Elizabeth Hardwick's Criticism of Washington Square
Aristotle said that art was one step away from life, and criticism was one step away from that. So what does that make a criticism of a criticism? Carry the one, divide by a and move the decimal point…I don't know, I was never that good at math, but it seems like we may need to drop bread crumbs like Hansel and Gretel to find our way back to the original text.
I enjoy criticism, sometimes for the purpose of learning something new and (factual and) exciting that I originally wasn't aware of in the text. Sometimes it is just fun to see where the critic's academic flight of fancy has taken them. Sometimes, and this is often true, a cigar is just a cigar…
Elizabeth Hardwick's (wasn't that Raleigh's wife's name?) article "On Washington Square" can't seem to decide whether it is fish or fowl; the reader has a hard time distinguishing between plot and character summary, New Historicist, Psychoanalytical, Formalist and all other manner of criticism. Nothing, I think was anything shockingly original or eye-opening, leaving me feeling that it was actually more review than actual literary criticism.
Hardwick dances from discipline to discipline throughout the course of the article, leaving the reader feeling spun every which way, swinging for a piñata that isn't even there. Interdisciplinary criticism is not necessarily a bad thing but, in two and-a half full pages of writing, the reader is given a whirlwind tour of too many subjects. She moves from an historical description of the time and setting of Washington Square to physical and psychological character summaries to a suggestion that the character of Austin Sloper may be James's portrayal of his brother William to a relatively long passage on the perfect balance and the source of the novel. Everything that was said was a complete thought, but there was no meat to the information; it was like gnawing on a soup bone while all you really want is a nice roast.
Actually, Hardwick's article was not at all faulty, just dry and altogether too short for the knowledge that it was trying to impart. It could have been three or four times longer and given ample attention to each point.
As said in the previous discussion regarding the second chapter of Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, zombies and their culture are examined and broke down in order to understand their motives for the progression of zombies globally. Through different perspectives from individuals based around the world, the discussion of the zombie culture debates over the idea that zombies have not just evolved within the narratives that have brought them to life, but they have evolved in such a way that ultimately transforms the narrative itself. However, in this specific chapter, “They are not men…they are dead bodies!”: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again, Chera Kee breaks down the introduction of zombies into mainstream consciousness,
Firstly , Tannen introduces the term “culture of critique” by beginning three successive paragraphs with the term so that the reader will not forget it. Tannen then identifies the problem presented by the “culture of critique”, that is, a tendency to attack the person making an argument, or misrepresenting the issue, rather than arguing against their position itself. She points out that instead of listening to reason, people who are caught up in the culture of critique debate as i...
Writing a journal from the perspective of a fictional eighteenth century reader, a mother whose daughter is the age of Eliza's friends, will allow me to employ reader-response criticism to help answer these questions and to decipher the possible social influences and/or meanings of the novel. Though reader-response criticism varies from critic to critic, it relies largely on the idea that the reader herself is a valid critic, that her critique is influenced by time and place,...
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Guerin, Wilfred L., Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reeseman, and John R. Willingham. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Guerin, Wilfred L., Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reesman, and John R. Willingham. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 125-156.
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