2012 AM The Role of the Critic

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  • Time: Tue, 8:00 - 10:00
  • Venue: new: V03 0-E005
  • Lecturer: Anna Auguscik
  • Combination: as literary/cultural studies course in AM 2b, 5, 10, 11
  • Course Description: In our age of Amazon consumer reviews and a free digital blogosphere, the role of the critic has come under criticism itself. Is there a plaidoyer to be made in favor of criticism? And what is it that a critic does? In this course, we will take a look at the role of the critic in literary discourse and its changed conceptions. By looking at a number of internal and external statements, historical and contemporary, we will try to understand which function a critical statement has both in reference to a book and the profession of the critic. We will especially look at criticism in reference to the two following books: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003). Please, make sure to purchase and read these novels in advance. Your reading of them is prerequisite to the course.
  • Students should purchase and read in advance (both available at the CVO-bookshop):
  • Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
  • DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003)
  • Additional materials for preparation, as well as the detailed syllabus, will be made available here.


  • Course Requirements
  • for 3 KP: regular attendance and an oral contribution in the form of a presentation
  • Requirements for 6 KP: as above, with a term paper of ca. 10 pp. based on the topic of the presentation.
  • Requirements for 9 KP: as above, with a term paper of ca. 15-20 pp. based on the topic of the presentation.
  • As part of the "Aktive Teilnahme" regulation:

Die aktive Teilnahme besteht aus folgenden Komponenten

  • regelmäßige Anwesenheit: max. 3 Abwesenheiten und gegebenenfalls Nacharbeit
  • Vor- und Nachbereitung des Seminarstoffs (z. B. Protokolle, Aufgaben, Vorbereitung/Lektüre von Texten)
  • Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Fragestellung aus dem Problembereich des Seminars, z.B. durch:
  • Übernahme von Impulsreferaten und
  • (nur falls Seminararbeit angestrebt, verschriftlicht, ansonsten als Teil der Präsentation) Entwicklung einer Research Paper Outline im Laufe des Semesters (die Zeitangaben verstehen sich als Empfehlungen): Wahl eines Themenbereichs (3.-5.Woche), Eingrenzung (ca. 8.-10.Woche), Abstract mit Fragestellung inkl. Forschungsbibliographie (RPO) (ca. 12.Woche), Vorstellung der Fragestellung in der letzten Semestersitzung.


17.04.12: Introduction - The Critic as [...]

critic, n.1 

    1. One who pronounces judgement on any thing or person; esp. one who passes severe or unfavourable judgement; a censurer, fault-
       finder, caviller.
    
    1598    Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost iii. i. 171,   I that haue been loues whip‥A Crietick, nay, a night-watch Constable.
    1598    J. Florio Worlde of Wordes,   Those notable Pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men.
    1606    T. Dekker Newes from Hell To Rdr. sig. A4v,   Take heed of Criticks. they bite (like fish) at any thing, especially at bookes.
    1692    E. Walker tr. Epictetus Enchiridion xlix,   Nor play the Critick, nor be apt to jeer.
    1702    Eng. Theophrastus 5   How strangely some words lose their primitive sense! By a Critick, was originally understood a good 
            judge; with us nowadays it signifies no more than a Fault finder.
    1766    J. Fordyce Serm. Young Women (1777) I. iv. 192   We are never safe in the company of a critic.

    2. One skilful in judging of the qualities and merits of literary or artistic works; one who writes upon the qualities of such works; 
       a professional reviewer of books, pictures, plays, and the like; also one skilled in textual or biblical criticism.
    
