Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
I've been thinking about the issue of criticism lately. One particular issue is whether you think reviewing is concerned with value or not, whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. From a personal point of view, I'd argue that prescriptive reviews usually say more about the reviewer than the reviewed subject (one reads Woolf's review of Bennett to find out more about Woolf, not Bennett, just as DH Lawrence's reviews of Emerson and Whitman tells us a great deal about Lawrence and little about either American author). Unless the reviewer happens to be particularly engaging for some reason then reading a set of rationalisations never really seems especially engaging to me, thinking of Pirsig's notion of aesthetic quality as something self evident but which cannot be defined within the confines of traditional logic.
The aesthetic theories of FR Leavis, to take one example, were quite succesful in producing a notion of what constitutes 'literature' based on a certain set of criteria. The problem was that this continually acted to exclude works that most people would have naturally assumed to be part of the canon, like Dickens and Bronte. However, to broaden the criteria was to run the risk of requiring certain other works to be admitted to the canon that would not seem to have any obvious place; the theory cannot be both complete and consistent at the same time.
However, as tempting as a form of criticism governed by the policy of 'that which we cannot speak, whereof we must be silent' might be, the question value will inevitably bleed through. Even the most objective statement will usually be found to be a part of wider subjective view of literature. On the whole, I think I increasingly see prescriptive writing as being best described as an unavoidable evil.Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 7:57 pm
