The Living Practice of Criticism

i wanted to give an account of our practice. I wanted critics at once to recognize their own activity in my sentences and to consider that activity differently. I wanted finally to write a literary-critical book about literary criticism, using tools of the craft to understand the craft.

My reasons were simple. Like any craft, academic literary criticism is a living practice. It survives only as its habitat thrives. Recent years have seen tragic habitat loss for the discipline of English, manifesting most acutely in the frightening disappearance of jobs for the young. The situation is urgent. Without younger scholars moving up the ranks, the skills of the craft fail to be renewed or challenged. They simply die. My book was an attempt to describe what would pass with that death. I focused on the practice of interacting with and knowing the world that goes by the name of close reading.

Close reading isn’t exactly reading, I argued, at least not in the conventional sense of decoding graphic marks. Rather it is a way of adding one’s own words to words in the world and so altering that world in turn. Our practice is less ocular than tactile, our skill less visual than dexterous. Close reading is active and creative. It makes things. Ankhi Mukherjee, Elaine Scarry, and Paul Saint-Amour all point to the ongoing connection I draw between the practice of shaping words from words and that of other crafts, like woodwork or masonry. Scarry likens my picture of close reading to the work of the ancient rhapsode. I think that is right, and nicely so, as it puts a contemporary academic practice at the dawn of philosophy and letters and literature. The rhapsode joins the singer’s words to the words she recites, and rhapsody understands its material in the deftness of its quoting. The relation of the rhapsode’s words to the words that are recited is in this way “lateral.” Scarry wonders whether I am right to stress the creative nature of this kind of making. I see her point, especially if one imagines creativity of this kind to be “equal” to or a kind of repetition of the writing of literature rather than “lateral” to it, in a humbler, artisanal adjustment to a present world (and maybe literature is like that too?). I’m happy to think that this lateralness can become the occasion for significant change to the given and subject to aesthetic judgment.

I focus on the skill that goes into that change and the importance of medium in the creative, critical act. We share the same verbal medium as our objects, and our skill resides in the treatment of marks that have sound and meaning, joined by the glue of syntax. Saint-Amour looks at my epigraph (the only one in the book) from the craft theorist David Pye, who describes skilled practice as a “workmanship of risk” because the outcome is never guaranteed but always subject to the moment-by-moment care and dexterity of the craftsperson. I found that to be an apt description of close reading because it emphasizes the process of making something from the world in the act of having something to say about it—Scarry’s house of woven silk. Nothing holds unless it is made well, and one can always slip at any stage of the creation.