    1605    Bacon Of Aduancem. Learning i. sig. K3v,   Certaine Critiques are vsed to say‥That if all Sciences were lost, 
            they might bee found in Virgill.
    1697    R. Bentley Diss. Epist. Phalaris Introd. 7   To pass a Censure on all kinds of Writings, to shew their Excellencies and 
            Defects, and especially to assign each‥to their proper Authors, was the chief Province‥of the Ancient Critics.
    1780    Johnson Lett. to Mrs. Thrale 27 July,   Mrs. Cholmondely‥told me I was the best critick in the world; and I told her, that 
            nobody in the world could judge like her of the merit of a critick.
    1825    Macaulay Milton in Edinb. Rev. Aug. 306   The poet, we believe, understood the nature of his art better than the critic [sc. 
            Johnson].
    1870    B. Disraeli Lothair (new ed.) xxxv,   You know who the Critics are? The men who have failed in Literature and Art.

    3. Comb. (freq. in appositive use).
    
    1680    Earl of Rochester et al. Poems 16   A great Inhabiter of the Pit; Where Critick-like, he sits and squints.
    1754    W. Cowper in W. Hayley Life W.C. (1803) I. 16   This simile were apt enough, But I've another, critic-proof!
    1906    Westm. Gaz. 29 Sept. 14/2   There have been murmurs‥against the critic-dramatist.
    1938    H. Read Coll. Ess. Lit. Crit. i. i. 17   When such a critic-poet attempts to probe down into such a fundamental question as 
            the form and structure of poetry.
    1965    Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 11 40   Critic-centred comments on the text.

(Second edition, 1989; online version December 2011. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44587>; accessed 23 February 2012. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1893.)

  • The Role of the Critic: A Questionnaire

24.04.12: Contemporary Criticism: VGL I

Topics

  • journalistic reviews
  • review cycle: pre-publication and post-publication reviews
  • UK vs. US publication and reviews

Reading

Further Reading

01.05.12: no course

08.05.12: Contemporary Criticism: VGL II

Topics

  • essayistic reviews
  • erudition
  • book clubs

Reading

Further Reading

15.05.12: Contemporary Criticism: CI I

Topics

Reading

Further Reading

22.05.12: Contemporary Criticism: CI II

Topics

Reading

Further Reading 

   [Specify research interest until 25 May]

29.05.12: Contemporary Criticism: Academic Criticism of CI and VGL

Topics

  • John Mullan's Guardian Book Club Series and its offers for academic criticism
  • academic criticism: topics, criteria, questions
  • choose two out of four texts under 'reading' (either two articles on VGL or CI, or one each):

Presenters

  • Kirstin Bogat: "CI's life cycle as a cross-over novel"

Reading VGL

  • Göran Nieragden. "Thank You, Holden Caulfield, and Goodbye: Fresh Ideas for Teaching Adolescent(s) Fiction-the What and the How." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 91.5 (Aug. 2010): 567-578.
  • Himansu S. Mohapatra. "The Real within the Hyper-Real: Identity and Social Location in Vernon God Little." Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 1.1 (Winter 2011): 67-77. [1]

Reading CI

  • Vivienne Muller. "Constituting Christopher: Disability Theory and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 16.2 (Dec. 2006): 118-125.
  • Stefania Ciocia. Postmodern Investigations: The Case of Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Children's Literature in Education: An International Quarterly 40.4 (Dec. 2009): 320-332.Postmodern

Further Reading

05.06.12: Traditions and Historical Perspectives I: The Function of Criticism

Topics

  • alternative histories of literary criticism
  • critics on the function(s) of criticism

Presenters

  • Matthias Heyn: "René Wellek's Historical Perspective"
  • Patrick Ernst: "The Function of Criticism: Arnold and Eliot"
  • Simon Fischer: "The Function of Criticism: Terry Eagleton"

Reading

  • René Wellek. "A Historical Perspective: Literary Criticism." What Is Criticism? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 297-321.

Further Reading

12.06.12: THP II: The Role of the Critic in Literary Communication

Topics

  • the relationship of critics and other participants in literary communications
  • rows and scandals, or the critic as mediator

Presenters

  • Sophia Serena Matzas: "The Triangular Relationship between Author, Reader, and Critic"
  • ???: "The Critic as Artist?" (cf. Wilde)
  • Julia Kreft: "Contemporary Critics and Controversial Criticism: Michiko Kakutani"
  • ???: "Contemporary Critics and Controversial Criticism: James Wood"

Reading

Further Reading

19.06.12: THP III: Criticism and Ideology

Topics

  • which role does ideology play in literary criticism?

