Disciplinary manifestos typically propose grand reconceptions or reorientations of the field. The work is not what we believe it to be; or if it is, it should be radically transformed.
I tend to be impatient with philosophers who operate in this mode. Their ethnography is often flawed—the discipline is more diverse and intellectually robust than they imagine—and they can be obtuse about more pressing dangers, more external than internal: they rise from the financial and political plight of higher education, not the methodological weakness of philosophy.
So I was happy to encounter Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, an apology for the literary humanities as they now exist that responds to declining enrollments and disappearing jobs:
I don’t have a new method of reading to advertise, and I don’t want to tell critics to stop doing one thing in order to do something else. Rather, I want to provide an account of what we already do so as to advocate for its good standing. The book is a defense of the everyday science and ordinary expertise of work in literary studies as it happens all the time and everywhere, in published criticism and the classroom.
The normal science of literary studies, according to Kramnick—and who would dispute it?—turns on the practice of close reading. This is his subject, viewed through an epistemological lens. Close reading is, Kramnick argues, “a baseline competence and method because it provides a way of understanding that cannot be achieved by other means.”
What is close reading and what is its relationship with knowledge? In one way, Kramnick is evasive: “Unlike regression analysis or Bayesian inference, close reading just doesn’t afford general characterization,” he contends. “The method is too sticky with respect to its materials to allow much in the way of abstraction across individual examples.”
He doesn’t argue for this “particularism” and I’d anticipate resistance from philosophers. Finding the essence that unites seemingly disparate phenomena is a professional habit that’s hard to break.
But there is a less theoretically charged reason for Kramnick to adopt a different method, which is that, by his own account, it is close reading, not theory building, that is the proprietary skill of the literary critic. It is therefore apt that he elucidates close reading by close reading: case studies of quote incorporation, critical free indirect style—when a critic’s prose channels or emulates her object—and the underestimated skill of plot synopsis.
When, for example, Mary Favret wants to show how William Cowper includes in his domestic seclusion the sense of war happening at a distance, she begins with the framework set by eight words across two lines from his long poem The Task: “The noisy arrival of the post-boy intrudes upon the ‘Winter Evening,’ where the poet hopes to cobble out of ‘undisturb’d retirement, and the hours / Of uninterrupted ev’ning’ a rural retreat from hostile weather and imperial hostilities.” … Favret’s construction respects the grammatical and emotional mood set for it by Cowper’s syntax yet nudges the picture of evening’s fireside so that a soft presence of violence abroad somewhat disturbs the calm.
This passage both illuminates and manifests the skill that is Kramnick’s subject: it argues for close reading as a form of expertise in the way close reading does.
Insofar as Kramnick has a theory of this activity, it has two parts. The first is expressed in a two-sentence aphorism:
Close reading isn’t reading. It’s writing.
To close-read a text is not to read it with special attention but to interpret it in your own words, albeit words that may interpolate the words of the text itself. This is distinctive of literary studies:
what makes practices of quotation and its near kin, free indirect discourse, unique is that they occur in the same linguistic medium as their objects of study. They are an immersion at the microscale in the very stuff of literature. Few other interpretive practices or methods of study are like that at all. … Art historians don’t paint about painting nor do musicologists write music about music.
Kramnick’s second axiom is thus what he calls “medium coincidence”—the medium of literary study is the same as that of its object—though the phrase begs to be read against the grain. “Medium coincidence” sounds like a modest fluke, neither trivial nor life-changing, not a necessity to build a manifesto on. Does the fact that literary critics write about writing matter to the epistemology of close reading? Do they know what they know in a different way than art historians or musicologists?
For Kramnick, the answer is yes: “The epistemic virtue of a given reading cannot be separated from its making of something from the very material being discussed.” It’s not just that critics regard their language as essential to their arguments—which is why they read their talks out word for word—but that the skill of “making sentences from sentences” is distinctive of literary studies, and its way of knowing is inseparable from skill:
criticism is true when it is apt, false when it is formed poorly. If the collective appraisal of critical writing is for this reason something of an aesthetic judgment, it is one that examines how carefully the writing has worked with its materials.
“Sentences that embed, point to, extend, or summarize other sentences and their parts are right (or wrong) according to how well the words or clauses fit individual dimensions of the world,” Kramnick concludes—the “world” in question being the literary text that is the object of study.
