By Thomas Karshan

1. I want to start by thanking Jonathan and Ross – or, as we might have said forty years ago, and might be more likely to say in America or Germany than in Britain – Professors Kramnick and Wilson – or, as the latter divides himself up in the final chapter of his book, Ross, Wilson, and Footnote. And actually, everyone else for showing up and being an audience.

I start that way to pose the question of how the names we put to people and things need to fit the occasion, if only that can be correctly identified – not easy in a room full of such different people as this one. That’s the principle of aptness which in the Renaissance was considered to be essential to good rhetoric and the essence of why Cicero was such a great writer.

That already raised a labyrinth of and challenges out of which a lot of Renaissance pedagogical theory comes. If the aim is to teach people to write well, and to do so is to imitate the best models, such as Cicero; and yet if those models insisted that you had to be apt; how could you do that?

Being apt involves entering into a trialogue between your words, those of your model, and those of the moment, or as we might say, culture around you; and it requires a skill or even art for which no hard rules can be stated.

This of course is also what we do in modern criticism, as Jonathan has shown in his book. As he says, we are like basket-weavers, braiding our words with those of our authors, in how, as he says, ‘criticism’s new sentences’ are ‘woven from old’; he wants ‘to draw attention to how some sentences stay true to others by embedding or extending them well.’ As he insists,’ The craft of composing these sentences means that an important part of their knowledge work lies in the doing, in the apt placement of words up against or amid words already there, not in thoughts or ideas or even research that precede the act itself.’ That craft embodies inexplicit knowledge – know-how not know-what. If the basket falls apart, or seems ugly to well-qualified judges, it is not true. And I’m sure Jonathan will after this want to adjust at least a little the basket I’ve just woven out of his sentences.

2. I agree with all of that, and only want to ask today whether it is well done, or only well done, in the form of the methodical essay, or what are arguably its grown-up variants, the article and the monograph – or are they? In his book, Ross explores the preface; the selection; the review; the lecture; the dialogue; the letter; and life-writing, as alternatives to the critical essay. As he says – weaving together strands from various other baskets:

‘Early critical writing’, Gavin remarks, ‘appeared in a wide range of genres that often bear little resemblance to modern essays, so what counted as “discourse” was difficult to specify’.25 The contrast here is between a situation in which criticism appeared in a wide array of genres and a later situation (ours) in which the genres of criticism have been drastically reduced, in effect, to one— the essay. It is thus, for instance, that Jerome McGann can declare that the ‘Enlightenment models’ of the essay and treatise have ‘dominated’ literary criticism ‘ for almost two hundred years’.’

It bears on the fundamental question of this website, since criticism has come to be equated with methodical essay and treatise – so much so that when people want to depart from it, this is what we call creative criticism.

3. I want to come at this from two angles. One is that of the history of how essays have been taught, a subject I’ve been working on the last year or two; and the other is my interest in teaching through imitation and parody which I practice in my creative-critical MA course on literature and play at UEA, where we ask those Renaissance questions about aptness – not, what would Cicero have written here? – but, what would Kafka write here? what would Ashbery write here? how do you go on with a voice in new circumstances? Those are questions that Renaissance thinkers on education asked – especially Erasmus –

It was sufficiently normal for Pope to make fun of it in Peri Bathous – how does one write like Sir Richard? though in fact his Imitations of Horace are exquisitely sophisticated demonstrations of the critical force and creative capacity of the procedure.

but they also dominate both the criticism and the creative practice of most of the modernists I work on – Woolf, Nabokov, Eliot, Pound, Auden – who on the whole believed students should seek to imitate and parody, not to write extensive verifiable prose about literature.

here for example is Woolf asking students to think how three novelists, Defoe, Austen, and Hardy, would describe the same scene – meeting a beggar in the street

It’s significant because in the history of pedagogy the essay has often come to be seen as the thing that replaced imitative practice – not, try to write like Cicero, or Addison, but – write an essay about Addison, or George Eliot, or Kafka, or Ellison, or Naipaul.

But Jonathan’s approach asks, for me, how true that opposition is between modern academic essays and imitation? When we write an essay about an author, is the real approach to truth not what we say about them, but how we catch and extend their voice, put on trial our attempts to bend our words in with theirs? in other words, is even the modern academic essay, that close weave of commentary and quotation, another exercise in imitation?

