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flappermyrtle's review against another edition
2.0
I had to read this book for a course in literary criticism, and as such it is very useful. Though the first chapter was dreadful to get through, it got better as the next chapters had more apparent narrative rather than theory. The last chapter contains a sort of rage against cultural studies, which was so personal it started to bother me. And there were A LOT of spelling mistakes - I don't mind one or two, but I noticed at least fifteen, and that's kind of ridiculous in a book on properly writing criticims, imo.
bucket's review against another edition
3.0
McDonald describes how the role of the literary critic has changed over the centuries, ultimately leading to "death" in the latter half of the 20th century.
He opens with a history of aesthetics, why evaluative criticism is so important, and how its lack is a symptom of general moral relativism and anti-authoritarianism. The rest of the book is an in-depth history of criticism and all it's association academic theories, beginning with Plato and Aristotle (doesn't everything begin with Plato and Aristotle?) and weaving along through romanticism, modernism, new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and cultural studies. More interesting than it sounds, I swear!
The books ends with a hopeful thought that perhaps criticism isn't dead, but just biding it's time. Already there are signs of returning interest in aesthetic and literary value.
I was an undergraduate English literature major from 2002-2006, when the structuralist literary theories were already falling away and the focus of literary criticism was beginning to once again assess aesthetic value through close reading while still hanging on to the cultural and authorial contexts that structuralism emphasizes. At the same time though, cultural studies was taking off in a big way, and analyzing everything from Harry Potter to Second Life, the Simpsons to fashion magazines.
Perhaps I'm a product of relativistic anti-authoritarianism, but I never really felt pressure to ignore literary and aesthetic value in college. I definitely can see a lack of interest in literature beyond academic english departments, publications like the New Yorker, and a select group of lit-bloggers (many of whom were english majors themselves).
I read this book to get a grasp of how the internet is changing the book review and got something else entirely here, but I'm not complaining. I was very interested in the ongoing struggles throughout history to wrestle with the concept of aesthetics. Theorists went from trying to come up with a set of standards that could scientifically evaluate all artistic works to avoiding any type of evaluation altogether.
I'm new to all this, but I see value in literature, and I think it's worthwhile for society to continually value literary merit and consider some works more meritorious than others, even if standards are continuously changing. Aesthetic relativism is akin to moral relativism - high-quality and low-quality exist, just as right and wrong do, even if these all are products of culture.
Themes: literature, criticism, critical theory, history, science vs. art, aesthetics, relativism, cultural studies, journalism, popular culture
He opens with a history of aesthetics, why evaluative criticism is so important, and how its lack is a symptom of general moral relativism and anti-authoritarianism. The rest of the book is an in-depth history of criticism and all it's association academic theories, beginning with Plato and Aristotle (doesn't everything begin with Plato and Aristotle?) and weaving along through romanticism, modernism, new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and cultural studies. More interesting than it sounds, I swear!
The books ends with a hopeful thought that perhaps criticism isn't dead, but just biding it's time. Already there are signs of returning interest in aesthetic and literary value.
I was an undergraduate English literature major from 2002-2006, when the structuralist literary theories were already falling away and the focus of literary criticism was beginning to once again assess aesthetic value through close reading while still hanging on to the cultural and authorial contexts that structuralism emphasizes. At the same time though, cultural studies was taking off in a big way, and analyzing everything from Harry Potter to Second Life, the Simpsons to fashion magazines.
Perhaps I'm a product of relativistic anti-authoritarianism, but I never really felt pressure to ignore literary and aesthetic value in college. I definitely can see a lack of interest in literature beyond academic english departments, publications like the New Yorker, and a select group of lit-bloggers (many of whom were english majors themselves).
I read this book to get a grasp of how the internet is changing the book review and got something else entirely here, but I'm not complaining. I was very interested in the ongoing struggles throughout history to wrestle with the concept of aesthetics. Theorists went from trying to come up with a set of standards that could scientifically evaluate all artistic works to avoiding any type of evaluation altogether.
