By Jenny Davidson 

1. Handwork

Thank you for being here and thanks to organizers, esp for biscuits!

I’m thrilled to be here to talk about these two excellent books and the larger issues they raise about what we do as professional critics inside and outside universities and as passionate amateurs. I’m only sorry that my opposite number Ryan Ruby can’t be here. Ryan was my student in Columbia’s Literature Humanities seminar more than twenty years ago and it has been a joy to watch him flourish as writer and critic in the intervening years. Thanks to the conference organizers and to everyone who’s helped make this event happen in ways great and small.

I want to open by saying I subscribe wholeheartedly to Jonathan’s premise about method in literary studies: that it “lies in a hands-on relation to our objects and our creating something from them” (7):

The micro-procedures of literary analysis, [he writes] for example, are skilled actions. One can’t do them without training. Over time, one becomes equipped with the knowledge to perform the action in a way that is adept and that seems on reflection, especially by others, to half create, half pick out features of the world that are true. (25)

I have always had strongly sensory impressions associated with writing – so that when I am grappling with an enormous number of primary texts and trying to make a way through them, I feel myself to be using a machete to clear a path before me, an impression so real that I can feel it in my triceps. As we learn to play a musical instrument, or continue to hone our practice, we rely on scales, arpeggios, “drills.” I have spent many of my happiest hours in adulthood in the classroom, and not only as teacher – being a student of yoga, swim, things I have learned as adults – has shown me that I am drawn to the kind of teaching that takes this approach (on the mat, protracting the shoulders and closing the ribcage in order to understand the structural integrity required for poses like crow and headstand; finger-drag or fists drill in the pool, making a hand a big paddle with drag vs a losing the surface of the palm and its powers of pulling to the extent that you have to recruit your long inner forearms as your paddle).

The longer I teach, the more I’ve integrated this kind of work into the assignments I give my students. Senior essay research methods seminar, developed curriculum last summer: look at significant and/or successful) critical essays (Barbara Johnson’s “My Monster/My Self” transcendent ex. Of the genre)– Nicole Aljoe, Caribbean colonial archive (scholarly argument), Mesle/Blackwood “The Function of Pettiness at the Present Time,” Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas” – think about how they are organized but especially about how they deal with their materials. An interim assignment, once we’ve looked at and talked about how that works: For 3 of your critical and/or theoretical sources, write 2-4 sentences that use quotation and paraphrase to summarize the source’s argument and 1-2 sentences that explain how you build on or counter this point. (the “build/counter” bit – components that add up to a senior essay – an argument/proposal – a sequence of close readings — 10,000 word sustained critical piece). My brothers are both professional carpenters and fabricators, and I think it can be helpful to imagine a thesis or book chapter as a project something like renovating a kitchen – we need a plan, we need skills, we need to understand that identifying and obtaining materials and that the project will go more easily if we do tasks in a certain order and that we must keep checking back in with the larger plan rather than obsessing on a small detail of cabinetry at the expense of integrating our thinking about plumbing and electric and layout and supply chains and so forth.

I may sound excessively functionalist, but to develop the craft that’s needed to manage larger-scale projects always starts at the level of the sentence. We can break the job down into small tasks and practice, practice, practice. And thinking about writing in this way, for our students but possibly for ourselves as well, can clear some of the psychological blocks on writing – the self-censorship, the debilitating perfectionism that many of our students experience – and create something like the joy we experience as young children when we finger-paint or build things out of pipe cleaner and tongue depressors and glue – a making as the term makerspace highlights.

