Notes for a Future Manifesto

However, I also think it’s a little unfair to say that the “average intelligent reader” is interested merely in a “recommendation.” This only reinforces the divide between “criticism,” which is perforce practiced primarily in the academy, and reviewing, the goal of which is presumably to provide a recommendation. [...] As I have suggested several times on this blog, what both contemporary literature and literary criticism need is not for academic critics to become more “accessible” but for literary magazines and journals to publish more non-academic criticism that goes beyond book chat and conventional journalistic reviews but that also avoids the navel-gazing “refinements” of academic criticism.

[...] in my opinion most habitual readers of literary works want most immediately to have a fulfilling reading experience and, to the extent that criticism is pertinent to this goal, to use literary criticism as a way of enlarging and enhancing this experience. Thus, if “many non-academic readers would in fact like to think in more careful ways about their reading,” as Rohan acknowledges, and if that’s “where academic expertise presented in an accessible manner comes in,” then the kind of “expertise” such readers might find helpful would be an ability to describe the aesthetic strategies and effects at work in a text, based ultimately on the ability to pay careful and focused attention to the text, in effect to let it reveal its own aesthetic nature. A knowledge of literary history and of the ways in which all poetry and fiction is finally implicated in that history could also be valuable, as long as that knowledge is put in the service of illuminating the work at hand, not of demonstrating the critic’s own superior powers of discernment.

Dan Green. “What They Are After.” The Reading Experience (8 Jan 2008).

(I quote Dan at length because what he writes echoes my feelings on the criticism of comics as something beyond mere “recommendation” (reviews) that aims to enhance the reading experience through attention to not only the work but it’s relation to history. This is something I aim for (probably not achieving as often as I’d like).)

Another reason [The Wire] may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

David Simon from an interview with Nick Hornby. The Believer. August 2007.

I will begin with the field in which I do most of my professional work—literary studies. Since not everyone is an expert in literary studies, allow me to start with some elementary principles familiar to those already involved with literature but that may not be so obvious to those who are not. Chronologically, first, we have writers creating literary texts, which I broadly define as works written with the use of the imagination, hence the usual term imaginative literature or creative writing. After these literary texts are produced, certain readers try to interpret them, producing what is known as literary criticism, hence the term literary critics. The next step after literary criticism is thinking of the works of literature—as well as the works of literary criticism—as a whole; this more generalized type of literary study is usually called literary theory. From the progression of literary text to critical text to theoretical text, we can see that a lot depends on the quantity and the quality of the literary texts that are at the beginning of the process. Without sounding simplistic, this is the familiar “garbage in, garbage out” syndrome.

Isagani R. Cruz. “Challenging ISI Thomson Scientific’s Journal Citation Reports” portal: Libraries and the Academy 8.1 (2008): 6-7.

Explaining anything involves analyzing it, at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. [...] An academic film critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves describing it. [...] An academic film critic will describe a scene in detail, for that’s necessary to understanding why it carries a particular meaning or achieves a particular effect. Analysis and description are rare in ordinary conversation and in film reviewing because of limits of time and space, but also because the film scholar is interested in something that isn’t so pressing for other parties: explanations.

David Bordwell. “Studying Cinema” (2000) on the difference between ordinary film conversation/film reviewing and film criticism.