I anticipate more resistance from philosophy. Are the skills of quote incorporation, critical free indirect discourse, and plot synopsis necessary for interpretive knowledge of literature? Could they be sufficient?
But the second question answers the first. Though he argues that there’s more to quote incorporation and the rest than outsiders typically see, when Kramnick praises “the virtuosity of everyday practice in the field,” he never suggests that these techniques exhaust it. Exercising them is not sufficient for critical expertise. What’s more, it’s consistent with his view that one could manifest the virtue of close reading without incorporating quotes etc., as a carpenter might, on occasion, make furniture from artificial wood.
This deflates his bold conclusion somewhat: the claim that interpretive knowledge is the exercise of skilled close reading has more substance the more one defines or specifies that skill. In being open-ended, Kramnick says less than might appear. But he does not say nothing. The insight that survives is that literary criticism is an expression of verbal ability, expressed in creative writing that absorbs and reworks writing:
When we credit what critics are doing, we don’t just notice their arguments. We attribute the success of their arguments to the virtuosity of their practice. … To emphasize the creative dimension of literary studies therefore does nothing to lower its claim to truth of this or that kind.
That critical essays are creative is not news, exactly. But that suits the tenor of Kramnick’s book, which is conservative, not revolutionary. His point is that to think of criticism as a form of creative writing is not to give up on its aspiration to knowledge but to elucidate the mode of knowing it involves.
This matters to Kramnick for pragmatic reasons. He notes that, while the number of tenure-track jobs in English declined by more than half since 2008, creative writing was an area of growth. There is student demand for it. Why not lean into this, marketing criticism as creative nonfiction?
This makes sense as advertising—though its efficacy will depend on why students gravitate towards creative writing. Do they want to write essays, or memoir, or fiction? And while the idea of criticism as creative writing is consistent with its claims to truth or knowledge, it forces the question why. Why constrain one’s creativity in these ways?
The book I read before Kramnick’s was by another critic, on criticism: A. V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites. It’s a very different beast, not just because it’s about visual art as well as poetry and prose. Marraccini writes wildly and ecstatically about Cy Twombly’s Age of Alexander, explicitly relinquishing the discipline of truth:
Am I “over interpreting” this painting? Probably. … Were I writing an historical or academic argument I would have to care here, about the boundary conditions for believability, for perceived intent, and for context. Whatever this is, I’ve now called them off. I can say anything, which is nothing so much as dangerously overwhelming. I do this all the time to the whole world; see it as a layering of partially readable signs and portents, like some unlucky augur forever staring into the guts of sheep, the flightpath of certain birds.
If critics are creative writers, why curb their appetites at all? Marraccini is a parasite, living on works of art, but unlike a tick, “ballooned up with blood,” she does not know when to stop:
Someday I will be feeding away, mouth to flank, hand to page, or sitting in the upper balcony of the ballet, and I’ll explode and the thin walls of my body will seep out faintly remembered, slightly digested prose.
Nicely done, Kieran, as usual. To add a fourth (?) criticism, I think your piece doesn't take account of how conservative or perhaps radical Kramnick's argument is, at least from your retelling. "Close reading" was associated with the so-called "New Criticism" of the 50s and 60s, which (if my memory serves) itself was a reaction against life of the artist sort of criticism, and even the criticism I like most, the sort of philosophically spirited work of Trilling and others, who rarely quote much. The New Criticism could easily be overdone, and was -- sort of Talmudic studies -- and was passe by the time I was a student in the late '80s. Part of the excitement of post structuralism generally was that it seemed to offer just the sort of play and creativity for which you call. All of this became quite ideological, people lost interest . . . so a call for a return to the text is no doubt in order. And I think the part about perception is right, fwiw. Anyway, thanks for bringing this to my attention, and keep up the good work.
Why use the word creative at all? All writing is creative insofar as the writer fills a blank page with words.
The only question is: Are those words worth reading? Are they amusing, intelligent, incisive, or are they banal, dull, and tedious? Writers speak of creative non-fiction but is there such a thing as un-creative non-fiction or non-creative non-fiction? Of course there isn't. Let's give the word creative a rest.