The awfully indefinable practice of critical reading...

Even before reading Michael Warner’s “Uncritical Reading”, the idea of critical reading did not sit well with me.  The reputed analytical power of critical reading and the veritable treasure throve of knowledge that this practice promised to yield up, made me very nervous.  What exactly was critical reading? Was I doing it? How did I know I was doing it? Although his chapter has not completely enlightened me, he has certainly brought raised some very interesting points that have enriched my understanding of critical reading. 

          Warner’s comment, that the way in which critical reading is described seems to treat it as “a notional derivative from a prior critical reading that it must posit in order to exist” (15), had escaped my attention.  It’s generally assumed that some affective reading mode has previously digested the text, putting these two practices side by side.  The derisive treatment of the affective, or ‘uncritical’, modes of reading by the critical orthodoxy is largely a product of their paranoid fear of textual attachment (Warner 16).  This is certainly something I’ve noticed in Bayard’s “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” and it really irritated me.  Feelings do have a place in the process of reading, and sacrificing them completely is a rather strange idea.  The crux of Warner’s argument proposed that, rather than considering ‘critical’ and ‘uncritical’ forms of reading as opposed to each other, we should consider them as just different and essentially complementary (Warner 30). 

        However, for fear sounding slavishly devoted to Michael Warner, I should outline some of the limitations in his work.  Primarily, these limitations rest mostly in what he fails to say rather than what he actually says.  For example, in trotting the reader through the developments in philosophical thoughts throughout history that have led to this split between critical and uncritical conceptions of reading (Warner 26 – 32), he fails to question whether or not we can legitimately separate reading into these different modes and, if we can, if it is advisable.  Warner also identifies that the professional critic, in their attempt to provide a critical reading, should not be a “business of taste-making…[and providing a] thumbs-up-thumbs-down decision of aesthetic judgement” (25), but he doesn’t actually say what the critic is expected to do if not this.  If it is to be objective, can they truly avoid imbuing their professional opinion with their personal opinion? The ability for the critic to be objective is not questioned. This argument becomes less direct as the chapter continues, and he seems to seek refuge in commenting on others’ work rather than presenting his own ideas. His line of argument seems to peter out before he says anything really groundbreaking. Overall, Warner really has presented an interesting discussion on the idea of critical thinking: it is very easy to understand, says what needs to be said and goes where no work has dared to tread before now.  But I do wish he explored his ideas further - especially defining the slippery topic of critical reading more satisfactorily.
Works Cited
Warner, Michael. "Uncritical Reading". Jane Gallop, ed. Poleric: Critical or Uncritical. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bayard, Pierre. How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. New York: Granta, 2007.

"Turn About" and the Complexities of the Screenplay

The theoretical issues exposed from studying Faulkner’s screenplay, Turnabout, demonstrated that critical analysis of a screenplay is fraught with problems.  We first consider how we will even conceive of such a text?  Do you think about it as you would a published literary work, or should it be treated like the broad outline of some greater work?  The screenplay’s form is utterly unusual.  It reads like a play, but in its final form, it’s a fleshed out film.  As a first copy, this screenplay isn’t even designed for an inexpert audience to read.  The fact this version was never used as the shooting script eventual film, Today We Live (1933), further limits its audience.  Considering these points, are we qualified to judge this screenplay? We certainly shouldn’t judge it in the same way that we would judge a novel or a poem. 

            However, I think people in the seminar discussing this work overestimated the text’s value and excused its faults (of which there were many!) on the basis of its status as an early version of a screenplay.  I don’t think that we would treat early drafts of poems so kindly, brushing aside any its faults because it was a first draft for a screenplay.  The screenplay’s irritatingly stereotypical "English" phraseology, almost as if lifted from a P.G. Wodehouse novel, and ploddingly obvious dialogue, in my mind, outweigh the screenplay's virtues, like the clever manipulation of sound effects and visual effects, and a sophisticated undertone of incest and complicated, triangular relationships.  But, because of its status as a screenplay and all the trappings that go with it, like the studio insisting that a woman be written into the screenplay because Hollywood needed a woman (specifically Joan Crawford to meet the studio’s contractual obligations to her), I think these faults were underestimated.  It is a text that shouldn’t be dismissed, but why make allowances for its quality to the extent that we do? 

        In the end, I think these allowances are made because of Faulkner's authorship.  This is especially strange when the collaborative nature of the process of writing a screenplay was stressed in our seminar, not to mention the fact that any given screenplay may be redrafted by other writers several times before the final copy is created.  But is such an author-centric reading of the screenplay desirable? Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?” shed light on this question.  Unlike Barthes’ assertion that a text’s existence is not bound up in the author’s existence (Barthes 223), the screenplay never seems to be discussed separate from the author.  As the screenplay is so collaborative, Barthes’ claim that a text is never original, but rather is “is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 223), casts doubt on how authentically Faulkner the screenplay is. Rather than considering the screenwriter as “author”, it might be more useful to think about the studio being the “author”.  The studio is the prime shaping force of the screenplay – it is written to cater for the needs of the studio, and owned by them, and the collaborative process of composing a screenplay means that it is reasonable to talk about the studio as a whole shaping the text.  The screenplay exceeds the concept of sole authorship, as other collaborative pieces do (Foucault 237).  

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. Ed. Daniel Finkelstein and Alistair 

           M^cCleery. The Book History Reader.  London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 

           221-224

Hawks, Howard and Faulkner, William. Turn About. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, August 

           24, 1932.

Foucault, Michel.  “What Is an Author?”. Ed. Sean Burke.  Authorship.  Edinburgh:

          Edinburgh UP, 1995. 233 – 246.  

