At close quarters

Undervalued, underfunded and misunderstood, literary studies are in desperate straits. The state of the discipline is such that increasingly terrified and harried scholars must disgorge work not to say something significant, but to meet requirements for hiring, promotion or the Research Excellence Framework – that is, to justify their existence – even as the grants and resources shrink. As an eminence in the field said to me not long ago, where the table used to have loaves of bread, it now has mostly crumbs.

There would seem to be two obvious ways to deal with this creeping evanescence: stand and fight, or keep on as you were. Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On method in literary studies and Ross Wilson’s Critical Forms: Forms of literary criticism, 1750–2020 each chooses one of these approaches.

Criticism and Truth chooses to fight, and it comes out swinging. On the last page of the preface Kramnick announces: “We don’t need one person’s single-minded program for how literary criticism ought to change. We need a defense of work that is already being done and an account of why it should flourish”. The book ends pugnaciously, too, asserting in its final pages that “the study of literature … keeps alive values of truth, justice, and beauty that support collective flourishing”. A reader couldn’t ask for a clearer defence.

For Kramnick the uniquely valuable work of literary analysis is close reading. The word “work” is significant here, because early on he argues that close reading is a craft. This grants literary studies a kind of earthy techne that confers value in a world increasingly suspicious of the intellectual. Using this idea of craft Kramnick draws beautifully on observations by the anthropologist Tim Ingold to argue that the act of engaging closely with a text is more practical than one might think. Close reading, he suggests, is a form of “hands-on immersion”, and that immersion not only becomes more skilled each time it is practised, but also results in an almost instinctive increase in understanding of the text that is being close-read. Nor does this engagement come only from explication. For Kramnick interpolating quotations skilfully is itself a kind of close reading, since it requires the scholar to attune themselves to the quoted work. As we practise this attuning, he argues, we see more deeply into the work and into the way it relates to the world – either the world that produced the work or the world in which we are reading it. Our understanding broadens.

As someone whose critical practice centres on close reading, this seems to me both an accurate and an important description. I don’t know of any critic who has not suddenly had an understanding about a literary work burst in on them in the process of writing about it. Nor do I know of any critic who has not at some point felt enriched by something they’ve gleaned from a such a work. True focus on the text leads to greater understanding, even if that understanding cannot necessarily be explicated. Kramnick explains how close reading does this in a way that is different from other disciplines, and how such close attention – not to what a reader hopes or believes a work says, but to what it is actually saying – breeds rigour and objectivity.

For Kramnick the “active confrontation and commingling of one’s own words [with] words out there in the world” is intrinsically linked with writing. Indeed, his third chapter, “Skilled Practice”, is in essence a paean to good writing: “when we credit what critics are doing, we don’t just notice their arguments. We attribute the success of their arguments to the virtuosity of their practice” – that is, to their writing. As he sees it literary analysis is akin to surgery or boxing: in all three expert knowledge is demonstrated in the practice.

As someone who also teaches writing, I find this observation heartening. But it is also where the trouble with Criticism and Truth begins. If the value of literary criticism lies in a virtuosic combination of observation and practice, what becomes of that value when the combination is not virtuosic? Most people who teach in the field of English would agree that, however bad the state of the discipline, it isn’t as bad as the state of student writing. Yet many of the student writers I encounter are quite good at “actively confronting” literary works; they have insightful ideas, even if they lack the ability to express them. Does the discipline of criticism have no value when it only teaches people to think, not to write? Or should we discount all criticism that isn’t well written?

Ross Wilson’s Critical Forms takes the opposite approach to Kramnick’s, putting its head down and doing literary criticism rather than advocating for it; undertaking, in particular, to consider as criticism kinds of writing that are not usually understood as such. Different forms, Wilson argues in the book’s introduction, allow for different critical manoeuvres and produce different critical insights. For this reason, looking at forms of criticism that do not fit the canonical category of “critical essay or book” will reveal “different critical desiderata”. The book’s seven chapters each consider one such form: Prefaces, Selections, Reviews, Lectures, Dialogues, Letters and Life-Writing.

Wilson draws on a broad array of works and writers, from Wordsworth (the Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and Coleridge (his lectures and the life-writing of Biographia Literaria) to more unexpected examples such as letters between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. The revelations offered by the less familiar pieces, in particular, are often striking. Toni Morrison’s illuminating and painful lectures reveal her astounding critical acumen; Keats’s letters remind one how much, how carefully and revealingly, he thought about the process of writing.

