Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society
I’m in grad school for just this–well, music, but a text is a text, literary or auditory. Even though I do cultural studies, sometimes I wonder, too.
Analysis obviously has it merits, but I often question the professionalism thereof. Is a university educated theorist, versed in Marx and Freud and Lacan, more qualified to tell me what a book or film or painting or symphony means? What does Armond White offer that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t offer better? To bring it back to books, what can I get out of Adorno, or an English professor, that I can’t get out of the guy who stocks the shelves at Borders/Chapters?
Just time for a quick note, but I have to say as loudly as possible that reviewing is not criticism. Just flatly not. I know that people confuse them and conflate them all the time and have done so years. But they are totally separate fields. Why? Criticism is very often not in the least concerned with how good a work is. It may be good. It usually is, true. The greatest artists provoke the greatest thoughts. But many, many works of criticism look at other aspects, at themes, at the treatment of characters and subjects and thoughts, at relationships to other authors and to philosophies and to the times, at items and aspects and parts of the world which are never mentioned - because that is often crucial to how a work is looked at, especially after its time.
Reviewing is for now. Criticism is for always. (It ends up being about now in a different way, because it can’t be anything else. But the intent is about always. Yet the now aspect means that new looks must always and continually be taken. The world changes out from underneath us even as we speak about it.)
“Well, my father was a piano mover.”
Although what you are describing does sound like reader response criticism, I wouldn’t classify necessarily all opinions or even most opinions as valid.
Some if this comes off badly but I think Armond White is a hack and Rotten Tomatoes isn’t criticism; it’s a collection of reductionist numbers that try to quantify the unquantifiable.
To me, criticism has to involve an adequate knowledge of the subject matter and of the HISTORY of the material and what has been said about the material by other people. Even given those prerequisites you’re going to have an obvious disagreement about the meaning or quality of different works. Criticism isn’t designed to provide answers, or at least not definitive answers; it is designed to provoke questions and thought about the work in question or discussion.
I seem to have a hard time describing what I consider as valid criticism but generally I’d divide it into two groups given the things I’ve already said:
- Those familiar with the medium. These are generally critics, historians, scholars, etc.
- Those familiar with the specifics of the work or the creator or some underlying theme of the work. These are generally fans, for lack of a better word, although they might have expertise in a related field.
As an example, I think the commentaries on the Matrix DVDs are fascinating because they provide a commentary by the critics (1) and two philosophers (2). The critics liked the first movie but hated the sequels. I think they make great points about the film as cinema but they are lazy and their attention drifts and they confuse details because they don’t care. Therefore, their opinion to me is only somewhat valid.
On the other hand, the philosophers love all of the films because of the philosophy and their knowledge in the field. However, they know next to nothing about film and why the critics have noteworthy objections to the narrative structure and action scenes in the sequels.
I don’t think either opinion is “right” but I think both are valid and enhance my understanding, appreciation and viewing of each film.
I didn’t mean to sound as though I conflated the two - I do know the difference between the two, and I stress it on a weekly basis to my undergrads. There’s a difference between understanding a text and saying that it sucks.
I agree and yet I don’t. Criticism tries to be about always, but as you point out, that’s an epistemological fallacy. You can’t forget about the 20th century just because you’re reading Victorian literature. But my point was to the actual merit of criticism, which is what the OP was getting at. I just see bramma23’s post underneath as I type a reply; my example was poor, I agree. I’m in music, so I’m out my element when it comes to words and such.
I can’t think off the top of my head of an example where, having read a philosopher/hermeneutician/semiotician’s works, I’ve been inclined to enjoy a text on a deeper level than I did before. More often, I’ve listened to (sorry to keep bringing this back to music, but it’s what I know) works that I’ve enjoyed, only to have critical review or analysis of it “dissect the clown,” so to speak. For me at least, it becomes distilled and ruined to reduce a work to a series of influences and disjunct ideas.
I don’t know…any example I can think to offer can simply doesn’t do my thoughts justice, since it seems like just a particularly bad example of criticism. I suppose there are good examples out there, but at a certain level I just resent being shown a “correct” way of interpreting a text.
I’m open to being flat out wrong, but in my dealings in the Arts and Culture department I work in, I’ve had too many people with ugly glasses tell me how everything is symbolic of a phallus because it relates to power, and it fetishizes the commodity of blah blah blah blah I don’t wanna read books anymore…
I had a high school philosophy teacher go on and on about how amazing the Matrix was because everything was secretly Buddhist and Catholic and Neo was Jesus but the Matrix was Plato’s cave blah blah blah blah You made the movie not fun anymore…
But yeah. Different strokes!