Presenters

  • Lea Gehlhaar: "Gender Criticism" (cf. Showalter)
  • Isabell Purwin: "Black Feminist Criticism" (cf. Smith)
  • Nils Rademacher: "Secular Criticism" (cf. Said)
  • Tim Jentzen: "Marxist Criticism" (cf. Eagleton)

Reading

  • Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 2006. [asl 441.7 CR 2851 HA / Dauer-HA Ger / Einf. in die Literaturw. / E 3 / 9 Ger]

Further Reading

  • Smith, Barbara. "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism." [1977] Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Newton. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. 3-18. [ang 910.9 soz BT 1883]
  • Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." Critical Inquiry 8:2 (1981:Winter): 179-205.
  • Döring, Tobias, Uwe Schäfer, Mark Stein (eds.). Can “The Subaltern” Be Read? The Role of the Critic in Postcolonial Studies. ACOLIT Special Issue No. 2. Frankfurt a.M.: Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, 1996.
  • Said, Edward W. "Secular Criticism." The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard University Press, 1983. 1-30. [ang 953.3 said 3 BN 8176]
  • Eagleton, Terry, and Drew Milne (eds.). Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader. Malden, Mass. et al: Blackwell, 2006. [asl 441.7 CR 2856,2006 HA / Dauer-HA Ger / Einf. in die Literaturw. / E 3 / 9 Ger]

26.06.12: THP IV: Media vs. Academia

Topics

  • academic analysis, essayistic criticism and journalistic reviews (cf. Bordwell)

Presenters

  • Hannah Bak: "Media vs. Academia: Hierarchical Institutions?" (cf. van Rees)
  • Mareike Wille: "Media vs. Academia in Film Criticism" (cf. Bordwell)
  • Charlotte Anna Sophie von Harling: "Holden Caulfield and Contemporary Adolescent Fiction: Comparisons of CI and VGL to The Catcher in the Rye in Media and Academia" (cf. Nieragden)
  • Esther Themann: "CI, representations of autism and disability studies"

Reading

  • Van Rees, C.J. "How a literary work becomes a masterpiece: on the threefold selection practiced by literary criticism." Poetics 12 (1983): 397–417.

Further Reading

03.07.12: THP V: The Digital Age

Topics

Presenters

  • Sara Müller: "Vernon God Little on Amazon"
  • Simon Wehber: "Curious Incident on Amazon"
  • Anna Lena Vetter: "The Curious Incident Online: Magazines, Blogs, and Databases"
  • Rianne Wascher: "Math in The Curious Incident: Comparative Examination of the Discussion in Online and Print Media"

Reading

  • Verboord, Marc. "The Legitimacy of Book Critics in the Age of the Internet and Omnivorousness: Expert Critics, Internet Critics and Peer Critics in Flanders and the Netherlands". European Sociological Review 26.6 (2010): 623-637.

Further Reading

  • Critics Versus Bloggers: Pen to Keyboard Combat, K Weber - NewMedia, 2007
  • Private readings in public. Schooling the literary imagination, DJ Sumara - 1996 - Peter Lang 
    [Hand in RPOs until 06 July]

10.07.12: Podium Discussion: The Role of the Critic

  • Questions and Ideas for Discussion: Henning Gruchot 
    Podium discussion with David Hugendick

17.07.12: Final Discussion: The Role of the Critic & Term Papers

  • Maren Zimmermann, Project Report: "The Role of (Online) Critics and Their Position in Literary Communication: A Survey"
  • discussion of RPOs

Bibliography

Novels

  • Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) incl. reviews/articles
  • DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003) incl. reviews/articles

