Doing Criticism. James Chandler

11. One modern source for this idea of aesthetic estrangement in criticism is an early essay by the Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 3–24, but it can be traced back Wordsworth and Coleridge and their Romantic experiments in poetry: “The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 130.

      12 12. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1960), p. 1377.

      13 13. William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1274. See Williams’ essay on Marianne Moore in William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 317.

      14 14. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters,” The Bean Eaters (New York: Harpers, 1960), p. 16.

      15 15. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1472. William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in Prose Works 1:130.

      16 16. Cited in A. O. Scott, Better Living through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (New York: Penguin, 2016), p. 18.

      17 17. For an account of how some of William Blake’s short lyrics carry out analysis and judgment on their readers, see my An Archaelogy of Sympathy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 269–77.

      18 18. See Ronald S. Crane et al., Critics and Criticism: Essays in Method, ed. Ronald S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

      19 19. See Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic: And Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970); Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Barbara Christian, New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985–2000, ed. Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene R. Keizer (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

      20 20. Even McDonald’s Death of the Critic, which seeks to address a more expansive sense of the term, tends to resort to literary criticism as paradigmatic for criticism as such (see Rónán McDonald, The Death of the Critic [New York: Continuum, 2007]).

      21 21. Hortense Spillers, “Formalism Comes to Harlem,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 84–85.

      22 22. Virginia Jackson, in a number of contexts, has tracked what she calls the history of “lyricization” in literary criticism. See, for example, her essay “Who Reads Poetry?” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 181–87.

      23 23. Note the complications with the term literature that emerge when we extend our horizon to “world literature”; see David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 6–23.

      24 24. John Ruskin, “Chapter VI: The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (New York: John Lovell Company, 1851), 2:152–230.

      25 25. It is of course not quite the same, since one involves labor in production of the work the other in its represented story or diegesis. See Clerks, dir. Kevin Smith (1994).

      26 26. See Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009).

      27 27. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 3–4.

      28 28. Tom Lehrer, “Clementine,” An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (Reprise 6199, 1959).

      29 29. Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in Prose Works, 1:127.

      30 30. See Inside Llewyn Davis, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen (2013).

      31 31. See Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

      32 32. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 4 (when Frye says “criticism,” he means literary criticism).

      33 33. See Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

      34 34. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). For a discussion of Cavell on cinema, Modernism, and the ordinary, see my “Literature among the Objects of Modernist Criticism: Value, Medium, Genre,” in The Values of Literary Studies, ed. Ronan McDonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 150–54.

      35 35. Shaun of the Dead, dir. Edgar Wright (2004). See High Fidelity, dir. Stephen Frears (2000).

      36 36. See Bullets over Broadway, dir. Woody Allen (1994).

      37 37. See High Art, dir. Lisa Cholodenko (1998).

      38 38. See Stranger than Fiction, dir. Marc Forster (2006), and Adaptation, dir. Spike Jonze (2002).

      39 39. See Reservoir Dogs, dir. Quentin Tarantino (1992), and The Sopranos (1999–2007).

      40 40. See Swingers, dir. Doug Liman (1996), and Goodfellas, dir. Martin Scorscese (1990).

      41 41. Kevin Smith, Clerks [screenplay] (New York: Faber and Faber, 2000).

      42 42. See, for example, Peter Wollen, whose example is Eisenstein, in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [1969]).

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