Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 2010"

Introduction: Critical Paradigms

Abstract: completing Theory of the Lyric. What we Call liter\u0003ar\u0003y Cr\u0003itiCiSm Can be tr\u0003aCed baCk to various modes of judgment, praise or blame, of songs and their performances. Singing contests and symposia were among the contexts in ancient Greece for the exercise and articulation of critical judgment; but a properly literary criticism, the classicist Andrew Ford argues, comes into being only with the emergence of a conception of poetry as a verbal artifact, subject to grammatical and rhetorical analysis, formal classification, and technical evaluation: “Only when singers became ‘poets,’ craftsmen of words rather than performers, could a properly ‘poetic’ literary criticism emerge as the special knowledge that discerns the excellence of poetry so understood” (9). Such criticism depends on a system of genres that prescribes the correct telos, or aim, of each type of song and what is appropriate to each, making possible judgments of success. For most of its history, literary criticism was linked to generic categories based on mimesis—genres differing according to what is represented—and to the rhetorical analysis of efficacious speech: criticism is praise or blame made possible by conceptions of goals and norms. The revolution in the concept of literature, which we link to that generally revolutionary time of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, breaks with a conception of literature linked to generic norms and with what Jacques Rancière, in La parole muette, calls “the normative system of BellesLettres” (13; my trans.). Rancière summarizes the shift from a concept of literature as mimesis to a concept of literature as expression: