Doing Criticism. James Chandler

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



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Richards’ poetry courses had such an enormous following that classes had to meet in the streets of Cambridge for the first time in centuries. He published his findings from these classroom experiments in Practical Criticism (1929), one of the few genuinely seminal works of criticism in English since the nineteenth century.8

      With these books, and through this group, and not least by the powerful force of his own charismatic example, Richards changed the way literature was studied. He made criticism the primary activity of the field of English, and he installed the notion of “close reading” at the center of that field. The American New Critics of the 1930s—Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and W. K. Wimsatt—all acknowledged the leadership of Richards in showing them the way forward. In America, this enterprise of “practical criticism,” with the study of lyric poems in isolation, indeed became a centerpiece of liberal education for decades. And one of the most important features of this program was that it implicitly identified itself as a kind of activity or doing, for practical also derives from a Greek word (prattein), which means, precisely, to do.

      1.2 Two Thought Experiments

      FIGURE 1.1 Prose transcription of Williams Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say,” handmade for this book by its author.

      Now imagine, instead, that you open a standard anthology of poetry, and you find the following:

      This Is Just to Say

      I have eaten

      the plums

      that were in

      the icebox

      and which

      you were probably

      saving

      for breakfast

      Forgive me

      they were delicious

      so sweet

      and so cold

      Some of these questions might loosely connect with those we might have asked ourselves if the note were in prose form and left by someone with whom we shared a fridge. The differences are nonetheless important. In this case, for example, we don’t know who the speaker of these words is supposed to be. We have to imagine both a speaker and an addressee, because neither is given. We don’t know if the two are on good terms or bad. In the Norton Anthology, the poem is identified with an author, William Carlos Williams. We may or may not know that the author was one of the foremost American poets of the early twentieth century. We may or may not know that he is from Rutherford, New Jersey. There is a date of publication, too, 1934, which might lead us to think about this composition as belonging to a past moment in time. That was the middle of the Great Depression, when money was short and food was scarce, especially luxury foods like plums. Does that matter to the way we respond to these words? “Icebox,” in that light, might thus come to seem less like a peculiar expression that our grandmother would have used than perhaps a marker of the poet’s historical moment. How might that sort of historical indicator figure in what we do with this form of words, this thing that seems to be proposing itself as a poem?