4.. We’ve now had my thesis statement, situating the case, and also before that my hook – the little joke about names, meant, like the opening of a James Bond, to drop you quickly into the action, to charm you into being the kind of audience I want you to be, to draw you together into a single audience in laughter, maybe to disarm you a little, to tease my themes. If you know anything about classical and Renaissance rhetoric you’ll know that was the bit they called the exordium, as the statement of the theme was the narratio.

The modern pedagogical essay, which is now such a default in the English-speaking world that, as Peter Womack says, it’s ‘as if intellectual activity produced essays the way a tree produces leaves.’

But clearly this isn’t so – the modern academic critical essay – and monograph – that Jonathan describes – is something that emerged after the second world war; and the essay as a staple of school and university education as we have it is a late 19th century invention, which developed out of the theme, which was not as our essays are supposed to be, a site of individual thought, experience, and research, but a performance of classical rhetoric, stocked with commonplaces collected from the ancients – and, written in Latin until the late 18th century, until English themes came in. However, the structure of the modern essay does match at one of the core structures of the Renaissance theme, inherited from Cicero –

show it

There were other key structure, such as this one, from, 1677, which is more concerned with logical structure –

and you can see how as the theme gradually developed into the essay in the 19th century it sometimes aimed at mimicking the structure of scientific knowledge – this is one example, from Parker, 1837

But, as you can see again from this diagram – the essay structure I’m basically familiar that maps onto a Ciceronian oration –

So, I am trained to communicate and think in essays of the kind I was made to write at school, and which are based on legal speeches.

4. How, then, did I learn that machinery which I take intuitively to be the basic structure of reason? and which I bring to writing about literature, and teach my students to write?

Well, in short, I don’t really remember. Maybe that’s in the nature of a craft, that you have to forget how you acquired it.

But one marked difference between Britain and America is that for some reason here the 20th century did not see the development of large-scale university composition instruction as happened in the States – and that carried over to schools, perhaps.

I knew, of course, that an essay should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – about as much as all English people are told – a truism, perhaps – but as I now know canonised by the most significant influence on essay-teaching in British schools during the 20th century, Ronald Ridout, whose five book series English Today, first published in 1947 is in the Guinness Book of World Records as largest numbers of textbooks ever sold – 90 million across Britain and the commonwealth –

Ridout says – p. 203 – ‘Every composition must have a beginning and an ending. It is not intended, by pointing out this, to insult your intelligence. Obvious truths are sometimes profound. This one certainly is. In fact, it can be said that it stands at the very heart of the difference between nature and art. No part of nature, that is of the material world or of human life, has a definite beginning or ending.’

And then Ridout gives examples of openings from Addison, Hazlitt, Blunden, Woolf, Hume, Stevenson, Robert Lynd, Ruskin, and some others; and endings from Addison, Birrell, Street, Hazlitt, Mill, Masefield, Tomlinson

I’m not sure whether he is consciously imitating Montaigne when he says that no part of nature has a beginning or ending, but it is exactly what Montaigne says, though of course Montaigne, being an antimethodical writer, draws the opposite conclusion – his writings, unlike the themes he was taught to write at school, will not have clear openings or endings, because they should be close to the truth of nature.

I am pretty sure I was taught from Ridout when I was six or seven, because I have carried around with me all my life the story he tells at the beginning of Book 1 that language began with a caveman crying out as he ran away from a lion. Something I still passionately adhere to.

So it was probably also from Ridout that I picked up what you might call the dialectical view of the essay –

Introduction, 2. One view, 3. Points against, 4. Other view, 5. Points against, 6. Balance/Conclusion

This also appears, by the way, in his spin-off, English for Australian Schools. Ridout was everywhere.

5. It is fundamentally different, I believe, from at least one of the defaults which obtained for a long time in American high-school, the five-paragraph theme, later redubbed the five-paragraph essay,

an introduction with the thesis, three body paragraphs
with topic sentences proving the thesis (generally three reasons or three
points), and a conclusion that restates the thesis and sums up the main points.

which Sharon Crowley has called – ‘the most thoroughgoing scheme for spatializing discourse that had appeared in rhetorical theory since Peter Ramus’ method of dichotomizing division rendered all the world divisible by halves’

though themes, to be clear, were also supposedly forms in which personal experience could be expressed – as, famously, Langston Hughes in his ‘Theme for English B’ –

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

Of course it’s not – that truth is a mechanism of the form.