Yet herein lies the difficulty with the book Critical Forms: Forms of literary criticism. The tautology of the title hints at a bigger structural problem: each chapter begins with a version of “let us consider that x could be a form of literary criticism” and ends with a form of “yes, x is a form of literary criticism”. In between too many of its revelations come from the writers it quotes, not from Critical Forms itself. The book meanders, it observes, it presents; what it rarely does is argue. There are chapters that offer statements of intent, then lose their thread. A paragraph early in the introduction repeatedly uses the word “discuss” to describe what will unfold: “I do not discuss … I do discuss … my discussion of literary description … discussing criticism”. “Discussion” is perhaps the best term to describe what the book does. It presents its chosen pieces of writing, makes interesting observations about them, but never answers the question vital to scholarship: so what?

This is nowhere more apparent than in the final section, “The Winding-Up”, which offers a conversation between Ross Wilson (“Ross”) and Ross Wilson (“Wilson”), with contributions from some talking footnotes. As Wilson points out, this “split-self conversation” is not without precedent. The scholar and critic Jerome McGann used it in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) as a way to explore his contradictory critical thoughts. Moreover, he employed this unfortunate approach because parts of his thought really were in contradiction with each other, whereas the Rosses Wilson agree with each other. Wilson is erudite; his writing is elegant; he has a delightful willingness (rare among people, never mind academics) to tell stories against himself. But none of this can make up for the sense that the book is rudderless – in search of a significance that eludes it.

It is in this issue of significance that Wilson’s work connects to Kramnick’s. At the end of the introduction to Critical Forms Wilson suggests that his study is appropriate to “a time of acute change in literary criticism” that sees the decline of traditional venues for literary analysis and the rise of “social media and other forms of online reviewing and commentary and so on”. Criticism and Truth’s “Coda” considers the role and possibilities of just such “public-facing criticism” – erudite writing that appears in non-scholarly publications, both printed and digital. Kramnick makes the case that such writing may lead to increased public interest in literary scholarship, and to an increase in job opportunities for future scholars. This is a heartening possibility, and the book ends on a stirring note: “we need to believe in and advocate for the methods we use when we write about literature”.

The difficulty with the rousing rhetoric lies in that “we”. Criticism and Truth is speaking to the converted. Just as no one who is not already interested in critical form is going to settle in to read Critical Forms, so no one who does not already believe in the value of literary criticism is going to tackle Criticism and Truth. Kramnick’s assertion that “the study of literature is the study of a part of the world that is presumed to be important for collective flourishing” is addressed to members of the professoriat. More and more people read only in small amounts, or not at all; more and more universities are closing literature departments and putting their money into Stem and business. Our “collective flourishing” no longer seems to require people to crack open a book, never mind engage closely with what they read.

Kramnick might have done better to end Criticism and Truth with a consideration of how to prove the worth of literary studies to the people who don’t already see it. He might, for example, have considered writing skills not just as important to critical practice, but as a practical way of advertising the value of our discipline. The ability to write clearly and accurately is the skill employers seek more than any other in new hires, because it is the one skill they can’t teach on the job. Kramnick might have pointed out that English departments are uniquely placed to teach this skill and encouraged them to make more of that fact. Or, if he were addressing a UK audience, he might have argued that literary studies could benefit from a widening of the curriculum that university students are allowed to follow, so that they could take classes that let them see for themselves the myriad ways in which the study of literature benefits discovery in the Stem disciplines, business studies and more. If he were a certain kind of public intellectual (a kind the study of literature increasingly seems to need) he could point out that the “recourse to empathy” that he touches on in his fourth chapter – the idea that reading literature teaches empathy because it allows readers to enter the minds and hearts of others – is also a good way of learning what parts of others you should exploit to get them to want things, to buy things or to believe things. This skill is highly valued in today’s world.

In which light there is an argument to be made that Ross Wilson’s Critical Forms is a more powerful statement than Criticism and Truth. It may not offer a defence of literary studies, but it does enact one, and there is something to be said for allowing “doing the work” to show the value of the work. Whether that demonstration is enough in these worrying days is a topic for another discussion.

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson is a novelist and Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Exeter. Her most recent novel is The Books of the Dead, 2019

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post At close quarters appeared first on TLS.