Henry James, Revision and Textual Authority

Murphy’s “Revision as a “Living Affair” in Henry James’s New York Edition” and Eric Leuschner’s “Utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable”: Collected Editions, Prefaces and the “Failure” of Henry James’s New York Edition”, in unpicking the tangled ethical mess that is literary revision; demonstrate how textual revision raises questions about textual authority.  Murphy’s discussion of the conflicting revisionist and preservationist stances on textual revision demonstrates that philosophical considerations underpin these difference views (Murphy 163).  

The revisionist is someone who recognises the creative capacity of the revised text in keeping the said text alive and relevant whilst the preservationist advocates that the text should remain unaltered.  The preservationist disputes the author’s reputed authority, and ability, to adapt the text for the better (163-164).  Linking this divide on views of literary revision to Leuschner’s discussion of James’s failed “New York Edition” (37), these conflicting stances on literary revision really reflect divided opinions over textual ownership.  Preservationists assert that the public owns the text once it enters the marketplace, whilst the revisionists’ view stems from the assumption that the author still owns the text, and thus the authority to alter it.  

            Identifying these different views on literary revision and discussing the rationales behind them does not, however, resolve the question of where textual authority lies. Rather, Murphy and Leuschner’s musings reaffirm how murky the issue is.  The preservationist conception of the literary work as a static object is perhaps a little misguided, as they seem to treat it more like a painting that an piece of literature.  The fact that a piece of literature, unlike a painting, remains in the possession of the author, gives him or her more opportunity to change it, and a piece of literature is physically easier to alter than a finished painting (Murphy 169).  The link between historical conditions and the emergence of the revisionist versus preservationist approaches to literary revision, throw into doubt how objective it is to stolidly support these views on their own.  James’s revision of his works would largely have to do with rise of the collected edition, which would have given him a chance to release the definitive version of his texts (Murphy 168).  Similarly, the expansion of copyright laws to protect the authority of literary works probably fostered the preservationist approach (Murphy 167).  

        On a closing note, though, the validity of the revisionist approach in the case of James seems largely redundant because his revised works failed to be financially viable (Leuschner 24).  Whether one likes it or not, books are products and need to meet consumers’ needs to be successful.  With the rise of the collected edition, as Leuschner states, the public saw such editions “as a way of “owning” the author, of being able to say that they had “James” on the shelf (37).  The failure of James’s New York Edition demonstrates that you can quibble all you like about the author’s right to revise their work, but the work's reception as a consumer commodity will measure its success.  The public will presume that they own works of the canon and always reduce the authority of the author to revise his or her work.  

Works Cited

Murphy, Stephen J. “Revision as a “Living Affair” in Henry James’s New York 

            Edition”. The Henry James Review. 29.2 (2008): p163-180.  Project 

            Muse. The John Hopkins UP. 28 Sept. 2010. <http://muse.jhu.edu>. 

Leuschner, Eric. “Utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable”: Collected Editions, Prefaces, and 

            the “Failure” of Henry James’s New York Edition”. The Henry James Review. 

            22.1 (2001): p24 – 40. Project Muse. The John Hopkins UP. 28 Sept. 

            2010. <http://muse.jhu.edu>. 

Belated Musing on Bayard...

Whilst paralysed into silence for fear of blogging and expressing my own opinion, Bayard’s “How to Read Books You Haven’t Read” took on a completely different complexion. His critique of the narrow definition of reading in the world of literary criticism (instead advocating that “non – reading” practices can be sufficient for insightful commentary) now seems like an equally restrictive and unimaginative explanation of the purpose and practices of the reader themselves. Bayard’s argument rests established assumptions, as his push for his “collective library” demonstrates:


“For a true reader, one who cares about being able to reflect on literature, it is

not any specific book that counts, but the totality of all books. Paying

exclusive attention to one book causes us to risk losing sight of the totality”

(Bayard 30-31)

Here, Bayard assumes that wide exposure to literary works is what forms an understanding of literature. From Bayard’s explanation of the complicated nature of reading, we may be scandalised by his tongue-in-cheek comments and wholly consolatory remarks on the futility of reading as it is traditionally understood, but it does not seem terribly challenging. Bayard’s concerns about maintaining perspective propagates the belief that wider reading will lead to more informed critical understanding – the parameters for defining reading have simply been adjusted. Even though his expanded definition of reading (including non – reading) classifies more people as wide readers, the value placed on a grand picture of literature by implication suggests that people without this desired scope are less equipped to comment on texts. Is true literary enlightenment (if there is such a thing) about drawing links between books or categorising them in our mental ‘collective library’? The very idealisation of this ‘collective library’ validates and supports the privileged status of the literary canon – it is not just knowledge of books that is important, but it is knowledge of particular books that is prized with this viewpoint. Grouping all books into an entity we can call “literature” is also quite arbitrary and in need of examination and discussion. It is not reasonable to say that texts exist without leeching off other texts to some degree, but too much emphasis is placed on the idea of a greater textual body. With this wider emphasis, it seems that to truly understand a book requires you to look equally well at the books around your studied book as between your said book’s covers.


Bayard’s proposed panoramic vantage point also suggests fear of emotional investment in texts, which is questionable. Bayard never fully explains how individual attention towards a particular book would “risk losing sight of the totality [of literature]” (31). Nor does he explain what he means by getting “lost in the details” (18) when focusing on individual works. If getting lost in the details is getting engrossed in the characters, setting or plot of a book, is that not what reading is about? Such an emotionally distant approach will not adequately engage with a text – emotional engagement cannot be lost in an attempt to be objective.