Yesterday, she commented that she writes more "reactions" than "reviews." It might be helpful to differentiate between a review and other terms that are close to it, like reaction or critique.
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A review is meant for others who might be considering reading the book. The chief focus of a review is whether the book/story is good and why.
A critique or "literary criticism" focuses on what the work means, both within the work itself and within the bigger context of the world in which the work was produced and also within the narrower confines of the world of literature. Criticism is nearly synonymous with analysis.
A reaction is not so much what the work means as what the work means to the person reviewing it. It's about the process of internalizing it and how it changes the reader's perspective on life.
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All three are part of reading well. The three also bleed into one another somewhat. You can't talk about what a work means to you without at least talking a little bit about what it means, period. You can't explain what the work's significance is without at least giving people a guess whether you think it's good. And you can't explain why it's good without talking a little bit about what it means. I tend to combine all three of these elements into my discussions of literature, which is why I tag them as both review and criticism.
It occurred to me the other day that there is another genre out there that influences how I approach writing about literature. It's the sermon. My first introduction to reading a text seriously wasn't in school, it was in church. Pastor Russ would spend 45 minutes talking about a relatively small number of verses from John or First Peter, first trying to explain issues from the Greek, then giving the context, both within the larger work and within the history in which the work was written, and then we'd move into what the work meant for us, how we should all change our lives based on the work's message.
I don't think I've ever gotten away from thinking of reading as something that should impact how I live, however far I've gotten from believing the other things Faith Bible Church taught me. I think anyone who attempts to be a critic about American literature ought to have at least some familiarity with how some of the better sermons sound, because it's a form that's likely to resonate with a lot of Americans.
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| His repertoire was a bit limited, but this guy was a decent literary critic |
A sermon isn't as scholarly as an article in a journal on Biblical studies, and neither are most of the things I write attempting to harness the full might of available literary erudition. I write the way it occurs to me to write, the way my actual thoughts usually play out when I read literature, and I hope that it registers with enough people that it's worth the effort.
I'd like it if there were more people doing criticism out there. No pastor can write a sermon without consulting at least a few serious scholars, and I'd be grateful if more actual literary professionals spent time blogging from a more learned perspective about these stories. But absent that--and it looks like we are absent that--I'm going to keep offering what I've got the only way I can offer it. But I'd like to warn readers (many of whom I suspect are students looking for help with stories they've been assigned) that although I will sometimes channel real literary analysis into my reviews, they're usually somewhat south of what you'd want to include in a paper on the story. They might point you in the right direction of what a work means, but you're going to need to follow those directions to some place where you can look at the meaning a little closer.
"A review is meant for others who might be considering reading the book. The chief focus of a review is whether the book/story is good and why." Hmm...maybe you should let the folks at the New York Review of Books know about this.
ReplyDeleteI'm now off to reread one of the more energizing offerings from Jonathan Edwards. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sounds the right note.
I'd like to read a series of book reviews by Edwards.
DeleteI like how you've differentiated the terms. I realized, as I read your descriptions, that my mooc posts are far more like reviews than my reading posts, since I consciously try to consider what parts of the course might appeal so what type of students, and what might be really annoying to others. But my reading posts are all over the map. If something technical leaps out at me, I'll write about that, but generally it's more about my experience. My overall aim (at least, in the past several years; initially I had no idea what I was trying to do) isn't to explain a story to students , but to show a way to approach reading "literature" naturally, without all the terminology - to make reading more approachable, to model more of a discovery method like math's IBL.
ReplyDeleteIt's why we make a good team, covering both sides of the field.
Although I listened to my share of sermons as a kid, I think my style borrows more from... surprise.... Rachel Maddow. I no longer have cable so I rarely see her, but she has a tendency to start a news bloc with a story that seems unrelated to anything. I've since discovered, through that Yale litcrit course, that's a feature of Greenblatt's New Historicism, which makes sense since he begins with a quasi-fictional Vatican underling wandering through Europe in search of manuscripts in his book Swerve. It's an engaging technique. Otherwise, all my posts end up starting with "This story..."
I've also noticed the voice of my posts often tends to imitate the voice of the story I'm writing about. It's not conscious or intentional; it just happens.
I don't think it's possible to write for long about these stories, as you have done, without combining elements of review, critique, response, and so on. I do the same thing. It just depends on what the story stirs up.
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