Who’s a Critic?
Who’s a critic?
Latest pet interest = criticism. As in literary criticism, not me rolling my eyes at that weird thing you said. (Am I projecting on myself??) It started with me re-discovering the work of Stanley Fish, whose book Is There a Text in This Class? helped provide the framework for my masters thesis so long ago. I then read Claire Dederer’s much-lauded Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an exploration of how to reconcile liking good art created by people who have done really not-good things (i.e. Woody Allen) that partly — and perceptively — shifts into how Dederer approaches her career as a critic. (In a nutshell, “…a never-ending flow of judgement, which nestles together with subjectivity.”)
So, I’m reading this new novel — Practice by Rosalind Brown. It takes place over the course of just one day as an Oxford student labors over an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. (It’s basically a book about reading; I’ll post about it soon.) She ponders a maxim by Helen Vendler: “A theory of critical reading might begin: Know your texts for decades. Recite many of them to yourself so often that they seem your own speech. Type them out, teach them, annotate them. A critical ‘reading’ is the end product of an internalization so complete that the word *reading* is not the right word for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of what has made you who you are.”
I Googled Vendler and learned that she died just this April. Unlike Dederer, “[Vendler] actively resisted the tendency to psychologize, politicize, or historicize textual interpretation. A poem was an art work standing on its own, and … she traced a sensitive path between a poet’s biography and corpus, keeping her focus on the page, the line, the word.” (That’s from a New Yorker piece by Nathan Heller.)
Whether you’re reading romance, all the Booker finalists, or up and down the bestseller lists, do you ruminate on what your reading “means”? Do you think about how you’re approaching the text? (Probably not. I know that many people read for escapism/enjoyment, and that’s just dandy too.)
It’s just that…I think we’re all critics, but maybe we don’t recognize it.
originally published on instagram