookish general with a Freudian slant. (On Freud: I revealed yesterday to my students that when Gregor Samsa's father pelts him from behind with apples, it was once commonly taken to represent a symbolic rape and impregnation. They said: EW!)

But Peter Brooks's Freud is not that Freud; he's interested in using psychoanalysis to create a dynamic, desire-based model of narrative as a counterweight to the static ice sculptures of the structuralists. He writes and reads awfully well, but the chapters on novels themselves are still the best ones, because the thing about Freud is, no matter how much it talks like science, it is still a myth, and you can put lipstick on a pig but -- Well. Anyone who loves L'Éducation Sentimentale really ought to read his chapter on L'Éducation Sentimentale.

Laird, Andrew, ed. Ancient Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

This was my birthday book from J. - an anthology of sweet classical candy!

[Antisthenes] also shows an awareness of the important principle of context, or the need to consider the circumstances in which something is said, who says it and so on, which anticipates the later λύσις εκ προσώπου 'solution by reference to the character concerned.' For instance, in discussing the problem of the Cyclopes, who are called ὑπερφίαλοι (overbearing) and ἀθέμιστοι (lawless) (Od. 9.106) and are said by Polyphemus to pay no heed to the gods (275 f.), yet enjoy a kind of Golden Age life under divine protection (107 ff., cf. 1.70, 7.206), Antisthenes said that only Polyphemus was unjust, and the fact that the others did not have to cultivate the earth showed their justice (fr. 53. Schol. Od. 9.106). He probably argued here, as the Scholia do, that one should remember that it was Polyphemus who said that they were independent of the gods, and not the poet himself.

-N.J. Richardson, "Homeric Professors in the Age of Sophists"

In the first debate between Aper and Maternus, Aper argues that the poet gets little respect (9.1-10.2). He has a great deal of fun (9.3-4) describing how the harried poet, after sweating over his verses day and night for a year, is forced, when it comes time to give a recitation, to pressure friends into attending. At his own expense he fits out an auditorium, rents the seats, and gets the programs ready. His reward? At the recitation he is greeted with a scattering of applause and a few empty-headed bravos; within two days no one remembers a thing about it.

-T.J. Luce, "Reading and Response in Tacitus' Dialogus"

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 (1961).

His quest is sympathetic, his trajectory engaging; a corrective to Percy Lubbock's dogmatisms about ambiguity and dramatic presentation leads into--not really an attack on modern fiction, but certainly a questioning of its premises. What do we lose with all this ambiguity, with authors refusing to make clear their ethical norms? Is Stephen Dedalus a pompous ass or not? Of course Booth knows that Joyce's answer, if you cornered him, would be a complicated version of "yes and no," but something about that seems unfair; Booth wants the cards on the table. The oddity is his assumption that authors really are holding those kind of cards, akin to the oddity of his insistence that fiction is mediated by language but not made of language--that it is fundamentally made of character, and that the linguistic mode of apprehending character is in the final analysis somehow ancillary.

The preference for human figures over linguistic structures is also evident in the implied authors and implied audiences and undramatized narrators and so on which are such a famous part of this book. As with the special case of the Arranger in Ulysses, such theoretical entities have always struck me as versions of the luminiferous aether, but I did just run across a quote from J.M. Bernstein's Philosophy of the Novel that at least explains the need to postulate them. In criticizing Genette's rather different system, Bernstein says that Genette can't imagine a non-individual subjectivity, and in a weird way that makes sense for Booth too. Given that novelistic narration does contains values that are bound up in the life of the mind, if you have a picture of the mind as self-subsistent and self-enclosed then of course you'll wind up inventing a bunch of rei cogitantes to back up that narration. On the other, if you can accept that our attitudes toward novels can piggyback off our attitudes toward people without actually conjuring up such people, then the whole distressing crowd of specters fades away.

Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926 (1921).

It's understandable that Lubbock should idolize James after becoming a friend of the Master in his later years, but strange that a book first published in 1921 should stop at 1903. The Ambassadors is his example of completely dramatized mental life, and
he seems to think the technique couldn't possibly be carried any farther. So maybe it would be unlikely for him to run across Stein, but Lubbock was living in Cambridge society; Woolf gave her "Modern Fiction" lecture in 1919; he must have known something about a certain Irishman living in Paris. I guess that guy was just a crank.

