Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Hear, hear …

… Not Quite a Manifesto - thereadingexperience. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Any defensible judgment about a work of literature must arise from observable features on which the judgment is based and to which the critic can return. This is where the distinction between having an "opinion" about a text and being able to support that opinion is real. An opinion is only a provisional conclusion until it can be allied with and clarified by specific illustration from the work, until the critic can point to those particulars of the work that prompted the opinion. An unsupported opinion may or may not contain implicit but unstated illustration of this kind, but as long as it's unstated, it is not itself "criticism." Not everyone wants to be a critic, of course, but a book review, for example, can't really be taken seriously as criticism unless some text-based "evidence" is provided.
In the talk I gave Sunday the Chestnut Hill Book Festival, I said something similar:

I happen to think that what readers look for in a review is an accurate and precise account of the experience the reviewer had with the book under review. You see, if you provide an experienced reader with that — with the basics underlying the book and clearly articulated reasons for liking or disliking it — those readers will have what they need to make up their own minds about it. Seeing what the reviewer’s premises are, they may well decide to read the book even if the reviewer didn’t like or not read it even if the reviewer did. From my experience, readers of books not only like to read. Generally speaking, they’re also comfortable thinking for themselves.
You can't do that, of course, without sufficient text-based evidence.


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