Literature Compass, 2020

This essay juxtaposes recent work in historical poetics with New Critical reading practices, particularly those theorized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their influential textbook Understanding Poetry (1938). It focuses on the relationships among method, period, and aesthetic value: the ways that New Critical reading and its variety of critical judgment helped make 19th-century poetry minor. Examining Understanding Poetry's association of 19th-century poetry with aesthetic badness -- as well as the generic histories of the textbook's "bad" poems -- the essay demonstrates the importance of the problem of evaluation for historical poetics.

Poetics Today, 2003

In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1963[1929]), I. A. Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. What is more, in this book he affiliates himself with the experimental psychology of his time and by extension with the rising prominence of Gestalt theory within this discipline. Our research weaves together not only these three trends but also his Interaction Theory of Metaphor, detailed in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). This essay draws out the implications of Richards's approach to cognitive literary studies for our work on poetic metaphor. In the section entitled “A Gestalt Approach to Poetry” we develop and incorporate his Interaction Theory of Metaphor into our Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor, applying it to a reading of John Donne's poem “The Bait.” In the section“An Empirical Study of Poetry” we discuss Richards's empiri...

2015

This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. Here, Derek Attridge and Henry Staten agree to rein in their own interpretive ingenuity and "minimally interpret" poemsreading them with careful regard for what the poem can be shown to actually say, in detail and as a whole, from opening to closure. Based on a series of e-mails, the book explores a number of topics in the reading of poetry, including historical and intellectual context, modernist difficulty, the role of criticism, and translation. This highly readable book will appeal to anyone who enjoys poetry, offering an inspiring resource for students whilst also mounting a challenge to some of the approaches to poetry currently widespread in the academy.

Introduction to the volume "Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature". Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021 (pp. 1-6). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719-001

Lap, 2021

Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? Taking Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of "poetische Kritik" as its starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, the essays here gathered explore the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature. Contents Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener What Is Poetic Critique? | 1 Jennifer Ashton Why Adding ‘Poetic’ to ‘Critique’ Adds Nothing to Critique | 7 Michel Chaouli Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used | 19 Amit Chaudhuri Storytelling and Forgetfulness | 35 Jeff Dolven Poetry, Critique, Imitation | 45 Alexander García Düttmann “Echo Reconciles” | 57 Jonathan Elmer On Not Forcing the Question: Criticism and Playing Along | 65 Anne Eusterschulte La Chambre Poétique | 79 Joshua Kates The Silence of the Concepts (in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Gottlob Frege) | 105 Bettine Menke Theater as Critical Praxis: Interruption and Citability | 125 Walter Benn Michaels Historicism’s Forms: The Aesthetics of Critique | 145 Yi-Ping Ong Poetic Criticism and the Work of Fiction: Goethe, Joyce, and Coetzee | 155 Simon Schleusener Surface, Distance, Depth: The Text and its Outside | 175 Contributors | 203

2013

have already been identified as defenses of poetry. 8 "Prufrock," "Gerontion," and Mauberley have been called defensive ruminations on their authors' juvenilia. 9 The two most substantial titles on the list-The Waste Land and Spring and All-have been widely read as their authors' respective statements on the politics of form. 10 But there has been only one other study of the defense of poetry as a genre of poetry, Jeannine Johnson's Why Write Poetry? (2007). My work differs from hers in a few important ways, first and foremost in that Johnson is not critical of the received class bias written into the defense as a genre. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that Johnson argues that the defense is brought into verse because her poets-H.D., Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Geoffrey Hill-bring lyric introspection to bear on the marginalization of poetry. 11 But the poets whose verse defenses I consider in this dissertation-Moore, Pound, Eliot, and Williams-are not lyrical poets. Their work is defined by their commitment to new forms that respond to the new world. Another key difference is that the poems I read convey their defenses through allegory rather than through argument. 12 (In the verse defenses I read, 8

“This paper focuses on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) and the recent "Postcritical Turn" towards questions of affect, address, and readerly subjectivity. It argues figures of address in lyric theory are more useful tools for Rankine's poem and that her work represents a sustained move away from the model in avant-garde poetics in the US that considers literary practice as a cultural critique. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), has galvanised literary discourse to aim beyond 20th Century critical paradigms. By isolating ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ - as identified by Paul Ricœur - Felski suggests this stance is an outmoded artefact of literary criticism that can be overcome. Critics intentionally ignore what the text really tells us and instead “read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text fails - or wilfully refuses - to see.” As such, critique considers exegesis a politically active process of identifying texts as symptomatic of ideological falsehood. This overdeveloped sense of the radicalism of interpretation, Felski contends, is a deluded narcissistic practice and critics, “thrive in the rarefied air of metacommentary, honing their ability to complicate and problematize, to turn statements about the world into statements about the forms of discourse in which they are made.” While the ‘heroic critic’ is recognisable in some criticism, the suggested alternatives have not found professional consensus. The term ‘post-critical turn’ remains in question, generating as much metacommentary as it set out to banish. To avoid this, I argue, we should be expanding our sample field. Turning to the contemporary novel to find a model for ‘postcritique’ (see Bewes, Fleissner and Anker) has overvalued fiction so that it dominates contemporary literary studies. When Felski refutes the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ with sensibility of “inspiration, invention, solace, recognition, reparation, or passion”, this is based on a privileging of the innovative narrative text. What’s more, novels are found to be innovative for possessing the very formal indicators of linguistic materiality, authorial undecidability and audience-oriented affect that poetic form has always been defined by. The contemporary lyric, I argue in this paper with its cultivated vocabulary of semantic indeterminacy, connotation and ambiguity, offers fertile ground for the critical reorientations underway in the profession. Making reference to Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), I show how the genre continues to realign the reading subject in an affective, ‘generous,’ or non-hierarchical relation to their object. I conclude with a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), inclusive of facsimile, photograph, and prose narrative, shows how vital the lyric genre can be for questions of identity and linguistic artifice and reaffirms how all language carries ideological meaning and subjective orientation. Literary practice of this vibrancy requires an extensive and deepened critical stance, not an emptied out one.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2009