Courses

What do critics do?  Four of the most foundational answers to this question are: describe, interpret, evaluate and explain. Each of those activities raises a host of questions that have long preoccupied scholars in the human sciences. 

—To describe is to represent, and therefore to enter the thicket of complications associated with any act of representation.

—To interpret is to determine meaning, but scholars have developed little consensus about what constitutes valid meaning or valid ways of deciding what a work of art means.

 —To evaluate is to determine the success or failure, goodness or badness of an object in both ethical and aesthetic terms. Once the hallmark of criticism, both inside and outside the academy, explicit evaluation has become less acceptable within scholarship, due to a consensus that value judgments often represent nothing more than self-interested bids for power and prestige. Nonetheless, implicit evaluation remains central to many forms of humanistic scholarship, such as critique and canon formation.  

—To explain, often understood as assigning origins and causes, has long been a staple of historical scholarship, and therefore looms largest in historicist approaches to literature. But even the most historicist humanists today tend to subject any causal explanation to corrosive scrutiny and have few protocols for developing persuasive ways of answering the question “Why?”

We will read and discuss landmark works in literary criticism that both perform and theorize description, interpretation, evaluation, and explanation, or explore how those four critical activities overlap. Authors to be read will include Bakhtin, Lukacs, Auerbach, Barthes, Sontag, Bourdieu, Scarry, Berlant, Sedgwick, and Haraway. We will also read very recent work by literary critics and classic meditations on method by social scientists. Each seminar participant will select a literary work that they will spend the semester describing, explaining, evaluating, and interpreting.