Abstract
In this introductory essay, Derek Attridge asks what the role of the academic literary critic should be in the fostering and diffusion of literature. He details some of the limitations of current critical practice, with particular attention to the dominance of empirico-historical approaches, and notes the growing interest in questions of literary aesthetics and affect. The strengths and weaknesses of some recent studies of the formal dimension of literary works are discussed. A critical approach founded on the notion of literary experience is proposed, whereby the status of the work as an event and its power to effect change are made central to the critic’s commentary.
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Notes
- 1.
Reading for Form was later published as a book.
- 2.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, Chap. 4, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”; Sedgwick’s essay was first published in 1997 under a slightly different title.
- 3.
Anker and Felski, Critique and Postcritique, 1.
- 4.
See Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading”; Marcus, Between Women, 75; Bewes, “Reading with the Grain”; Love, “Thin Description”; Attridge and Staten, Craft of Poetry. For an assessment of the “postcritique” school as it impacts art history, see Callahan, “Post-Critique in Contemporary Art History.”
- 5.
Eyers, Speculative Formalism, 7.
- 6.
North, Literary Criticism, 115.
- 7.
The meter can be regarded either as poulter’s measure with the first line divided or short metre with the third and fourth lines running together. There is a further metrical allusion not mentioned by Levine: the rhymes echo those of the traditional tail rhyme stanza (aabccb), though the disposition of long and short lines is diametrically opposed to the usual arrangement.
- 8.
Levine, Forms, 79.
- 9.
Eyers, Speculative Formalism, 61, 69, 83, 96.
- 10.
Eyers, 14.
- 11.
Eyers, 29.
- 12.
Eyers, 102.
- 13.
Eyers, 70.
- 14.
Eyers, 99.
- 15.
Felski’s arguments are addressed at many points in this volume; see, in particular, the chapters by Battersby, Grimble, and Hosseini.
- 16.
Actor-network theory has connections with the philosophical movement known as “OOO” (“object-oriented-ontology”), which in turn has links to the “anti-correlationist” school of Quentin Meillassoux and, more fuzzily, to the work of Alain Badiou. All these approaches involve a questioning of the fundamental Kantian insight that the human mind has no direct access to the world in itself; this skepticism plays out in different ways in literary studies, all of which undervalue (fatally, to my mind) the role of the reader’s experience of the powers of language and artistic invention.
- 17.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 11.
- 18.
Felski, Limits of Critique, 154.
- 19.
T. S. Eliot, “A New Tradition of Poetic Drama,” quoted in Eliot, Poems, 1:361–62. I have discussed the transtemporal nature of artistic inventiveness in The Work of Literature and The Singularity of Literature.
- 20.
See the discussions of North’s book in the essays by Battersby, Grimble, and Hosseini in this volume.
- 21.
North, Literary Criticism, 147.
- 22.
North, 232.
- 23.
North, 193–94.
- 24.
See, for instance, Attridge, Work of Literature and Singularity of Literature, passim; Rosenblatt, Literary Work; Szafraniec, Event of Literature. Toril Moi argues for a related conception of a “poem, a play, a novel as a particularly complex action” (“‘Nothing Is Hidden,’” 36) which she derives from Wittgenstein; but her account pays insufficient attention to the role of the reader in performing that action.
- 25.
In Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Age of Emancipations, Simon During foregrounds experience in arguing for the contribution made by literature to the rise of democracy. During sees the emphasis placed on experience in democratic systems as benefitting from the novel’s power as a describer of experience in society (passim).
- 26.
My thanks to Mir Ali Hosseini for bringing this work to my attention.
- 27.
Derrida, “Psyche,” 328.
- 28.
See Gutting, “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience.”
- 29.
Attridge, Experience of Poetry.
- 30.
Jay, Cultural Semantics, 47.
- 31.
In The Work of Literature I give a brief account of the importance of phenomenological approaches to my thinking about the experience of literary works (Attridge, Work of Literature, 90–93).
- 32.
Reading is a variety of perception, which always has a dual active and passive character; to see, for example, is to exercise the faculty of sight and to allow light rays to enter the eyes. But literary reading demands both heightened activity—the bringing to bear on a verbal text a complex set of strategies—and enhanced receptivity to what is unfamiliar and unpredictable.
- 33.
For G. H. Hardy, mathematical theorems such as Euclid’s or Pythagoras’s also exhibit “a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” Hardy, Mathematician’s Apology, 29. My thanks to Anirudh Sridhar for alerting me to this connection.
- 34.
Johnson, World of Difference, 16. See also Ellen Rooney’s discussion of surprise in her contribution to this volume.
- 35.
See Attridge, “Context, Idioculture, Invention,” 682–83, for a concise account of this term.
- 36.
“Suspicious reading,” notes Eric Hayot, is “driven always to overmaster the text by locating it within a historical context that it itself could not have grasped or managed as such, a style of reading, it is worth noting, that also defined itself strongly in opposition to what one might think of as ‘ordinary’ or ‘amateur’ reading” (“Then and Now,” 288). In his challenging essay “Uncritical Reading,” Michael Warner suggests that the kinds of reading that happen outside academic contexts are too easily dismissed by academic critics and teachers.
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Attridge, D. (2021). Introduction: Criticism Today—Form, Critique, and the Experience of Literature. In: Sridhar, A., Hosseini, M.A., Attridge, D. (eds) The Work of Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9_1
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