2. Voice

Reading in the sense of close reading, Jonathan suggests, is really a form of writing rather than reading, an “explanatory method” with disciplinary specificity and considerable analytic power: “This method is craftwork in a literal sense. It is something one does or makes with one’s hands, and its mode of attention is a kind of dexterity. The ‘reading’ is typed or in some few cases handwritten. To the degree to which information comes in from the eyes to the mind, it also goes out through the fingers to the screen or the page” (35-36). Jonathan is too acute a critic to neglect that fact that criticism is a verbal mode that can be spoken as well as written. I think of the moment, for instance, when he clarifies his observation that “one must read as one writes” (34) with this lovely pair of sentences: “Whether in scholarship or the classroom, commentary of this kind demands thought to be externalized in graphic or spoken form. It demands the active confrontation and commingling of one’s own words and words out there in the word” (34). A page earlier, as he describes the art of quoting well, he has made it clear that he understands criticism to migrate back and forth between voice and page in this list of the activities involved in criticism: “pointing to lines or words of interest to your argument; placing new words up against or around them; describing how quoted words sit among words unquoted or in the tradition of scholarly discussion” (33). And yet he does not have the ear, I think, that Ross Wilson displays in Critical Forms as he thinks about what he calls, in a particularly lovely formulation, “the performance of imaginative voicing that is at the heart of literary criticism” (123).

What does it mean to think of criticism as a performance, a voicing, rather than a kind of craft or mode of commentary that is at its heart textual?

My favorite chapter: Lectures

Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America – “published lectures whose status as both text and spoken event is crucial to the arguments they develop” (112). Presence – access.

Lowth and the really lovely reading of Lowth on reading Homer – “here we have the energetic voice of Virtue herself, here we behold her animated form” (121):

I think of the compositional practices of eighteenth-century writers like Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon – well documented habit of composition in the mind, then later transcription (overcoming friction – procrastination) of putting into writing. And of orality in other kinds of writing – the double existence on page and voice of works that come out of Afro Caribbean literary culture especially, the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!.

3. The play of criticism

The mandate of Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750-2020: it is not a history from nowhere, it is historicist in Momigliano’s sense. with historicism entailing “the recognition that each of us sees past events from a point of view determined or at least conditioned by our own individual changing situation in history.”

, it is history written from the present – which is to say it considers questions of “the relation of literary criticism to literature and … what kind of writing literary-critical writing” in the context of “recent considerations of what has come to be called ‘creative criticism’”: “Indeed,” Ross adds, “the attention given in recent years to the loose set of practices of literary-critical writing that are actively engaged in adding to and redefining (as well as commenting on and evaluating) literature itself is a key context for this book” (5). I love Ross’s combination of acute historicism with a real immersion in and attentiveness to the pressing questions of the present day. I also share Ross’s belief that there never really was a final “sundering of critical writing from formal experimentation” (7), and there’s something wonderfully generative and exciting about how he frames the book’s project:

An account of literary criticism and its forms need not be a merely taxonomic undertaking, involving the assignment of a finite number of fixed forms to fixed functions, but instead the elaboration of the formal resources and innovations of which literary criticism has historically availed itself in its fulfilment of different critical priorities and advancement of different critical claims. (17)

I think that we are incredibly aware right now of how various and flexible criticism can be, though there are many questions in my mind about how such work will be funded. It is often only with tenure – something that is more endangered than it has been in my lifetime – that scholars feel free to write “creatively” – so as to say, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection is an enormously creative research project, genuinely field-changing, but the style or form of the book is still more traditional than the work she does in Lose Your Mother, “Venus in Two Acts” and most recently Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. How much freedom do doctoral students really have when it comes to writing a thesis or dissertation? Katina Rogers, in her chapter on unorthodox dissertations (the CUNY incubator), describes a doctoral thesis on ASL vlogs that is composed as a vlog – but that requires an accompaniment of a traditional written dissertation as well, so that it entails in many respects twice the work. I do not imagine that we in this room who teach at universities could build a strong consensus around how important it is for students to write a journeyman project in the traditional scholarly mode as opposed to exploring the wider range of forms that their advisors in many cases prefer to practice. Perhaps more to the point, is this even the relevant question to ask when there are so few university teaching jobs with decent working conditions for them to pass into after they complete their degrees?