7. I can see myself now, at the age of 17, preparing to write an essay on Hamlet, scribbling on the pages of my Arden edition until the pages were black with ink, talking back to Hamlet, defacing the book until it was my own. As Henry James says in the preface to What Maisie Knew – ‘to criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised thing and make it one’s own.’ I was learning to be a basket weaver.

But I didn’t think of myself as doing that. I thought I was producing an interpretation in answer to a question. That was as it were the lead thought, as it is on the whole for our undergraduates. Essentially my process was to put Hamlet through the essay machine until I could make it speak sententious conclusions worthy of an essay – to make Shakespeare speak like Polonius. Where Hamlet by indirection finds direction out, I would reverse that.

This was a school which at every turn discouraged expressions of emotion, was not especially hot on the arts, and encouraged analytic skills. We were being prepared to become lawyers. By re-writing Hamlet as an essay, I was turning it into the language of power. I could somehow, at one and the same time, be Hamlet and Fortinbras.

Effectively I was translating the play into an essay. That is always a risk for someone who writes a methodical essay about a play or poem or novel.

5. Hamlet does for sure have something in common with a modern essay, or to put it in Renaissance terms, as it does with the themes Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have written at Wittenberg and their grammar schools. It contains for instance the structures of dialogue Renaissance students learned at schools, which fed into the theme: you would pose a question or quaestio – acting as devil’s advocate, and explore it from one angle, as Hamlet does when he asks ‘To be or not to be, ay that’s the question’. To be or not to be is, as Vanessa Lim for example has recently shown, an example of a thesis – the penultimate of the Aphthonian forms – the origins of the modern dialectical essay I had been taught.

Hamlet is a device for dramatizing contrasting ideas, and testing their implications against one another, as they are lived out – as an essay can be. Like many works of literature after it, Hamlet teases us by playing with and defeating the structures of the essay which form understanding.

In that sense Hamlet is like some of Montaigne’s essays (which Shakespeare was reading in Florio) in the sense that it plays with and teases the structure of the theme, concealing or diffusing its themes –

As Montaigne says:

It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.’ The Montaignean theme was often not stated at the beginning, but in the middle, the end, or an innocuous corner of the discourse, and often there were many intersecting themes.

So my task then was to take the themes of Hamlet are dispersed, marginal, hidden, intersecting, and to put them in bold and centralise them. I was acting like Montaigne’s early English readers, who often would write at the head of the chapter what they took to be its theme, and try to re-organise the essays into themes.

In fact Montaigne’s essais, like Tristram Shandy, like Keats’s odes, belongs to that category of miscellaneous writing which emerged in direct opposition to methodical discourse – on the one hand, to epics and Ciceronian speeches and systematic philosophy, and on the other hand to the emerging discourse of the universities and professions – and which allows a flexible, even protean, organisation of knowledge and understanding. Out of this emerges much of modern fiction and a lot of modern poetry. The conceptual achievements of miscellaneous writing over the last four hundred years have been immense, and we pay tribute to them by extricating their latent themes. But they have happened in a discourse other than ours – by ours I mean members of the discipline – in fact in a discourse specifically in flight from ours.

No wonder poets and novelists look with bemusement if not fear when we try to absorb their writing into our methodical discourse, even when they need our attention and institutional patronage. They flee from us; we hunt them.

6. Well. I sat down to write my essay, read through my spiderlike black commentary on the pages of my Arden, and my pages upon pages of handwritten notes – and then organised the page.

But I encountered, what we all encounter, the structural difficulty of the modern critical essay, which is always one of the hardest things to teach to students: namely, how do you get from the interlinear scribble, detailed commentary, to the spear-thrust of an argument? How do you avoid reducing the text to a series of illustrations of the argument?

Those two elements correspond to parts of that other late 19th century pedagogical invention, the seminar: the moments when the class has read a portion of the text and is commenting on it; and the moment when everyone in the class is, so to speak, shooting the shit.

