Leituras pela manhã

 

To what extent do you find yourself appealing to principles, even if only implicitly, when you write criticism?

After all, the very people who are avoiding such vicarious re-imagining on paper are often doing precisely that as teachers, in the classroom: in order to teach a novel, you must get your audience to learn to love it first. So you try to bring it alive in the classroom. Increasingly, I feel an instinctive connection between the pedagogical experience of teaching and the pedagogical experience of reviewing: it’s about bringing an audience along with you. It’s a shame that so many academics only address each other.

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” Ideally, in criticism, you’re making use of everything that has formed you – life, memory, childhood, anecdotes, bits of experiential wisdom, music, your reading, philosophy, theology, theory, what have you – in order to bring all that to bear on a text that, if rich enough, is simultaneously teaching you something you are learning for the first time at the precise moment of your own “grand explication.” How strange and humbling that is! (Kenneth Burke)


You’re known for being an enthusiastic quoter. What role do you think quotation plays or should play in good criticism?

There’s something more, perhaps, something almost ethical: I like the selflessness of quotation, the modesty, the absurdly beautiful, almost-tautological ideal that the work of criticism (as Walter Benjamin apparently dreamed) might be made up only of quotation and would thus just be the entire original text, written out word for word, or rather re-written word for word. We have that quasi-tautological experience sometimes, don’t we, when we are copying out a long quotation, and following the syntax of someone else’s prose like a car following a road. I suppose memorization is the same gesture: the move away from self toward someone else, the “humanism of the other.”


writer and literary critic James Wood, interviewed by Becca Rothfeld - How Criticism Works