The 1926 edition belongs to a series of small paperbacks called "The Traveler's Library" (also in the series, "The Intimate Journals of Paul Gaugin" and "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields" by Lafcadio Hearn), and thus conjures the image of people taking this treatise on carriages to broadcast their intellectual currency. After accepting a cigar from your traveling companion, you may use the presence of the book as an occasion for remarks such as "While Tolstoy's genius is undeniable, War and Peace lacks a centre of consciousness, while Anna Karenina suffers from an over-utilization of the dramatic method and under-utilization of the pictorial..."

Williams, Merle A. Henry James and the Philosophical Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Hale, Dorothy J. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory From Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

What did Henry James write after all? Did he perhaps write... nothing but an irresistible opportunity to demonstrate the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida at ponderous length? No, Merle A. Williams, he did not.

Hale is as intimidatingly smart in print as she is in office hours. The book is very much a second-order theoretical affair; but if you happen to like theories about theories, and are interested in the seventies dethroning of Percy Lubbock or warnings about the overeager application of Bakhtin to anything within grabbing distance, this one is yours.

Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Oh hell, he makes a lot of claims that I had been wanting to make, in some version, and he makes them really well.

Although James, like many other late-nineteenth-century writers, understands his historical context as undeniably empty of the large moral frameworks and categories and typologies within which intelligible human engagement and understanding were formerly possible, it is still the case that the way his novels and stories work, come to engage and grip us, would not be explicable were he not to have succeeded in establishing something like the necessity, the practical unavoidability, of the moral categories his narratives call forth. While much of this moral dimension involves the importance of the possibility of one's actions being justifiable to those whom such actions affect (James's frequent word is being "squared"), the criteria of such acceptance or mutual recognition have nothing to do with natural law, the wisdom of tradition, the approval of the community, religious scripture or religious feeling, pure practical reason, the resolution of class conflict, or some benchmark like a phronimos, an experienced man of practical wisdom. In effect, all the major characters are walking a high wire with lots of normative turbulence but without any safety net, dependent wholly on each other and their own talk and negotiations and perceptions for balance. There is plenty of "high modernism" here, in other words, replete with absent gods, and so many other absent minor divinities like mankind, progress, and happiness or prosperity. Yet there is also no metaphysical boredom, no nihilism, no high-culture nostalgia (with America simplistically demonized as kulturlos modernity), none of the "secularized" Christianity of Dickens or George Eliot, not even Conradean stoicism, no symboliste new religions. The young - Milly Theale, Ralph Touchett - die innocently, unjustly, but no one raises any fists to God.... With James we have begun to settle down in the only wilderness left, "inside," but without a sense of teleological, progressive, developmental stages of success or any road map or goal; we have only the endless chatter and irresolution and revisions and re-revision of the later modern urban world. Even so, perhaps just because so, some sort of real tranquility is intimated, some moral tone in the late novels especially, in some way more than resignation, pessimism, or skepticism, is struck.

The specifics are as good as the generalities. Pippin lays out what Edmund Wilson misses in The Turn of the Screw, what Eve Sedgwick misses in "The Beast in the Jungle," what Martha Nussbaum misses in The Golden Bowl. Of course he doesn't answer all the questions he raises - they're big questions - but he's talking in the right terms.

Casanova, Pascale. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution (Beckett L'abstracteur: Anatomie d'une révolution littéraire). Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2007 (1997).

It is very hard to write well about Beckett, but Casanova largely pulls it off - ignore the révolution and pay attention to the abstracteur. It isn't the familiar-sounding claims for Beckett's novelty that make this book important, but rather Casanova's reading of him against the dominant Blanchot-inspired critical tradition. She takes Beckett's decision to write about the impossibility of writing not as an existential statement but as a solution to a technical problem, resolutely formalist in nature, with its closest analogue in abstract art. What emerges from her argument is an affecting portrait of a demythologized Beckett, occupied above all with matters of craft. It makes his later works in particular more real to me.