First, some useful contrasts.
How to Do Criticism will differ from many of Blackwell’s “How to Study” volumes in that it focuses on an activity. Criticism involves more than the
study of literature or film. It is an activity that issues in an actual product, the work of criticism itself. On another side, it also differs from a “How to Do” book in this series such as Wolfgang Iser’s
How to Do Theory, in that it focuses on the
practical side of our responses to a work rather than the task of establishing the conceptual grounds for such responses. There is further difference. Unlike theory, criticism is obliged at every turn to accept its position of secondariness. Criticism, at least criticism as it will be presented in this volume, is always a derivative activity. It is always criticism of some work or body of work to which it directs attention. The book may have some relevance to the criticism of the dramatic and the non-narrative visual arts but it is not primarily addressed to those issues. It is about criticism of literature and, to a lesser degree, film, and it aims to get students started in the difficult art of writing well about these subjects.
Part of the justification for including film criticism is that the book is meant primarily for students in literature departments, where film is often taught alongside literary materials. But there is a second justification. Whereas film criticism is a relatively recent and rapidly developing field, with considerable popular appeal, literary criticism is centuries old in its pedigree but in risk of losing its interest for a new generation of readers. It thus seems potentially promising to bring the two fields into dialogue, especially since they share an interest in certain problems: how to deal with issues of form, narrative, rhetorical address, and point of view. Eighty years ago, with books like Practical Criticism and Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards helped to found the modern academic study of this subject on the basis of a strongly invidious distinction between what he called “poetry” and what he called “cinema.” One engaged with the former in order to save the world from the latter. Such a distinction, dubious in the 1920s, would be difficult even to attempt in our current moment. To be clear, however, while the book I propose will bring film criticism into play, the primary emphasis in the book will be on literary criticism, still the largest area for the practice of criticism in Britain, America, and the Anglophone world.
To say that this book is about critical writing is not to suggest that criticism must necessarily assume written form. The rules of criticism are most “legible” in written form, and it is perhaps easiest to see and show the workings of criticism as a discipline in an encounter with a written text. Still, when we produce a radio or television commentary, when we teach, or indeed when we sit around and chat about the latest novel or film, we are engaged in criticism. The fact that we produce so much of this sort of discourse, that we indulge in the pleasures of discussing books and films perhaps even to a greater degree than in pleasures of reading and seeing them – suggests the centrality of criticism to our culture. This coexists with a sense shared by many nowadays that criticism is a suspect, parasitic, or dispensable kind of activity. Both the fact of criticism’s actual pervasiveness and its perceived marginality are interesting features of our current cultural situation. The revival of criticism as an academic practice will involve some acknowledgement of this potentially productive tension.
The “rules of criticism” is a deliberately archaic sounding phrase. In using it, I do not mean to suggest that we are still living in the age of Dryden and Pope. I do mean to suggest that the practice of criticism in any age involves basic norms and regulative procedures. What makes the current moment in criticism especially challenging, indeed, is the task of determining what such norms and procedures might be, or at least setting some terms for how to think about these matters in relation to exemplary criticism in our time.
Though criticism is necessarily secondary, it need not be considered necessarily negative or adverse, though certainly the term has acquired that sense over the years. It is well to recall that it has its origin in a Greek word meaning both to choose and to separate, a derivation which suggests that the activities central to doing criticism are judgment and analysis. The judgment need not be pejorative. The best critics over the years are those who both praise and blame, find both virtue and fault. And the analysis need not kill: we need not “murder to dissect”. At the same time, this term “criticism” has become so closely connected with the theory and practice of “critique” that this relationship is one that must be addressed in any contemporary treatment of the subject, and so it will be here.
I envision five chapters that will be organized topically. It would have been possible, of course, to organize the book according to the various genres that criticism, as it is understood here, typically addresses: poetry, drama, fiction, and film. I have decided instead, however, to address the variety of genres along the way under a series of headings that constitute the books fundamental problems. There will be a host of illustrative examples throughout the book, both of primary works for analysis and of modes of critical writing.
