James Chandler - Doing Criticism

4 Chapter 5Figure 5.1 Congressional page watching Mr. Smith (James Stewart) in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ....Figure 5.2 Tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor’s son Joey (Cameron Bright) watching his father’s...Figure 5.3 Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), Sybil (Viola Davis), and the Whitaker children all forming...Figure 5.4 Aftermath of failed sex between Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) and...

5 Chapter 6Figure 6.1 Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) addressing the camera directly in Do the Right Thing ...Figure 6.2 Strike Dunham (Mekhi Phifer) facing the camera and assuming center stage on location in...Figure 6.3 Image from Virtual Reality video game that anticipates young...Figure 6.4 Television showrunner Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) offering his definition of...

1 Cover

2 Title page

3 Copyright

4 Dedication

5 Table of Contents

6 Preface

7 Acknowledgments

8 Begin Reading

9 Index

10 End User License Agreement

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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.