Doing Criticism. James Chandler

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Название Doing Criticism
Автор произведения James Chandler
Жанр Языкознание
Серия
Издательство Языкознание
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119800620



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audience for Humanities Day at Chicago some years ago. I thank my hosts for these opportunities, and the audiences for some searching questions. Thanks, too, to Deans Martha Roth and Anne Robertson for granting the research time to complete this book. I should add that it consists almost entirely of previously unpublished material, but a version of my discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “Casualty” appeared in Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015). At Wiley-Blackwell, I have worked with many editors and members of staff, from Emma Bennett, who first commissioned the book, to Liz Wingett, who saw it through the press. I thank them all for their flexibility and professionalism. Last by not least, Eric Powell, my research assistant, logged hundreds of hours on this book in the course of both my researching it and preparing it for publication. The book owes a great deal to his meticulous work on it.

PART I CRITICAL ISSUES

      1.1 Functions of Criticism

      Our word criticism comes from an ancient Greek word (krinein) meaning both to separate and to judge. Those two ideas, connected as they are, provide a usable working definition for most purposes. To see the intimate connection between discrimination and evaluation in the critical act, consider the anecdote offered by eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume in an essay that explains criticism in philosophical terms. The story is one that Hume himself borrowed from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and it is told by Sancho Panza about his kinsmen, who were reputed to be great judges of wine.

      Hume, whose Greek was very good, means us to understand by this story that analytic competence—the capacity to distinguish the elements in a composition—supports evaluative authority. Assessing the quality of something requires discerning its separate qualities. This is why Aristotle, in the Poetics, broke Greek tragedy down to its six component parts and, in judging some tragedies better than others, analytically isolated special kinds of moments (like reversal and discovery). The relationship between analysis and judgment was crucial to his pioneering efforts in criticism.