موت الناقد

by Ronan McDonald, فخري صالح (Translator)

سعى هذا الكتاب إلى القول إن دور النقد الأكاديمى القائم على حكم القيمة قد تراجع دوره وتضاءل تأثيره وضعفت صلته بجمهرة القراء فى ظل مد النقد الثقافى الذى يتصدر المشهد النقدى فى المؤسسة الأكاديمية البريطانية و كذلك الأمريكية. ويبنى الأكاديمى البريطانى رونان ماكدونالد على هذا التصور إعلانه المدوّى عن "موت الناقد" والعمل الجارى على حفل تأبينه، فى إشارة رمزية دالة على فقدان الناقد الأكاديمى، وكذلك الصحفى، مكانتهما ودورهما فى الثقافة الأنجلوساكسونية خلال العقود الثلاثة أو الأربعة؛ وبالتحديد بعد الثورة الطلابية فى أوروبا عام 1968 وصعود التيارات المعادية للسلطة، والكارهة لها، فى المجتمع الشاب الداعى إلى التحرر من جميع أشكال السلطة، بما فيها سلطة الناقد الأكاديمى.
لقد حدث تحول جذرى فى دراسة الآداب والفنون بحيث حلّ القارئ غير المتخصص محلّ القارئ المتخصص الذى يعمل فى المؤسسة الأكاديمية، أو حتى فى الصحافة السيّارة التى أتاحت فى عقود سابقة تأثيراً واسعاً للنقاد الذين ينشرون مقالاتهم وتعليقاتهم فى المجلات المتخصصة بمراجعات الكتب وكذلك فى الملاحق التى تصدرها الصحف الغربية الكبرى يوم الأحد. كما شحب دور الناقد وتضاءل حضوره أيضا بسبب ابتعاده عن كتابة مانسميه فى الحقل النقدى العربى "النقد التنويرى"، وانسحابه إلى صومعته الأكاديمية مكتفيا بكتابة دراسات وبحوث لايفهمها سوى النخبة المتخصصة العارفة باللغة الاصطلاحية والمفاهيم والمنهجيات التى توجه هذا النوع من الكتابات النقدية التى لا تلقى بالا لما تهتم به الجمهرة الواسعة من القراء من تعريف بالأعمال الأدبية والفنية وتقديم إضاءات حولها وربطها بسياقات إنتاجها، والتعرف على مواضع تميزها ومقدار إضافتها إلى النوع الأدبى.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literature, Literary Criticism, History

202 pages, Unknown Binding

First published December 27, 2007

Reviews

[محمد الحمراوي · Rating 4 out of 5]

من خلال عنوان كتابه - موت الناقد - يحاول "رونان ماكدونالد" التحذير من التراجع الواضح لدور الناقد الأكاديمي ، في ظل صعود أجيال لا تؤمن بالسلطة والمرجعية التي يتمتع بها الناقد ، وإنتشار العديد من الوسائل - مثل موقع جود ريدز نفسه - التي تجعل من مراجعات الكتب الإنطباعية والسطحية والمتحيّزة في كثير من الأحيان ، بديلاً عن مقالات الناقد الأكاديمي .

يشير كذلك إلى الخلل الذي مر به النقد على امتداد سنوات عديدة وتخبّطه ما بين النظريات والنظريات المضادة ، والأسباب التي جعلت الناقد مكروهاً لدى الكاتب وكذلك القارئ .

كتاب مهم .

[Sayaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://sayaf.net/?p=1271

[Bucket · Rating 3 out of 5]

McDonald describes how the role of the literary critic has changed over the centuries, ultimately leading to "death" in the latter half of the 20th century.

He opens with a history of aesthetics, why evaluative criticism is so important, and how its lack is a symptom of general moral relativism and anti-authoritarianism. The rest of the book is an in-depth history of criticism and all it's association academic theories, beginning with Plato and Aristotle (doesn't everything begin with Plato and Aristotle?) and weaving along through romanticism, modernism, new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and cultural studies. More interesting than it sounds, I swear!

The books ends with a hopeful thought that perhaps criticism isn't dead, but just biding it's time. Already there are signs of returning interest in aesthetic and literary value.

