The Function of Criticism at the Present Time March 22, 2007
I've been asked to teach a course on criticism this coming fall. I've come up with a syllabus, and thought I would post it here for comment. There's a course description, followed by a reading list. (Note that some of the links are to pay sites that require univeristy-library-like access.)
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time Michael Scharf
Mathew Arnold's 1864 essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" makes it criticism's goal "to see the object as in itself it really is" so that the national zeitgeist can be enriched to the point where a "grand work of literary genius" becomes possible. In the supersaturated U.S. present, the very idea of grand works, or great ones, has come under scruntiny, and book reviewing in print newspapers and print consumer magazines (vital in Arnold's day) is, other than as a means of scorekeeping, dead as a meaningful medium of exchange—just as more books are being published per year than at any time in history. Those factors, along with the current zeitgeist, where market logic dominates to the exclusion of most other kinds of thinking, suggest a rephrasing of Arnold's dictum: criticism, now, exists "to promote the object as in itself it really demands." The course will evaluate the truth, and desireability as a state of affairs, of the revised dictum. It will assume that blogs (and, somewhat differently, amazon.com) are the primary loci for critical thought and exchange about books, and ask if most blogs have discarded the pretense of objectivity. Students will create their own critical blogs, centered on either contemporary poetry or contemporary fiction, with an emphasis on discovering and generating discussion about lesser-known writers. Posts will include close readings of poems, author interviews, capsule book reviews, at least one review-essay, responses to other bloggers, and other items. At the same time, we will study conventional essays and reviews that have attempted to change the zeitgeists from which they emerged (or that document such changes), and note the rhetorical similarities and differences from criticism that works best on blogs.
Readings "Letter to B-------" Edgar Allan Poe "Essay on Shelley" Robert Browning "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense" Friedrich Nietzsche "On a Generation that Squandered its Poets" Roman Jakobson "Discourse on Colonialism" Aimé Césaire "The Inward Generation" Paul de Man "Eros at the Mirror" Giorgio Agamben "Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature" Christian Thorne "The Failure of the New York Intellectuals" Ann Douglas "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity" Stuart Hall "At Full Speed: Inside the Mind of W.B. Yeats" Declan Kiberd "'September 1st, 1939': Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public" Stephen Burt "Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism" Christopher Nealon
blogs.
Readings