Doing Criticism. James Chandler

Doing Criticism - James  Chandler


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in a city like London goes hand in hand with great productions and lively performance. Here is one of my favorite formulations of this point by the influential Canadian critic Northrop Frye, framed as a negative hypothesis about the consequences for a society that might seek to do without criticism:

      There is nothing radical about what Frye is claiming here, but there is something attractive about his double formulation of criticism’s role, mediating between populist or consumerist tendencies on the one hand and recherché aesthetic mystification on the other.

      It is at this point that we can bring together the two kinds of responses that I have been developing, both answers to the question of how to generalize beyond Richards’ efforts to ground “criticism” in the study of lyric poetry. One involves a middle way between restricting the relevant sense of criticism to “literature” and extending it across all forms of “art.” The other involves a middle way between populism (or consumerism) and aesthetic mystification. Both have some relation to the limits of Modernism and to the enterprise of practical criticism that was partly circumscribed by these limits. I can clarify what I mean by returning to Richards, who was writing in the heyday of British Modernism. Here is what he wrote in 1924, the year before he launched his project in practical criticism at Cambridge:

      For many reasons standards are much more in need of defence than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to envisage a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination. Yet commercialism has done stranger things: we have not yet fathomed the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loud-speaker…

      [PC, p. 31]


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