What does critical writing mean to you?
Rob Pope identifies four basic meanings of criticism:
- finding fault and pulling to pieces [the text] in a negative sense;
- analysing and pulling to pieces [the text] in the neutral sense of taking apart;
- interpreting [the text] with a view to establishing [its] meaning and understanding;
- evaluating [the text] with a view to establishing [its] relative or absolute worth.
(Pope: 2002 43)
Criticism is something we do to a text. Literary criticism is what we do to a literary text, and it involves the last three practices in Pope’s list: analysis, interpretation and evaluation. As you can see, critical writing always has another text for its subject.
Take, for instance, Amelia Opie’s novel Adeline Mowbray (1805). This creative and original piece of writing is published alongside a critical essay written by Shelley King and John B. Pierce. These critics have analysed, interpreted and evaluated Opie’s novel, and presented their writing as an introduction to Adeline Mowbray.
On one hand, King and Pierce’s critical writing is subordinate to Opie’s novel. And yet on the other hand, the essay introduces Opie’s novel in a way that suggests that creative writing is incomplete without its supplementary piece of critical writing telling us how to read it.
Do you read the critical introductions to literary texts? If so, which do you read first: the critical introduction or the main writing? Why do you think publishers include introductions and notes? What do you think it means to introduce a piece of literature? Does it stop at telling us what the writing is about, or does it explain what the text is trying to say?
Is critical writing, then, about explaining creative writing? If it is, is it possible for literary criticism to have the final word? And if critical writing isn’t about explaining a text, what is its purpose?
The literary critic F.R.Leavis was particularly alarmed at the prospect of final words. In his essay ‘Valuation in Criticism’, he claims that:
What we call analysis is a creative or re-creative process. It is a more deliberate following-through of that process of creation in response to the poet’s words (a poem being in question) which any serious reading is. It is a recreation in which, by a considering attentiveness, we ensure a more than ordinary faithfulness and fullness. And actually when one is engaged in analysis, one is engaged in discussion, even if only implicitly.
(Singh: 1986 278)
Leavis rightly acknowledges that critical analysis is about more than something we do to a text. It is instead a way in which we enter into a relationship with writing that involves listening and responding to words and to language. Furthermore, it involves other readers.
Critical writing is informed by a sense of discussion. If critical reading is the attention we pay to the relationship we have with language, critical writing is the attention we pay to sharing that relationship with others.
