Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins
Autor Professor Michel Chaoulien Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 feb 2024
Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli argues, criticism involves three moments: Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don’t know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us.
We tend to associate criticism with scholarship and journalism. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism, but what he calls “poetic criticism”—a staging ground for surprise, dread, delight, comprehension, and incomprehension. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me draws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Kant and Schlegel to Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Barthes, and Cavell. Reflecting on these dimensions of poetic experience, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than communicating the urgency of criticism.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226830421
ISBN-10: 022683042X
Pagini: 192
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 022683042X
Pagini: 192
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
Michel Chaouli is professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities. His recent publications include Thinking with Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” and the coedited volume Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature.
Extras
I want to tell you about a mishap I had while teaching Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial a few years ago. The basics are quickly summarized: after reading out loud a passage that I had chosen because it seemed especially rich, I found I had nothing to say about it. Nothing. I tried finessing things by reading it a second time: still nothing. Panic rising, I skipped to another passage I had marked and read it to the class, and
then another—always with the same outcome.
This was unnerving. I had set off on one path—the path of analysis and interpretation, the path I knew, or thought I knew—only to find myself repeatedly led back to my starting point, to Kafka’s words themselves. It was a bit like walking into a Luis Buñuel movie, The Exterminating Angel, for example, or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where every attempt at achieving a simple task—crossing a threshold or sitting down to a meal—is mysteriously foiled.
Or like wandering into a story by Kafka himself, a story like “An Imperial Message.” It’s a simple story: a messenger rushes to get a message from the dying emperor to you—yes, you—yet despite his swiftness, despite his resolve, he never manages to leave the palace, much less cross the vast expanse of the empire to reach you. Like The Trial and so much of Kafka’s writing, the story is pervaded by the feeling that a character’s efforts to move forward, vigorous though they may be, result in nothing but futility and exhaustion. It’s a feeling we know from bad dreams and one I came to know in front of my class. Try as I might, I found no way to deliver the message.
I have often returned to that moment, and not without dread, since the burn of humiliation never quite heals. One reason to revisit it may be that I soon felt, or perhaps hoped, that the scene betrayed something more than my own shortcoming, that being tongue-tied spoke to a shared condition, the condition of criticism, which we encounter in reviews and monographs but whose roots reach deeper and wider. I felt and hoped that my failure to speak was mute testimony to a general difficulty in saying something that could stand up to the experience of reading the passages from The Trial—the difficulty of criticism. This book is a wager that there is something to that feeling and that hope.
Most things I encounter in the world do not impel me to speak about them. When I hold a spoon without saying something about it, I do not feel an absence, a void aching to be filled, a stutter pounding against an invisible barrier, and not because there is nothing to say about it. An inquiry into the spoon need not be less demanding than examining a work by Kafka. When I take the spoon for granted and credit it with indifferent silence, as I do every day, I do lose something: I deprive myself of the knowledge of its place in history and miss out on the pleasure of noticing just how elegant a device this piece of flatware is. But that is not essential to the relationship we have, the spoon and I. Telling its story, singing its praises, or enumerating its flaws, is something I do for my own sake or for the sake of others, not something the spoon asks of me. If it can be said to ask anything of me, it is to use it—to stir the broth or tap the soft-boiled egg; so, I use it. As a rule, the spoon does not call on me to grapple with its significance, which is why as a rule I do not feel the urge to put it down and tell you about it.
Yet when holding a book that speaks to me, that is just what I feel: the urge to put it down and tell you. And when I then fail, my silence feels different from the one with which I greet the spoon. Now my silence consists not in the mere absence of words but has a volume and mass all its own. I feel the pressure of words I am not uttering. These are not words I know and have chosen to hold back, the way I decide to keep a secret. They are words whose surging force I feel yet whose shape and character elude me. Because I require them to give shape to my experience, their remaining out of reach means that my own experience fails me: What just happened to me? Did anything happen? Nor must I remain silent to hear the absence of words: often (in the classroom, for instance, or the scholarly study) it is the very
abundance of discourse, its polish and erudition, that bears witness to what remains unspoken.
It comes down to this:
Something speaks to me.
I must tell you about it.
But I don’t know how.