I was weaving my words in among Shakespeare’s words, engaged in that dialogue with the dead which Ross speaks of in his book.

And I loved that. I say I loved that because if we want to know how we should write criticism, it will help to know what it is for; and understanding the pleasure it gives us may be a good clue to what it is for.

There was the pleasure of copying out Shakespeare’s words, taking them under my pen and making them mine. Is this not perhaps the first and primary purpose of criticism? just the pleasure of copying out quotations, and making them live in us, and us in them, and through them?

7. I find it helpful here to cite a passage from Thomas Greene’s book on Renaissance imitative practice, The Light at Troy, where he distinguishes four procedures in cultural translation.

The first, which corresponds to copying and memorisation, he calls ‘reproductive or sacramental; it celebrates an enshrined primary text by rehearsing it liturgically’. As in prayer, the principle is that the words are never really the same, because the person speaking them is always different.

But what then we seek to introduce our own words in balance with those we imitate. As Greene goes on to say: ‘Heuristic imitations come to us advertising their derivation from the subtexts they carry with them, but having done that, they proceed to distance themselves from the subtexts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed.’

In other words, a certain imperfection or inaptness is necessary to the project, one which recognises the incommensurability of cultural moments.

Still more so what Greene calls ‘dialectical imitation’, where the two voices clash –

‘The text cannot simply leave us with two dead dialects. It has to create a miniature anachronistic crisis and then find a creative issue from the crisis.’

That gives rise to the trialogue I spoke of in my introduction. In that that gap a third voice is born in the gap between the voice of the author and that of the language one is translating into – whether that is that of the scholarly essay, or some other language.

That for me, I must say, is the moment of crisis when criticism, as well as creativity, emerges from imitation. It is also therefore, the moment of truth. Is the basket true when it holds? or is it when it breaks and frays that it proves its truth?

8. So, I’m going to finish with some questions, for Ross, for Jonathan, and for everyone? If we were teaching To be or not to be to our students, what would we want them to do, and why?

To write an essay about it in response to a prompt, linking it to the other themes of Hamlet, developing an essay which – to be sure – need not turn Hamlet into an argument, but would incorporate its dialectics? what kind of essay structure would be sufficient to our purposes?

how much should students try to get close to the various languages, I mean styles, of the play? how far, and how, can they be asked to try to translate those voices into discourses they know? how can they not? and how far can or should they be conscious of doing so?

What could be the virtues of asking them for a response in one of Ross’s other modes? Should we ask them to converse with Hamlet, or imagine they are him, as Augustine was asked to imagine he was Dido?

or write an essay incorporating their lives into Hamlet, as so many have done before them, whether Goethe or Shakespeare or Nabokov? for as T. S. Eliot noted, Hamlet is the locus classicus of creative criticism in that sense –

should they try to write an imitation or parody of Renaissance thesis, on a quaestio?

should they write an essay using only the words of the speech, as Jeff Dolven asks of his students at Princeton studying a sonnet at Princeton?

and how would or should those critical modes fit together?

9. For my part, I don’t wish or need to choose. Much though I love imitative pedagogy, for what it does for creation as well as criticism, it did of course always sit along and with analysis in the Erasmian scheme. Both the creative and critical faculties need to be spoken to, and drawn together – as, for example, Proust thought was possible, when having wrote both his brilliant close analysis of Flaubert’s style and his pastiche of Flaubert in Pastiches et Mélanges, wrote that: ‘Our minds are never satisfied unless they can provide a clear recreation of what they had first produced unconsciously [that is to say, in the form of analysis], or a living recreation of what they had first patiently analysed.’ Know-how can be translated into know-that, and vice versa. I hope it may be so.

That in fact was the vision of Malcolm Bradbury, who essentially established creative writing at UEA and therefore in the UK, bringing it over from America. He said that ‘we saw a fundamental aim of our programme as being the building of new relations between the “creative” and the “critical”, both in individuals and in university culture too.’

He mean faculties in both the sense of university faculties, and mental faculties – for it’s one of the many things that this debate inherits from Emerson and Arnold that we now speak of the creative and critical faculties. I’ll leave it to the questions afterwards for us to discuss how happy we are with those terms.