I'm new to all this, but I see value in literature, and I think it's worthwhile for society to continually value literary merit and consider some works more meritorious than others, even if standards are continuously changing. Aesthetic relativism is akin to moral relativism - high-quality and low-quality exist, just as right and wrong do, even if these all are products of culture.
Themes: literature, criticism, critical theory, history, science vs. art, aesthetics, relativism, cultural studies, journalism, popular culture
george_r_t_c's review
2.0
There are quite a few typos in this book, and in turning to the index to check how many times McDonald has actually referred to John Carey (whom McDonald seeks to critique here), I discover that this entry is printed: Carey, John, x, 24-25, 19-20, 32-4, 108. The slight but noticeable sequential disorder here speaks perhaps to the slight but noticeable disorder of this book's argument and structure. The first chapter makes some general points about the slow disappearance of evaluative criticism from the academy, and then refutes in general terms John Carey's relativistic account of criticism as entirely subjective. The two middle chapters consist of a history of literary criticism which is too broad to be more than superficial. The final chapter morphs from the continuation of this history into the condemnation of 'cultural studies,' which issues from that history's terminus, Raymond Williams and then Terry Eagleton.
To be generous, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing a history of literary criticism that tries to explain the shrinkage of evaluative criticism (if you want a 5-star book that tells that history elegantly and persuasively, try Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History) or with writing a book that argues in favour of evaluative criticism against the general project of cultural studies. I think McDonald could write a better book on either of those topics individually. However, it is not possible to do both of those things at once in 150 pages, and as a result I did not finish McDonald's book with a clear idea of why evaluative criticism is good (perhaps ironically) or why it has disappeared from the academy.
I remain a bit suspicious of McDonald's personal position with respect to literary studies and its politics, because he uses the term "neo-Marxist" several times (not sure what that means) and also couples the word "postmodern" with "scepticism" or "relativism" wherever it occurs, which seems like a sign, much more legible in the wake of Jordan Peterson, that the writer in question hasn't engaged in good faith with any theorists of postmodernism. McDonald doesn't really say this explicitly, but he repeats the Matthew Arnold line, "the best that has been taught and said," and its variants, a few times (ix, 68, 69, 125), until it begins to sound like what it is, i.e. an empty and contextless bit of rhetoric, which, along with his valorisation of the practice of specific critics who were good writers (and this ties in to his concluding thesis that critical writing should basically take a lesson from the discipline of creative writing), such as Hazlitt and Arnold and Williams (even though he disagrees with Williams and Eagleton he concedes, as if this is the main thing, that they are sophisticated writers), suggests to me that McDonald's ideal critic is someone without a theory or a politics. Indeed, his concluding pages also mention James Wood in admiring terms, the well-established Harvard "Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism" whom I used to like before I read this essay in which Frank Guan judiciously contends that "In literature as in much else, the tenor of the Nineties was set by the New Republic, where James Wood's reviews of classic novels consistently dampened their ideological charge even as his reviews of contemporary fiction condemned deviation from a pinched conception of realism." It's not that I want to criticise McDonald for not being left-wing, but rather that he seems to be distancing himself from every theorist who sincerely holds a political position, which is a distracting ambiguity that makes it hard to piece together the book's thesis.
