{"product_id":"something-speaks-to-me-9780226830421","title":"Something Speaks to Me","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn 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 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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 *\u003cbr\u003e“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 *\u003cbr\u003e“In this startlingly original and elegantly constructed book, Chaouli enacts the very sort of practice which his phenomenology of poetic criticism so brilliantly describes. \u003ci\u003eSomething Speaks to Me\u003c\/i\u003e 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 *\u003cbr\u003e\"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 *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo Start\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part 1. Something Speaks to Me (Intimacy)\u003cbr\u003e Feeling the Pulse of the Text\u003cbr\u003e Some Examples\u003cbr\u003e Poetic Criticism, an Essay\u003cbr\u003e Roland Barthes Has Sushi\u003cbr\u003e What Does the Text Want from Me?\u003cbr\u003e The Impersonality of Intimacy\u003cbr\u003e The Texture of Intimacy\u003cbr\u003e Productive Distrust\u003cbr\u003e Learning to Unlearn\u003cbr\u003e Naïveté\u003cbr\u003e Intimacy, Self-Taught\u003cbr\u003e The Call of Significance\u003cbr\u003e The Authority of the Poetic\u003cbr\u003e Being in History\u003cbr\u003e Being in the \u003ci\u003eSame\u003c\/i\u003e History (Tradition)\u003cbr\u003e A Bastard of History\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part 2. I Must Tell You about It (Urgency)\u003cbr\u003e Understanding and Making\u003cbr\u003e Making the New by Remaking the Old\u003cbr\u003e Learning Not to Conclude\u003cbr\u003e Tact\u003cbr\u003e Playing It by Ear\u003cbr\u003e Poetic Making Conserves as It Renews\u003cbr\u003e Poetic Power\u003cbr\u003e Philological Disarmament\u003cbr\u003e Hearing That We May Speak\u003cbr\u003e Second Thoughts\u003cbr\u003e Self-Reference versus Urgency\u003cbr\u003e Epiphanies\u003cbr\u003e The Intense Life of Language\u003cbr\u003e What and How\u003cbr\u003e The Knot of Experience\u003cbr\u003e Making Freedom\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part 3. But I Don’t Know How (Opacity)\u003cbr\u003e Shadow in Plain Sight\u003cbr\u003e The Difficulty of Criticism\u003cbr\u003e The Strange Voice\u003cbr\u003e Aristotle versus Plato\u003cbr\u003e What in Technique Is More Than Technique\u003cbr\u003e What Kind of Thing Is the Poetic Thing?\u003cbr\u003e The Work of Art versus the Poetic Work\u003cbr\u003e The Eye of the Work, the Eye of the Beholder\u003cbr\u003e How to Leap Over One’s Own Shadow\u003cbr\u003e Why Non-Knowing Is the Primal Condition of Poetry\u003cbr\u003e Genius\u003cbr\u003e Criticism Is Making\u003cbr\u003e The Poet of the Poet\u003cbr\u003e Falling\u003cbr\u003e The Difficulty, and the Ecstasy, of Reality\u003cbr\u003e Is Poetry a Deflection from Life?\u003cbr\u003e In Poetry, Non-Knowing Is a Primal Condition\u003cbr\u003e The Social Force of the Impersonal\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e To Be Continued . . .\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Index","brand":"The University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48732933652823,"sku":"9780226830421","price":19.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780226830421.jpg?v=1719999011","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/something-speaks-to-me-9780226830421","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}