Doing Criticism. James Chandler

Doing Criticism - James  Chandler


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tree in Paradise to the invocation of the elevated prospect from the peaks of Mount Horeb, where divine inspiration was given to Moses, the presumed author of the book of Genesis on which Paradise Lost is based. There is also a visual repetition (or “match cut”) between this mountain top and that of Sinai, repeated in the invocation of Mount Zion in the clause that begins after the conjunctive “or” in line 10. Eisenstein’s expansive idea of montage might also apply to the “adventurous song” that means to “soar above the Aonian mount,” transcending that pinnacle, as the transcendent divine Spirit broods dove-like above the primordial abyss before the creative imperative “let there be light.” Most striking of all these montage effects, however, might be the juxtaposition of this first light of the world, brought about by the divine Word, and the light that the poet seeks to bring into his dark mind. This latter light, in corresponding to the first one, forms part of Milton’s Puritan belief in the “inner light” available to the “upright heart and pure” of the elect.

      As a filmmaker, Eisenstein was famously attentive to the rhythm that governs the succession of images and sounds in cinematic montage, and rhythm is likewise crucial to what Milton has in view when he speaks of his ambition to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” After all, Paradise Lost is written in blank verse, a verse form that is not prose (since it involves lines regulated by iambic pentameter, five repetitions of unstressed and stressed syllables) and has no rhyme scheme. Blank verse is a metrical form nonetheless in which the line matters in two important ways: first by an adherence to the iambic pentameter norm, and second by implied principles of construction for what a line can be (since a blank-verse line cannot end or begin just anywhere). In blank verse, importantly, the unit of the line has little to do with the unit of sense, understood as a clause. And yet, although none of the first six lines are end-stopped—none ends with the completion of a sentence or independent clause—all conclude with a noun that completes a noun phrase: “the fruit,” “immortal taste,” “all our woe,” “one greater man,” “the blissful seat,” and “the secret top.” In each case, a strong monosyllabic noun follows an unstressed syllable, thus lending a kind of closing cadence to the line even as we look beyond it for the completion of the clause or sentence. We have to wait until line 7 to find a line that does not end with a noun phrase set to this particular rhythm, and there we are delivered an important single verb—inspire—that provides the same cadence for line closure, in spite of the fact that it is a transitive verb still awaiting its direct object: “That shepherd” (i.e., Moses). The noun phrases then reappear to close lines 8–10.

      I noted at the start that the art of doing criticism has been around for a long time and is something we are not likely to do without anytime soon. I suggested that the kinds of critical discussion that have been staged within popular cinema in recent decades amply attest to that point. Though this is a book that means, finally, to help students of literature and cinema (students in the broadest sense) to think and write well about what they find in their reading and viewing, I hope at all points to preserve the sense of vital connection with the kind of issues that Randal and Dante argue about in Clerks, the kind of issues that any number of readers of this book might find themselves arguing about after an evening of reading or viewing. In Dante and Randal’s exchange, we have a fine example of Mencken’s critical exuberance. It is not only something wonderful to behold. It is even more wonderful to undertake, to do ourselves. How indeed could we ever imagine doing without it?

      NOTES

      1 1. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), pp. 216–17.

      2 2. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” Selected Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 65.

      3 3. Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. xi.

      4 4. Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), p. 77.

      5 5. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), p. 1.

      6 6. See Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865), pp. 1–42.

      7 7. T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 30.

      8 8. See I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004 [1929]); hereafter abbreviated PC. Recent research into Richards’ classroom notebooks suggests a somewhat different picture of his actual pedagogy than what he offers in his famous book: see Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 66–106.

      9 9. In this effort, I follow the lead of Raymond Williams’ sustained response to the work of Richards. See my “I. A. Richards and Raymond Williams: Reading Poetry, Reading Society,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 325–52.

      10 10. William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret


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