McDonald has an irritating habit of criticising things by pointing out some metastructural or self-referential contradiction that afflicts them. After a few iterations of this method, the consequences of which are never worked out in more detail, it begins to seem like a kind of undergraduate gotcha. On pages 29-30 he criticises the general attitude of poststructuralism by writing that "everything was open to radical critique apart from its own attachment to radicalism, everything should be challenged apart from the urge to iconoclasm, the role of the university theorist was one of dissent from everything, apart from the imperative to dissent." On page 101 he writes, of Northrop Frye, that "there is a clear contradiction in downgrading value judgements: it too is a value judgement." On page 118 he writes: "If all human culture is subject to structuralist procedures, then, surely, so is structuralism itself." None of these potentially interesting claims is developed, and certainly not in a way that I would call intelligently immanent, i.e. in a way that seeks in good faith to actually work out the details and the methodological contradictions of these methods and theories. They're just gotchas. On page 127 he writes: "Cultural studies, so eager to escape the institutional limitations of conventional disciplinary distinction, ends up being quite impenetrable, hard to fix or identify. It cannot be called to account because it refuses the account book. This might be one reason why it has been so hard to popularise. To be concerned with everything is, ultimately, to be concerned with nothing." This last sophistical twist strikes me as merely false, which would be clear from reading any work of cultural studies that engages in detail with something specific and substantial (that is to say: any work of cultural studies, or indeed any of the proto-cultural-studies essays of Barthes or Williams).
McDonald signals in a few ways that he wants to engage with the concept of the 'public sphere' as a precondition for popular evaluative criticism. He adopts a distressingly ambivalent attitude towards the democratisation of criticism, and the accompanying remarks on the explosion of the 'blogosphere' inevitably seem a bit glib in 2020, since we all know there are only four websites that people actually use anymore (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Marxists Internet Archive, in case you were wondering). I think a genuine problem with McDonald's approach to the idea of the public sphere is his unwillingness to be open about its specific class character. This is maybe a similarly glib retort coming from someone who doesn't already think cultural studies is bad, but I think there's a serious contradiction between his claim on page 59 that aesthetic criticism was "inevitably ... treated as bourgeois ideology," that Kant and the idea of a critical, enlightened space of artistic discourse are trivialised in their historicisation by contemporary theorists, and the way he explains the evolution of the public sphere on page 53, where he quite explicitly says that "the growth of a bourgeois 'public sphere' engendered a social conversation of educated people who indulged in urban life and urbane manners, conversation and wit." McDonald is of course right to point out that this eighteenth-century phenomenon is deeply bourgeois and middle-class (although he doesn't dwell as much on its whiteness and maleness; it's funny actually that he notes on the first page of the preface that the literary critic was "traditionally ... male and patrician" but then continues to use the masculine pronoun, even though this aside about gender was prompted by his use of that pronoun). The problem is he doesn't seem to realise concomitantly that the "huge new public" which consumed this "rational and civilised discourse" was, and is today, only a slice of a wider set of discursively distinct demographics (53, 54). He's not interested in exploring the consequences of this correct historical characterisation, and prefers to vaguely castigate those theorists who would focus on this history instead of simply taking Samuel Johnson at his word.
This book also has the worst cover I've ever seen.
To be generous, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing a history of literary criticism that tries to explain the shrinkage of evaluative criticism (if you want a 5-star book that tells that history elegantly and persuasively, try Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History) or with writing a book that argues in favour of evaluative criticism against the general project of cultural studies. I think McDonald could write a better book on either of those topics individually. However, it is not possible to do both of those things at once in 150 pages, and as a result I did not finish McDonald's book with a clear idea of why evaluative criticism is good (perhaps ironically) or why it has disappeared from the academy.
I remain a bit suspicious of McDonald's personal position with respect to literary studies and its politics, because he uses the term "neo-Marxist" several times (not sure what that means) and also couples the word "postmodern" with "scepticism" or "relativism" wherever it occurs, which seems like a sign, much more legible in the wake of Jordan Peterson, that the writer in question hasn't engaged in good faith with any theorists of postmodernism. McDonald doesn't really say this explicitly, but he repeats the Matthew Arnold line, "the best that has been taught and said," and its variants, a few times (ix, 68, 69, 125), until it begins to sound like what it is, i.e. an empty and contextless bit of rhetoric, which, along with his valorisation of the practice of specific critics who were good writers (and this ties in to his concluding thesis that critical writing should basically take a lesson from the discipline of creative writing), such as Hazlitt and Arnold and Williams (even though he disagrees with Williams and Eagleton he concedes, as if this is the main thing, that they are sophisticated writers), suggests to me that McDonald's ideal critic is someone without a theory or a politics. Indeed, his concluding pages also mention James Wood in admiring terms, the well-established Harvard "Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism" whom I used to like before I read this essay in which Frank Guan judiciously contends that "In literature as in much else, the tenor of the Nineties was set by the New Republic, where James Wood's reviews of classic novels consistently dampened their ideological charge even as his reviews of contemporary fiction condemned deviation from a pinched conception of realism." It's not that I want to criticise McDonald for not being left-wing, but rather that he seems to be distancing himself from every theorist who sincerely holds a political position, which is a distracting ambiguity that makes it hard to piece together the book's thesis.
