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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If one wanted to identify a small fault in this poem, for example, it might be the switch in relative pronouns from “that” to “which,” where, grammatically, “that” should appear in both instances. I can think of possible defenses of this switch. One might call it a deliberate performance of colloquial speech, for example, though I don’t myself find this defense very convincing. We might also defend the switch of pronouns as a sign of haste. We know that William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician in his native New Jersey, and that he sometimes dashed off short poems on a typewriter between patients. That would make a kind of sense of the inconsistency, though it wouldn’t explain it away.

      FIGURE 1.2 Manuscript copy of Emily Dickinson’s “Forbidden fruit a flavor has.” Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College, Manuscript 187.

      We might notice first that the words here compose two independent clauses, each consisting of exactly fourteen syllables. These two clauses are also marked by a certain rhythm, and by a peculiarity of grammar that we might call “syntactic inversion”: not “has a flavor,” but “a flavor has.” Not “that mocks lawful orchards,” but “that lawful orchards mocks.” We know that that second example involves an inversion because, if we look carefully, we see the inflected ending of the English verb to mock—“mocks”—needs to correspond to a singular subject. We might therefore first have imagined that the line involves the mocking of the flavor of the forbidden fruit before realizing that the grammar requires us to read it the other way around: it is the flavor, with its peculiar quality, that mocks the lawful orchards. This sort of device, which demands revisiting the lines, can expose and test our routine assumptions about the world, as the best poetry often does. We might also detect the dominance of f sounds in the first part of the poem, and how they give way to l sounds in the second part, with the interesting word “lawful”—with its l, f, l sequence—making the pivot from the one to the other. And some words, it turns out, rhyme with others.

      Seeing all this, we might conclude that this piece of writing is a poem, even before we ever see it laid out in a book of poetry in this form (perhaps the same book in which we found the Williams poem):

      Forbidden fruit a flavor has

      That lawful orchards mocks;

      How luscious lies the pea within

      1.3 Limits of the Lyric Paradigm

      Two questions thus emerge here and now. First, how do we extend the scope of criticism’s subject matter beyond the lyric poem—the poem itself—so as to identify a range of things that might serve the work of practical criticism as well as the lyric poem does? Second, how do we extend the benefits of critical engagement beyond the circumference of personal growth and gratification? Both are important questions for addressing the question of how to do criticism at the present time.