Criticism of VGL and Criticism of CI

Further Reading

  • René Wellek. "A Historical Perspective: Literary Criticism." What Is Criticism? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 297-321.
  • Talk:2012 AM The Role of the Critic

Tools

Quotes

  • "The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the true function of man; it is proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men." (Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, 1864)
  • "Our fundamental want today in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of presidents or Congresses — radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish’d, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote — and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?" (Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871)
  • "To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem." (Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1890)
  • "The most important qualification which I have been able to find, which accounts for the peculiar importance of the criticism of practitioners, is that a critic must have a very highly developed sense of fact. This is by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense of fact is very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization." (T.S. Eliot, The Function of Criticism, 1923)
  • "The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty." (Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950)
  • "Criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness: a real critic has no one but himself to depend on. He can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses — and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the art is seen, so that the work of art will seem everything to him and his own self nothing." (RAndall Jarrell, The Age of Criticism, 1952)
  • "Any critic who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to and those which presently exist, between the past and the present out of which the future must be born. This struggle with oneself as well as with the age, out of which something must be written and which therefore can be read — this is my test for a critic." (Alfred Kazin, The Function of Criticism Today,1960)
  • "The role of the critic is therefore that of participation in the re-creation and expansion of the poet's text. Don Quijote is far more complex and a far richer work of art today than in the time of Cervantes." (Valdés 1986)
  • "Criticism may have once been the meeting of two minds - the critic and the author - but now there are multiple authors and multiple critics." (Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. p.128)
  • "[...] writing a piece of criticism is just writing a beautiful thing as a partner to a beautiful thing. I'm not interested in tearing it apart - though I think those critics are essential, and it's important that people separate the good from the bad; I don't believe in relativist criticism. I want to write about greatness, not mediocreness. There's no point." (Zadie Smith, qt. in Guardian profile article, 2005)
  • "The kind of reviewing I like, or the kind I aspire to, takes another moment. It's easy to feel contempt for writing, or to get one over on it. I guess I'm trying to read a book along its own grain, and not against its grain. I don't have enough energy to write about something I hate."; also: "I think a good book review is a place to meet a book on its own terms, not as an ideological vehicle or an academic plaything. Often people think of writing as primary and reading as the lesser art; in my life it's the other way around. When I write about books I’m trying to honor reading as a creative act: as far as I’m concerned the job is not simply to describe an end product but to delineate a process, an intimate experience with a book which the general reader understands just as well as the professional critic." (Zadie Smith, 2011; check Harper's Magazine for a transcript of this conversation: http://harpers.org/archive/2011/02/hbc-90007992)

Ideas

  • Criticism and History: Criticism in Anglophone vs. in German traditions (literarary criticism in media and academia vs. Literaturkritik/Literaturwissenschaft)
  • Criticism and Institutions: The Critic as Journalist vs. The Critic as Academic
  • Criticism and Theory: European Criticism, British Criticism, North American Criticism (cf. Julian Wolfreys)
  • Literary Communication and the Role of the Critic: Triangular Relations (Author - Critic - Reader)
  • The Critic as Mediator? On Criticism and Ethics
  • Writers as Critics and the Critic as Artist (cf. http://www.ameliaatlas.com/?p=284)
  • Critics and their Criteria: Authenticity, Legitimacy, ...
  • Orchestration
  • Interview-Reviews, Author-Profiles and Other Forms of Reviews
  • Publishing and the Review Cycle: Trade Media, Pre- and Post-Publication, Hardback and Paperback, Summer & Christmas Reading
  • Literary Comparisons and Other Signs of Erudition
  • Controversial Contemporary Critics: James Wood, Michiko Kakutani, ...
  • Criticism and Gender
  • Criticism and Literary Prizes
  • Criticism and the Digital Age
  • Criticism & the Digital Age I: Critics vs. Bloggers?
  • Criticism & the Digial Age II: Amazon and the Amateur Critic

Links

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