I was an undergraduate English literature major from 2002-2006, when the structuralist literary theories were already falling away and the focus of literary criticism was beginning to once again assess aesthetic value through close reading while still hanging on to the cultural and authorial contexts that structuralism emphasizes. At the same time though, cultural studies was taking off in a big way, and analyzing everything from Harry Potter to Second Life, the Simpsons to fashion magazines.

Perhaps I'm a product of relativistic anti-authoritarianism, but I never really felt pressure to ignore literary and aesthetic value in college. I definitely can see a lack of interest in literature beyond academic english departments, publications like the New Yorker, and a select group of lit-bloggers (many of whom were english majors themselves).

I read this book to get a grasp of how the internet is changing the book review and got something else entirely here, but I'm not complaining. I was very interested in the ongoing struggles throughout history to wrestle with the concept of aesthetics. Theorists went from trying to come up with a set of standards that could scientifically evaluate all artistic works to avoiding any type of evaluation altogether.

I'm new to all this, but I see value in literature, and I think it's worthwhile for society to continually value literary merit and consider some works more meritorious than others, even if standards are continuously changing. Aesthetic relativism is akin to moral relativism - high-quality and low-quality exist, just as right and wrong do, even if these all are products of culture.

Themes: literature, criticism, critical theory, history, science vs. art, aesthetics, relativism, cultural studies, journalism, popular culture