That is the heart of it—the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement: I read something, and next there is an upsurge of desire to tell you about it. “Desire” is not quite right, since what makes itself felt is something closer to a need, a need so obscure that it remains nameless.
then another—always with the same outcome.
This was unnerving. I had set off on one path—the path of analysis and interpretation, the path I knew, or thought I knew—only to find myself repeatedly led back to my starting point, to Kafka’s words themselves. It was a bit like walking into a Luis Buñuel movie, The Exterminating Angel, for example, or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where every attempt at achieving a simple task—crossing a threshold or sitting down to a meal—is mysteriously foiled.
Or like wandering into a story by Kafka himself, a story like “An Imperial Message.” It’s a simple story: a messenger rushes to get a message from the dying emperor to you—yes, you—yet despite his swiftness, despite his resolve, he never manages to leave the palace, much less cross the vast expanse of the empire to reach you. Like The Trial and so much of Kafka’s writing, the story is pervaded by the feeling that a character’s efforts to move forward, vigorous though they may be, result in nothing but futility and exhaustion. It’s a feeling we know from bad dreams and one I came to know in front of my class. Try as I might, I found no way to deliver the message.
I have often returned to that moment, and not without dread, since the burn of humiliation never quite heals. One reason to revisit it may be that I soon felt, or perhaps hoped, that the scene betrayed something more than my own shortcoming, that being tongue-tied spoke to a shared condition, the condition of criticism, which we encounter in reviews and monographs but whose roots reach deeper and wider. I felt and hoped that my failure to speak was mute testimony to a general difficulty in saying something that could stand up to the experience of reading the passages from The Trial—the difficulty of criticism. This book is a wager that there is something to that feeling and that hope.
Most things I encounter in the world do not impel me to speak about them. When I hold a spoon without saying something about it, I do not feel an absence, a void aching to be filled, a stutter pounding against an invisible barrier, and not because there is nothing to say about it. An inquiry into the spoon need not be less demanding than examining a work by Kafka. When I take the spoon for granted and credit it with indifferent silence, as I do every day, I do lose something: I deprive myself of the knowledge of its place in history and miss out on the pleasure of noticing just how elegant a device this piece of flatware is. But that is not essential to the relationship we have, the spoon and I. Telling its story, singing its praises, or enumerating its flaws, is something I do for my own sake or for the sake of others, not something the spoon asks of me. If it can be said to ask anything of me, it is to use it—to stir the broth or tap the soft-boiled egg; so, I use it. As a rule, the spoon does not call on me to grapple with its significance, which is why as a rule I do not feel the urge to put it down and tell you about it.
Yet when holding a book that speaks to me, that is just what I feel: the urge to put it down and tell you. And when I then fail, my silence feels different from the one with which I greet the spoon. Now my silence consists not in the mere absence of words but has a volume and mass all its own. I feel the pressure of words I am not uttering. These are not words I know and have chosen to hold back, the way I decide to keep a secret. They are words whose surging force I feel yet whose shape and character elude me. Because I require them to give shape to my experience, their remaining out of reach means that my own experience fails me: What just happened to me? Did anything happen? Nor must I remain silent to hear the absence of words: often (in the classroom, for instance, or the scholarly study) it is the very
abundance of discourse, its polish and erudition, that bears witness to what remains unspoken.
It comes down to this:
Something speaks to me.
I must tell you about it.
But I don’t know how.
That is the heart of it—the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement: I read something, and next there is an upsurge of desire to tell you about it. “Desire” is not quite right, since what makes itself felt is something closer to a need, a need so obscure that it remains nameless.
Cuprins
To Start
Part 1. Something Speaks to Me (Intimacy)
Feeling the Pulse of the Text
Some Examples
Poetic Criticism, an Essay
Roland Barthes Has Sushi
What Does the Text Want from Me?
