THE PRACTICE OF CRITICISM | Fall 2008
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Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:20 a.m. - 12:35 p.m., Welles 119.
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30 - 2:30, and by appointment.
How To Use This Site
You may be looking at this course site on the web. Or you may be looking at it inside mycourses.geneseo.edu. I've made it available both ways in order to keep as much of it as possible open to public view. Whether you're inside or outside mycourses, you'll use the navigation links on the right to get to most of the site's content. The Outcomes page, for example, will show you what I'm hoping we'll accomplish together this semester, while the Requirements page will tell you what we'll be reading and the Schedule page will tell you when we'll be discussing it. When inside mycourses, you'll have access to additional content using the tabs at the top of the mycourses window (Tools, Calendar, Communicate, etc.).
What the Course Is
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form)
"[W]hat is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
In asking what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation, Lewis Carroll's Alice meant more than she said. Books are indeed useless without the conversation through which readers make sense of them. That conversation - a "discussion" that is both "heated" and "interminable" (in the words of Kenneth Burke) - is the practice of criticism.
The point of the conversation is, among other things, to represent or "picture" the meaning of texts. Books are useless without meaning - or, to put it another way, until we make meaning out of them.
Our class will be a "parlor" in which, through conversation, we will make meaning from poetry, drama, fiction, film, and other kinds of text. At times the conversation will be live and literal, but at other times it will take place in the virtual space afforded by the internet. Our conversation will concern not only texts but the practices of literature and criticism themselves. In other words, we will be interested in picturing (representing) all three of the following for a given poem: What does it mean to call this a poem? What does this poem mean? How did I make meaning of this poem?
Substitute "text" for "poem," and you can see that our inquiry will have to extend beyond words. Many written texts come (like Carroll's Alice books) accompanied by pictures; some texts, like George Herbert's "Easter Wings" or Lionel Kearns's "Birth of God/uniVerse" are word-pictures; and if "every picture tells a story," as this one seems to do, then every picture must in some sense be a text itself. Some written texts are accompanied by music or other sounds (Kearns is again instructive, as is Carroll, whose stories about Alice are filled with songs). Epic poetry was originally sung; the terms "lyric" and "verse," as applied to poetry, reference the poetry's musical qualities, while, as applied to popular music, they point the opposite way, referencing the music's words. Films and videos are moving pictures, often combined with sounds, and more often than not conveying words.
So our "texts" this semester will be poems, plays, stories, novels, pictures, films, videos, songs - even (glancingly) games. (I can't tell you why I'm not a gamer, but I'm just not. However, literary texts are certainly games, and most games have a narrative structure and are therefore plainly texts. Witness, yet again, the Alice books, dominated in turn by cards and chess.)
Games bring us back to conversation. "He talks about [our conversation] just as if it was a game!" Alice thinks of Humpty Dumpty. And rightly so. Conversation is a rule-governed collborative activity. Consequenty, our conversation this semester will require collaboration. It will not be a conversation if one person does all the talking. To promote collaboration and the sense of community that comes with it, we will use a variety of tools. You will be expected to participate in group writing at the Geneseo wiki and to maintain a blog. In addition, you're invited (though not required) to join our class Facebook group, "English 170 Fall 2008."