I don’t see lit crit professors, or their mentees, becoming hugely successful writers, in the same way that grad students who work under talented scientists become eminent scientists. If academic humanities training was an effective “writing dojo,” we’d expect to see lots of famous writers come from an academic background, and furthermore we’d see folks flocking to such programs and achieving measurable improvements. This doesn’t seem to be the case; revealed preferences suggest that lit crit is uncorrelated with artistic ability, though intelligence and persuasiveness might correlate with both.
I do think there is a place for “aesthetic engineering,” whose goal is to figure out what elements are necessary for the experience of beauty, and how to do it more efficiently. But that’s not what academic departments do. Instead the only steps towards systematizing aesthetics is in the advertising and film industries, where their next paycheck depends on understanding what people actually enjoy. Real academics look down upon such behavior, and shore up their status by creating individual fiefdoms, like alchemists.
Good criticism can provide you with insights about a work you might not have spotted yourself. It can also provide you with context that gives meaning to a work but isn’t contained within the work itself - but arguably that’s more annotation than criticism. And critics can function as post-production editors - seperating good art from bad and telling others which is which. (I’m not completely against what Exapno said about reviewers and critics but I think a good reviewer has to overlap into some critical judgement.)
Some works don’t really need analysis. They’re pretty much just surface. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad - there can be a lot of good entertainment on the surface.
I think analysis is still possible with seemingly shallow things. But I would have to think that, since my primary interest is popular culture. 
I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t do at least a basic analysis of everything they read or watch, or whatever. The question is merely how deep you go.
I personally like the “what if this were true” version of literary criticism. I also believe that good literature is good with a surface analysis, and that it’s okay to dislike a classic. The latter two I’ve been told is wrong.
No, but they are more qualified to teach you techniques for discovering meaning.
Lots of people approach literary criticism as though it were akin to cryptography: There’s a hidden message in the text and by using the right techniques you can discover what it is. Through the application of the proper critical tools you can see past the superficial surface details of the text and uncover its true hidden meaning.
This is totally, utterly wrong.
Texts do not have hidden meanings. The meaning of a text is the product of the idiosyncratic interaction that occurs between an individual reader and text during the process of reading. Different readers will discover different meanings in the same text. And all of these meanings will be equally true.
The purpose of literary criticism is not to uncover something that’s hidden within a text, but rather to provide us with different strategies of engagement that will allow us to arrive at different destinations in the process of reading. By multiplying the possible readings of a text, we increase the likelihood that we will hit upon a reading that will prove interesting or useful to us as individuals.
Any teacher who claims that he can tell you what the “real meaning” of a text is doesn’t really understand how literature works.
I’ve discovered that there is nothing more difficult for freshman students to understand than The Hamster King’s very good point. They tend to be very resistant to the idea that an answer is neither right nor wrong, it’s merely supported or unsupported. You can argue a Marxist view of Frankenstein for example, but you’d have to provide credible evidence. There’s always one or two that simply deny such a thing is possible, and get frustrated by the notion that nobody gets to be correct. “What’s the point?” They ask “If we all get to have our own meanings?”
Or, alternatively, “Well, that’s how*** I ***interpret it, and just because nobody else sees it that way doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s just a different interpretation is all.”
I think the proper route is two or three step:
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Experience a literary or artistic work completely unadulterated by outside influence to get that raw virgin encounter with the work.
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Perhaps at this point you might discuss it with your peer group, but eventually and inevitably, you get to…
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Scholarly analysis in the case of deep literary works, or the IMDB trivia page in the case of random films, or Sparx notes, or the equivalent.
After experiencing it at least once for yourself, and at least once discussing it with peers, the best way to enhance the experience of an artistic work is to either talk to the creator, or to someone versed in the tropes of the medium.
And I think there is almost equal merit in the following:
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What you get out of it.
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What the creator intended.
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What it means within the context of the community of similar works, and analysts of the work.
Since Sassyfrass, the OP has posted noting since the beginning, don’t y’all think its about time we got into a serious discussion of deconstructionism?
Later, perhaps, we can attack post-modernism?
Who are the Morans and why aren’t they reading? Is it an Irish thing?
I just finished reading* Lolita*. At the end I was both blown away and confused. It was nice to be able to find other readers of the work, people who had studied it and compared it to other works. These are the critics the OP is talking about, the academics who write papers and wiki articles? I got a lot of answers from those people who have spent a lot more time delving into that dense novel and I appreciate the effort.
See also A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, an excellent counter-example to the notion that literary critics cannot write.
Regards,
Shodan
Lit Crit exists because we allow people to get doctorates in English.