#people arguing about practical criticism until it becomes ridiculous: the undergrad cambridge english experience.

[zielenna]

The line between seeing things (in the sense of observing things which are there) and seeing things (in the sense of imagining things which are not there) is a finer one in literary criticism than it is in life in general. But the boundary between the two matters in several ways. Only a really good critic can take you up to that boundary and make you wonder which side you’re on. Bad critics tell you what you already knew, or else stride obliviously over the boundary between the noticed and the imaginary into their own fantasy realms of implausible readings. Good critics make you see things. They do it by redescribing texts, or paintings, or music, or posters, or advertisements, or cultures, so that something which was not fully visible before becomes legible. That act of making visible could be a matter of saying ‘look how the brushwork here creates a glowing shadow,’ or even ‘look at this correlation between poverty and the spread of disease,’ or it could be ‘look at all those -ibles and think about what they tell us.’ Criticism is an especially contentious discipline because the criteria for distinguishing the seen from the invented are themselves contentious. The plausibility of a particular piece of criticism depends in part on the persuasiveness of the critic and the willingness of an audience to see things a particular way, with facts and data also playing their part, but not a much more determining part than the judgment of the audience.