The Impersonality of Intimacy
The Texture of Intimacy
Productive Distrust
Learning to Unlearn
Naïveté
Intimacy, Self-Taught
The Call of Significance
The Authority of the Poetic
Being in History
Being in the Same History (Tradition)
A Bastard of History
Part 2. I Must Tell You about It (Urgency)
Understanding and Making
Making the New by Remaking the Old
Learning Not to Conclude
Tact
Playing It by Ear
Poetic Making Conserves as It Renews
Poetic Power
Philological Disarmament
Hearing That We May Speak
Second Thoughts
Self-Reference versus Urgency
Epiphanies
The Intense Life of Language
What and How
The Knot of Experience
Making Freedom
Part 3. But I Don’t Know How (Opacity)
Shadow in Plain Sight
The Difficulty of Criticism
The Strange Voice
Aristotle versus Plato
What in Technique Is More Than Technique
What Kind of Thing Is the Poetic Thing?
The Work of Art versus the Poetic Work
The Eye of the Work, the Eye of the Beholder
How to Leap Over One’s Own Shadow
Why Non-Knowing Is the Primal Condition of Poetry
Genius
Criticism Is Making
The Poet of the Poet
Falling
The Difficulty, and the Ecstasy, of Reality
Is Poetry a Deflection from Life?
In Poetry, Non-Knowing Is a Primal Condition
The Social Force of the Impersonal
To Be Continued . . .
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Part 1. Something Speaks to Me (Intimacy)
Feeling the Pulse of the Text
Some Examples
Poetic Criticism, an Essay
Roland Barthes Has Sushi
What Does the Text Want from Me?
The Impersonality of Intimacy
The Texture of Intimacy
Productive Distrust
Learning to Unlearn
Naïveté
Intimacy, Self-Taught
The Call of Significance
The Authority of the Poetic
Being in History
Being in the Same History (Tradition)
A Bastard of History
Part 2. I Must Tell You about It (Urgency)
Understanding and Making
Making the New by Remaking the Old
Learning Not to Conclude
Tact
Playing It by Ear
Poetic Making Conserves as It Renews
Poetic Power
Philological Disarmament
Hearing That We May Speak
Second Thoughts
Self-Reference versus Urgency
Epiphanies
The Intense Life of Language
What and How
The Knot of Experience
Making Freedom
Part 3. But I Don’t Know How (Opacity)
Shadow in Plain Sight
The Difficulty of Criticism
The Strange Voice
Aristotle versus Plato
What in Technique Is More Than Technique
What Kind of Thing Is the Poetic Thing?
The Work of Art versus the Poetic Work
The Eye of the Work, the Eye of the Beholder
How to Leap Over One’s Own Shadow
Why Non-Knowing Is the Primal Condition of Poetry
Genius
Criticism Is Making
The Poet of the Poet
Falling
The Difficulty, and the Ecstasy, of Reality
Is Poetry a Deflection from Life?
In Poetry, Non-Knowing Is a Primal Condition
The Social Force of the Impersonal
To Be Continued . . .
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Recenzii
“If, as Michel Chaouli suggests, there is no greater compliment to pay a work than ‘to credit it with the power of arousing the urge of making,’ then this book deserves that high praise. I left its pages grateful to the author for articulating things I’ve thought but didn’t yet have words for, as well as for articulating ideas that hadn’t yet occurred to me. Chaouli’s prose is patient and pellucid at every turn without ever sacrificing passion or complexity. His book renews my excitement about—and dedication to—poetic criticism, not to mention the sustaining arts of connection and conversation.”
“Chaouli’s passionate, brooding exploration of poetic criticism should be essential reading not for literary critics alone but for anyone who has fallen under the spell of a powerful work of art and feels the mysterious compulsion to speak about the experience.”
“In this startlingly original and elegantly constructed book, Chaouli enacts the very sort of practice which his phenomenology of poetic criticism so brilliantly describes. Something Speaks to Me extends the legacy of Barthes, Baldwin, Sontag, and Adorno, writers for whom criticism meant ‘making new sense’ as much as ‘understanding [existing sense],’ and whose passages are read with unprecedented attention throughout. It is also a unique work: a phenomenology of intimacy, urgency, and opacity. This triad of terms enables Chaouli to explore the philosophical depths of what happens when criticism and participation are seen as interlocking rather than opposing activities, disclosing the seriousness of an underexamined and often unloved practice but also highlighting its everyday joys.”
"Inviting us to look afresh at the experience of reading, Michel Chaouli fuses the poetic and philosophical to stunning effect. To read his words is to be arrested by revelatory turns of phrase and ambushed by insights. Chaouli’s luminous prose deserves the widest possible audience."