Why criticism matters
 

A collection of essays in the New York Times.

Is it just me or do these people have mighty strange ideas about the role of critics?

-o-

Colin, I agree these ideas are phrased rather radically, but I don't think they're off the wall. If you're trying to say "These poems/novels/stories are good (or bad), and this is why," you've got to have a very clear idea of what writing itself should be and do, and what people should get out of reading beyond mere escape and entertainment. To have that kind of clear idea is to take a moral stance.

No, not every critic is going to do that--and these days, most people will probably shrug off such criticism. But some writers will be prodded to do more than write potboilers.

So what's your view of what criticism should be and do?

I assume we're talking about reviewers rather than scholars or critiquers. In my tediously conventional view, people read reviews in order to discern if something is worth reading/watching. IMHO, critics who have no clue as to what a target audience enjoys should probably seek another [a]vocation.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the role of the poet, let alone the critic. If interested in "something true about life and the world" why not read a philosophy text, newspaper or travelogue? Shouldn't the reviewer concentrate on saying something true about the poetry?

The "evangelist" is always telling me to eat broccoli. Who among us needs to be told what to like? Why confuse the issue with anyone's aesthetics other than the readers'?

No. The critic has one important function: to tell us if the author has written well.

HNY, all!

Colin

Not to change the subject but this

Seated on the cusp of the network revolution, the critic Sven Birkerts cataloged the losses that a reader in the electronic millennium would suffer: divorce from historical consciousness, a fragmented sense of time, a loss of deep concentration.

is certainly true.

I blame television as much as the internet. I think the constant influx of ads on teve and the constant zapping back and foth has fragmented the minds of both young and old.

Ms. Grinch

I don't have a television, that's why I am so collected. :D :D

I'm not sure I do assume that.

I value reviews--I've written 'em--and I agree that when I read a review I want to know enough about the book to determine whether I'll enjoy it and whether it's worth my money. But criticism is something else again, something rather bigger. After all, one can write criticism about a poet who is long out of print, a situation in which you're arguing hard that a writer has been unjustly neglected. One can write criticism that argues that a writer of a past era who had been highly esteemed was really less important than some other because of the people that other writer influenced or because of the topics he/she faced head on. One can write criticism to pass judgment on a whole era of writers. And so on.

Kirsch, for one, is very much a critic and not just a reviewer. (Of course that means it's no surprise that he believes criticism is Very Important.)

Understood. My assumption was based largely on venue: the Sunday Book Review section in http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.htm. Were we in The Deep End I'd assume we were referring to critique.

FWIW, if we are talking about scholarly criticism I would find the first and third remarks no less bizarre; the second would be as much about cynicism as criticism (along the lines of "Poems used to have readers. Now they have constituencies.").

-o-

Colin, about the third comment, I guess I do agree. Good writing in criticism is a basic requirement; if the critic doesn't write well, why should we believe his or her opinions about writing? But that sentence seems to claim that writing well is the only requirement.

For the first comment, though, I've got quite a bit of sympathy. I agree that I'm glad that many critics limit themselves to judging whether readers will like a book. But sometimes there are truth claims to be judged. I've got no problem with a critic who has large, clear views about what writing should do and states his claims accordingly.

About the "evangelist" question: Frankly, I could use an evangelist to explain to me a lot of the "cutting edge" poetry I see. Who is there who will speak my language and explain to me what these writers mean to do? In the 1950s, there were readers who were baffled by some of the work of Dylan Thomas; it was serious criticism that explained him and made him mainstream.

I think I'll wait and read these in print. Anyway, Dan Chiasson's apotheosis of C. D. Wright in the 1/3 New Yorker has put me off my feed for a couple of days.

Maryann: Who is there who will speak my language and explain to me what these writers mean to do?

This crystallises a notion I have long held in a corner of my head - that translation is perhaps the truest form of criticism. I like the look of that idea from the other side.

One of the things that has always worried me about "lit-crit" is that it has become a genre, with a specialised language that distances it from the text under discussion. Introducing the notion of "critic as translator" acknowledges the subjectivity of such writing and even, indirectly, dignifies the use of the first person singular, long banished from "serious" criticism and the academic essay..

Symbiosis
 

Maryann & Ann:

I suspect that you are correct; we're likely talking about annotation rather than criticism. Indeed, "translation" may be the best description. As you know (and as mentioned elsewhere), most modern poetry is written in Tamarian. This supports an industry of such translators serving universities and the literary community at large.

Were the poems written originally in English the translators would be excluded, leaving critics to discuss boring stuff like technique, rhythms, style, innovations, influences and form.

-o-

Ah, Colin - my favourite episode! I devoted a chapter of a book of my own to it. Inappropriate (irrelevant) to quote it here, but I'll send it via PM if you're interested.

Ann, there's a slightly Tamarian tinge to the conversation here. What's the episode you're referring to? I clicked on Colin's link but can't manage to find where it comes from or what it's a part of. I'm intrigued and would also like to know which book of yours you're referring to and what's the topic you deal with.

Gregory:

The reference is to the Season 5, Episode 2 of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". The episode can be downloaded here, among other places.

-o-

Ah - the Tamarians are a race who converse in metaphor and feature in "Darmok", an episode of Star Trek -The Next Generation. Jean-Luc Picard is marooned on a planet with a Tamarian leader and they play out a Tamarian myth which, since it is peculiar to their race (parallel with our Arthurian or Graeco-Roman legends), Picard struggles to understand. He succeeds by tying it in to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and, at the end of the episode, is seen to be reading The Homeric Hymns...

I used it in a book called "Discussing Wittgenstein" which is about the relationship between two people who spend much time in each other's company. The chapter deals with Wittgenstein's assertion that there can be no such thing as a private language and posits that all language is private.

The myth thing is popping up all over the Sphere at the moment, where other threads touch on the modern uses made of the dusty contents of the myth-kitty.

Ann:

In addition to the basic premise that alliances are easier to built than friendships, you gotta love the look of surprised frustration the Tamarians give on realizing that no one understands their referents and metaphors. I'll bet we've all seen that look at readings!

Please do!

Speaking of irrelevant, I wonder if many know (or care?) that the guy who gave us Sturgeon's Revelation (i.e. "90% of everything is crap") is the same Theodore Sturgeon who wrote "Amok Time", the episode from the original Star Trek series where Spock mates.

Returning to the subject at hand (my apologies for the sidetracking, Maryann), I guess it depends on whether we reject or believe the notion that poetry is form, not content--that it is not about what one says but how one says it. For us koolaid drinkers, actual criticism begins where contemporary "criticism" leaves off (i.e. after interpretation/translation/footnoting/annotation).

-o-

Thanks for the information, Ann and Colin. I would never have got there on my own, as I've never seen Star Trek, the Second Generation. But you make me think that perhaps I should (at least that episode).

At the risk of adding irrelevance to irrelevance (not that I think the Wittgenstein connection is really irrelevant to the official topic of the thread), let me just add that I came across Sturgeon's name this very afternoon in connection with an interesting literary hoax: the creation, by a New York night-time radio DJ of an entirely fictional best-seller, I, Libertine, by an entirely fictional author, Frederick Ewing, created by himself and his nocturnal listeners, who all contributed to the hoax, going to bookshops and asking for the novel. Theodore Sturgeon apparently volunteered to write the book, after it had become the talk of the town - and it did become, briefly at least, a genuine best-seller.

Perhaps I can suggest a kind of connection to the thread: the hoaxers in a way demonstrated that talk about a literary work, in certain circles, can even substitute the work itself. (Not that I'm sure where that leads us...)