THE SUMMER ISSUE of The Yale Review this year is a special issue on criticism: What is it, and why do we write it? What perils and possibilities define its future? In the issue, our contributors shed light on the practice of criticism as it unfolds in magazines, in conversation, and online, elucidating subjects as diverse as poetry, theater, and sculpture.
In his recent book Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, Jonathan Kramnick considers many of these same questions about literary criticism as it is practiced in the academy today. Kramnick argues that literary studies and its “proprietary method” of close reading constitute a kind of craft knowledge analogous to weaving or mortaring—a “hands-on” engagement with the materials of literature through which new language and knowledge are created. By demonstrating that literary studies is a coherent, specialized discipline akin to but meaningfully different from the sciences and social sciences, Criticism and Truth doubles as a modest polemic—“a defense of work that is already being done and an account of why it should flourish.”
This folio presents responses to Kramnick’s book by the scholars Ankhi Mukherjee, Paul Saint-Amour, and Elaine Scarry, first delivered at a colloquium at Yale University in March. In a reply to their reflections, Kramnick writes, “Close reading is active and creative. It makes things.” Together, these critics have made a rich portrait of literary scholarship as it is and as it should be.
—The Editors