I have done much work with doctoral students in my own department on how to think about multiple career pathways, how to prepare oneself for more than one kind of job and how to think about the need to make a living – to pay the bills. I have been singularly frustrated – I talk all the time about this with actual students, undergrad and grad — about the ways faculty less, er, concerned than I am to understand underlying material realities talk about the success stories of PhD alums who have a high profile in the world of culture – as novelists, critics, essayists, writers of magazine profiles. But the fact is – this work does not pay the bills. Marina Harss 2021 essay “The Reality of Dance Criticism Today”:

somewhere in the mid-2010s, I came to a realization: Writing about dance had become something I did for pleasure and because I was driven to, but at best a gig, a hobby that paid something, not quite a profession. I worked on it full-time, but earned the equivalent of a part-time job. Over the years I have supplemented it with other work, mainly translations, public interviews and, more recently, with the advance on a book. I’m also married to a person who makes a decent salary.

It is lovely that our students are such gifted writers and that they develop those talents in so many exciting directions. It is lovely but it is not a career in the traditional sense. The possibility of making a living as a literary journalist has diminished much more rapidly than I think anyone could have imagined in the early 1990s, when I graduated from college. The decline of magazines and newspapers – the fact that there are periodicals that pay equal or smaller numbers of dollars for reviews now, and dollars THAT HAVE NOT BEEN ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION. So that both academia and cultural journalism have narrowed in the openings they allow for providing a sound material base for a life of reading and writing.

4. Ekphrasis

I think less of “medium coincidence” than Jonathan does – I suppose in the context of his argument about the discipline it makes sense to emphasize the distinctiveness of this fact, and to underline the fact that for instance art historical writing and criticism, and film studies, contrastingly, “have ekphrastic modes of explanation whose method and creativity depend on translating features of nonverbal artifacts into the language of academic argument” (71-72). (and what about the language of description, of the essay?) “To be available as ekphrasis involves a sort of annihilation and rebirth, whereas to be available as quotation or deixis or imitation involves a sort of perseverance into a new shape” (72). That might suggest that ekphrasis is MORE creative, not less – but also I’m not sure such a clear distinction can be maintained – I think the ways of reading that we mark as “literary” criticism are criticism pure and simple. Let me share a favorite example that may more vividly get across what I mean. This is Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly’s works on paper:

Through TW’s work, the germs of writing proceed from the greatest rarity to a swarming multiplicity: a kind of graphic pruritus. In its tendency, then, writing becomes culture. When writing bears down, explodes, pushes toward the margins, it rejoins the idea of the Book. The Book which is potentially present in TW’s work is the old Book, the annotated Book: a super-added word invades the margins, the interlinea: this is the gloss. When TW writes and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also “operates” a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, the gesture of a dandy.

Orality (Coleridge – or Harold Bloom!). Voice, oracular

Sympathetic inhabiting – acting – ghosts (possession)

5. The essay

And where is the essay in all this? Criticism and the essay overlap so substantially in Every segment of the period Ross writes about. I don’t know if you considered having a chapter on the essay, or if that seemed needless because it is often considered the/a dominant form, but I see a distinctive mode. Example: Lamb, On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century

Charles Lamb (“On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century”) on Palmer’s performance of Joseph Surface (xxxiv): “the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—to express it in a word-the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,–the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,–which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character… John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.”
Autotheory vs the essay – sometimes in tension, sometimes not. Roland Barthes’s rib chop! But the tendency to spin out into difficulty rather than ease of access.

Teju Cole open city – novel as criticism – Amitava Kumar – Rob Nizon Dreambirds – Kate Zambreno, Herve Guibert. Songtag notes on style

Point (tension – text/footnote): “public criticism can have an essayistic, first-person address typically lacking in ordeinary academic prose, with comparisons drawn between characters and events in literary texts and the experience of the critic herself” (103) and n. on 122: “The use of this kind of first person is an important and innovative feature of some recent academic criticism as well” (Sharpe, In the Wake as ex.)

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Jonathan: “In this way, quotation is the art of moving across two orders of writing, one’s own and someone else’s. One composes sentences about and with sentences already made” (33)
“… the skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act” (66).