Friday, September 21, 2012



"He would be horribly embarrassed by any such suggestion."
"I am disappointed."
"I'm afraid I can't help that."








  1. MrsDarwin10:15 AM

    Oddly enough, this has been on our minds as well. I've been pondering lately the distinction between literate reading and reading as consumption. Literate reading involves assessing a work on its own merits, by its own logic, and in accordance with the author's intent (and sometimes it involves rejecting the work if the merits are poor, the logic inconsistent, or the author's intent deficient). Consumption is just that: consuming a book for entertainment, or out of boredom, regardless of the merits of the work. Everyone does some of each kind of reading, I think, though people tend more toward one mindset than the other. I think that the vast popularity of genre literature indicates that there's a wide audience for consumable literature, which is more easily swallowed if it follows certain conventions. There's not anything particularly wrong with consumable literature -- who hasn't wanted to read a mystery after a long day or just read a story where one is assured that happiness will prevail in the end? And yet life doesn't fit into formulaic guidelines, and if literature wants to reflect life, it can't either.

    I stumbled on Austen's Plan for a Novel several weeks ago, but without knowing the circumstances of composition. It was funny then, but it's even more amusing knowing why she wrote it.

    You should write a series of posts on Mind of the Maker.

  2. branemrys11:07 AM

     I think we probably can even distinguish between different kinds of reading as consumption. In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis talks about the reading of the 'unliterary', who only read for the Event, the happening of the work, in much the same way that the unmusical only listen to music for the Tune. He notes that what makes them unliterary is not that that they want the Event -- every reader does -- but that they want almost nothing else; it's not that they like easy vacation fiction but that they will reject even good easy vacation fiction if it offers too much of anything else -- Wodehouse or Jules Verne (say) is too literary for them: "Most of the things which good writing gives or bad writing fails to give are things he does not want and has no use for." So in a sense I think one can argue that there are really three kinds of reading here, due to the fact that there seem to be people who are to literary reading as the tone deaf are to music, and this affects even how they handle reading for consumption (which is the common denominator capable of being shared by anyone who reads for enjoyment at all).

    Lewis also has a good description of what you mentioned about literate reading and bad writing: "We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment."

    I have a few other things in the works, but a series at some point on Mind of the Maker might be interesting.

  3. Thanks for this post. The idea of a good critic
    focusing on the internal logic of the work hadn't even occurred to me, which is
    probably one reason I've shied away from criticism in general (besides my
    inexperience).  It did seem rather strange to me that if some of my
    friends were philosophers and fiction writers that I'd neglect to offer
    some helpful thoughts on their papers and stories. After all, don't friends
    will the good of friends, even if this be helping fellow scribes be more of
    what they can be?


  4. branemrys2:16 PM

     Right. And while some people write merely for the enjoyment of it, and wouldn't find any criticism helpful or pleasant simply because it's not really what they're doing, in general people find the good kind of criticism interesting and exciting, because it at least can give them better means to do what they were trying to do in the first place. And that's the goal of friendly criticism (which need not, incidentally, be what we usually think of as critical -- for instance,  it can sometimes instead identify the things that work best, and why they work so well).

  5. MrsDarwin3:03 PM

    Well, it's not going to let me edit that, so here are corrected links:

    Acedia and Me

    Miss Marple vs. Philip Marlowe

  6. branemrys4:54 PM

     Cleaned it up from backstage.

    An Experiment in Criticism definitely is worth reading at least once; the basic argument of the book is that instead of deciding which books are good and bad on the basis of some arbitrary standard, we should take those books to be good which can be read again and again by people who enjoy reading for its own sake.

  7. I think quite a few of these ideas on criticism can also
    apply to editing. I'm wondering if the good editor is similar to the good
    critic, suggesting improvements respecting the inner logic of the work, while
    the bad editor basically attempts to become a co-writer.

  8. Thanks for the link, Mrs. D. 

    Acedia (sloth), now there's one of the bigger vices a writer needs to slay. To be a good writer, one must write (as John C. Wright says) in the same manner that to be virtuous one must practice virtue. 