McDonald has an irritating habit of criticising things by pointing out some metastructural or self-referential contradiction that afflicts them. After a few iterations of this method, the consequences of which are never worked out in more detail, it begins to seem like a kind of undergraduate gotcha. On pages 29-30 he criticises the general attitude of poststructuralism by writing that "everything was open to radical critique apart from its own attachment to radicalism, everything should be challenged apart from the urge to iconoclasm, the role of the university theorist was one of dissent from everything, apart from the imperative to dissent." On page 101 he writes, of Northrop Frye, that "there is a clear contradiction in downgrading value judgements: it too is a value judgement." On page 118 he writes: "If all human culture is subject to structuralist procedures, then, surely, so is structuralism itself." None of these potentially interesting claims is developed, and certainly not in a way that I would call intelligently immanent, i.e. in a way that seeks in good faith to actually work out the details and the methodological contradictions of these methods and theories. They're just gotchas. On page 127 he writes: "Cultural studies, so eager to escape the institutional limitations of conventional disciplinary distinction, ends up being quite impenetrable, hard to fix or identify. It cannot be called to account because it refuses the account book. This might be one reason why it has been so hard to popularise. To be concerned with everything is, ultimately, to be concerned with nothing." This last sophistical twist strikes me as merely false, which would be clear from reading any work of cultural studies that engages in detail with something specific and substantial (that is to say: any work of cultural studies, or indeed any of the proto-cultural-studies essays of Barthes or Williams).
McDonald signals in a few ways that he wants to engage with the concept of the 'public sphere' as a precondition for popular evaluative criticism. He adopts a distressingly ambivalent attitude towards the democratisation of criticism, and the accompanying remarks on the explosion of the 'blogosphere' inevitably seem a bit glib in 2020, since we all know there are only four websites that people actually use anymore (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Marxists Internet Archive, in case you were wondering). I think a genuine problem with McDonald's approach to the idea of the public sphere is his unwillingness to be open about its specific class character. This is maybe a similarly glib retort coming from someone who doesn't already think cultural studies is bad, but I think there's a serious contradiction between his claim on page 59 that aesthetic criticism was "inevitably ... treated as bourgeois ideology," that Kant and the idea of a critical, enlightened space of artistic discourse are trivialised in their historicisation by contemporary theorists, and the way he explains the evolution of the public sphere on page 53, where he quite explicitly says that "the growth of a bourgeois 'public sphere' engendered a social conversation of educated people who indulged in urban life and urbane manners, conversation and wit." McDonald is of course right to point out that this eighteenth-century phenomenon is deeply bourgeois and middle-class (although he doesn't dwell as much on its whiteness and maleness; it's funny actually that he notes on the first page of the preface that the literary critic was "traditionally ... male and patrician" but then continues to use the masculine pronoun, even though this aside about gender was prompted by his use of that pronoun). The problem is he doesn't seem to realise concomitantly that the "huge new public" which consumed this "rational and civilised discourse" was, and is today, only a slice of a wider set of discursively distinct demographics (53, 54). He's not interested in exploring the consequences of this correct historical characterisation, and prefers to vaguely castigate those theorists who would focus on this history instead of simply taking Samuel Johnson at his word.
This book also has the worst cover I've ever seen.
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