Description
Book SynopsisAn account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us. Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli argues, criticism involves three moments: Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don't know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us. We tend to associate criticism with scholarship and journalism. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism, but what he calls poetic criticisma staging ground for surprise, dread, delight, comprehension, and incomprehension. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me draws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Kant and Schlegel to Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Barthes, and Cavell. Reflecting on these dimensions
Trade Review“If, as Michel Chaouli suggests, there is no greater compliment to pay a work than ‘to credit it with the power of arousing the urge of making,’ then this book deserves that high praise. I left its pages grateful to the author for articulating things I’ve thought but didn’t yet have words for, as well as for articulating ideas that hadn’t yet occurred to me. Chaouli’s prose is patient and pellucid at every turn without ever sacrificing passion or complexity. His book renews my excitement about—and dedication to—poetic criticism, not to mention the sustaining arts of connection and conversation.” * Maggie Nelson *
“Chaouli’s passionate, brooding exploration of poetic criticism should be essential reading not for literary critics alone but for anyone who has fallen under the spell of a powerful work of art and feels the mysterious compulsion to speak about the experience.” * Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University *
“In this startlingly original and elegantly constructed book, Chaouli enacts the very sort of practice which his phenomenology of poetic criticism so brilliantly describes.
Something Speaks to Me extends the legacy of Barthes, Baldwin, Sontag, and Adorno, writers for whom criticism meant ‘making new sense’ as much as ‘understanding [existing sense],’ and whose passages are read with unprecedented attention throughout. It is also a unique work: a phenomenology of intimacy, urgency, and opacity. This triad of terms enables Chaouli to explore the philosophical depths of what happens when criticism and participation are seen as interlocking rather than opposing activities, disclosing the seriousness of an underexamined and often unloved practice but also highlighting its everyday joys.” * Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago *
"Inviting us to look afresh at the experience of reading, Michel Chaouli fuses the poetic and philosophical to stunning effect. To read his words is to be arrested by revelatory turns of phrase and ambushed by insights. Chaouli’s luminous prose deserves the widest possible audience." * Rita Felski, University of Virginia *
Table of ContentsTo Start
Part 1. Something Speaks to Me (Intimacy)
Feeling the Pulse of the Text
Some Examples
Poetic Criticism, an Essay
Roland Barthes Has Sushi
What Does the Text Want from Me?
The Impersonality of Intimacy
The Texture of Intimacy
Productive Distrust
Learning to Unlearn
Naïveté
Intimacy, Self-Taught
The Call of Significance
The Authority of the Poetic
Being in History
Being in the
Same History (Tradition)
A Bastard of History
Part 2. I Must Tell You about It (Urgency)
Understanding and Making
Making the New by Remaking the Old
Learning Not to Conclude
Tact
Playing It by Ear
Poetic Making Conserves as It Renews
Poetic Power
Philological Disarmament
Hearing That We May Speak
Second Thoughts
Self-Reference versus Urgency
Epiphanies
The Intense Life of Language
What and How
The Knot of Experience
Making Freedom
Part 3. But I Don’t Know How (Opacity)
Shadow in Plain Sight
The Difficulty of Criticism
The Strange Voice
Aristotle versus Plato
What in Technique Is More Than Technique
What Kind of Thing Is the Poetic Thing?
The Work of Art versus the Poetic Work
The Eye of the Work, the Eye of the Beholder
How to Leap Over One’s Own Shadow
Why Non-Knowing Is the Primal Condition of Poetry
Genius
Criticism Is Making
The Poet of the Poet
Falling
The Difficulty, and the Ecstasy, of Reality
Is Poetry a Deflection from Life?
In Poetry, Non-Knowing Is a Primal Condition
The Social Force of the Impersonal
To Be Continued . . .
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