[Bas Nieuwenhuijsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

“De literaire kritiek is dood”, is de overtuigde stelling van Rónán McDonald, “en daar mag best een traantje om gelaten worden”. Vanuit dit startpunt laat hij de lezer door zijn ogen zien wat de stand van zaken is binnen het wereldje van de literaire kritiek. Op die wijze worden in vier hoofdstukken de meest basale factoren voor het overlijden van de criticus geschetst, alsook de polemische geschiedenis tot aan vandaag de dag, de ontwikkeling van de literaire kritiek zowel binnen als buiten de universiteit en, tot slot, de verwoede pogingen die sinds de jaren zestig zijn gedaan om tot een theorie der literatuurkritiek te komen. The Death of the Critic (2007) is een rond essay, waarin de situatie waarin de literatuurkritiek verkeert vanuit verschillende kanten belicht wordt, al blijft de dood als uitkomst discutabel.
In het eerste hoofdstuk van het boek legt de schrijver uit in welke situatie de literatuurkritiek precies verkeert. De democratisering van de sector, vooral door tussenkomst van het internet en de bijbehorende mogelijkheden om als consument zelfstandig kritieken te publiceren, heeft bijgedragen aan de afnemende autoriteit van de professionele criticus. De professionele kritiek impliceert een zeker elitisme en in de hedendaagse samenleving wordt de professionele criticus steeds vaker gezien als iemand die de consument probeert de les te leren. Deze ontwikkeling is goed te plaatsen in de afkeer van autoriteit die in vrijwel de hele Westelijke samenleving plaatsvindt. Uiteraard is dit niet de enige oorzaak.
Deze ontwikkeling moet niet gevierd worden, zo zegt McDonald: de grote variëteit van kritieken die vandaag de dag geschreven worden, neemt ook een grote verscheidenheid in kwaliteit met zich mee. Bij een professionele criticus kun je er van op aan dat er een zekere inhoud in het artikel zit. Kritiek die sommige bloggers publiceren op hun site gaat soms niet verder dan een korte samenvatting en wat commentaar. Maar dan toch, zou ik zeggen, geeft deze democratisering van de sector de lezer de mogelijkheid om de recensies te lezen die hij zelf wil. De afnemende autoriteit van professionals is een gegeven, dus het is aan hen in te spelen op de veranderende sector. Zoals Rónán McDonald al aangeeft: ze hoeven alleen maar te gaan bloggen en als hun doordachte commentaar daadwerkelijk onderscheidend is, komen hun kritieken vanzelf wel bovendrijven.
Hoe het ook zij, van de dood van de criticus lijkt nog niet echt sprake. Uitgeverijen maken nog altijd volop gebruik van het meest lovende commentaar om hun boeken aan te prijzen. Je zult op de achterkant van een boek niet snel een verwijzing naar een blogger tegenkomen, dus kennelijk wordt de autoriteit van de critici vooralsnog door de literaire sector zelf in stand gehouden. De autoriteit van de professionele recensent zit hem namelijk voor een groot deel in zijn verbondenheid aan een belangrijke krant: De Volkskrant, Trouw, of zelfs The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde en El País zijn nou eenmaal bij een veel bredere kring van lezers bekend als kwaliteitskranten dan literatuurblogs. Ook over de grens. En hoe genadeloos men af en toe ook mag zijn, sommige auteurs hebben hun naamsbekendheid juist te danken aan het goedkeurende oordeel van een recensent.
Als de essayist het over de taken van de professionele literatuurkritiek heeft, zijn de argumenten overtuigender. Critici houden namelijk niet van stilstand: ze peilen de veranderende smaak en stemmen die af met de veranderende context. Daardoor speelt de kritiek ook een essentiële rol in de literatuurgeschiedenis. Deze draait altijd om de grote namen en zo is het ook onvermijdbaar dat alleen de critici met een zekere autoriteit hun stempel kunnen drukken op het canon. Dit argument gaat hand in hand met de overtuiging dat men door het lezen van blogs alleen maar een bevestiging van de eigen smaak vindt. In de kranten, daarentegen, wordt een gevarieerder aanbod besproken. Op die manier is de literaire criticus ook in staat andere soorten lectuur te suggereren.
McDonald leidt de lezer ook langs de geschiedenis van de literatuurkritiek. Dat hij daarbij ook stilstaat bij de voornaamste kunststromingen die er zoal geweest zijn, is wellicht een beetje overbodig. Van de meeste echt geïnteresseerden mag verwacht worden dat zij hiermee bekend zijn. Toch moet ook geprezen worden dat het essay grondig onderlegd is en dat de schrijver veel achtergrond biedt om zijn standpunten te onderbouwen. Zo maakt hij ook duidelijk dat de literaire kritiek een verleden heeft met veel veranderingen. In het derde hoofdstuk laat hij namelijk ook zien dat de gedachten over hoe de ideale recensie is, objectief of subjectief, erg vaak veranderden vanaf de twintigste eeuw. Dit had vooral te maken met de pogingen van academici om tot een systematische aanpak te komen met objectieve criteria. Toch is dat eigenlijk wel frappant, want elke criticus maakt een persoonlijke selectie van wat hem wel of niet aanstaat. Een zekere mate van subjectiviteit zal er dus altijd blijven.
Zo is The Death of the Critic een weloverwogen essay over de stand van zaken binnen de literaire kritiek. Schrijver McDonald heeft daarbij oog voor zowel de veranderende samenleving waarin de critici een veranderende rol moeten aannemen als voor het historisch belang van het beroep. Om terug te komen op de stelling waarmee hij begon, is de overtuiging dat de literatuurkritiek dood is niet geheel overtuigend. Zo is het aanbod aan recensies juist een stuk hoger dan voorheen en ondanks het feit dat lang niet alle even diepgaand zijn, wordt er ook zeker genoeg kwalitatief verantwoorde recensies geschreven. Het overlijden van de criticus is daarnaast ook te betwijfelen, aangezien er op de kaft van boeken niet snel citaten van literaire blogs terecht zullen komen. Zo zorgt de boekensector er zelf voor dat kwalitatieve literatuurkritiek niet verloren gaat, al is het ook voor een groot deel aan het podium dat de grote kranten hen bieden te danken dat de recensenten nog altijd kunnen publiceren en ook gelezen worden. We moeten de kritiek niet ten dode opschrijven voordat dat ook echt het geval is. Ze is levend en tussen de doden hoort ze nog niet thuis.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very USEFUL book, but not a brilliant one. The sad thing, I suppose is that McDonald has a logic problem. It is rather annoying -- sometimes his conclusions are wtf? and sometimes when things ARE logically connected he is unable to spell out the connections, or even investigate them. That said, he has many good ideas, but they are buried here and there in the confused mass. This book outlines (heroically, since it is a lot of work) the history of literary criticism, roughly from the Enlightenment to right now, taking into account the UK and US strands. In itself that is a lot of historical work, and would be valuable for anyone who wants a concise history of 'what happened'. I am not sure however about the weird jump and slant into Cultural Studies, a full-on angry attack that I feel does not completely suss out the complications of residing in a literature (NOT specifically a cultural studies) department.

The other thing is his angst (I am supposing that the confusion in the writing and the angst are related). Like many of us literary critics -- well perhaps not many -- the more despairing sadsack ones -- he is worried about literary value and its seeming disappearance with the dismantling of the canon. It is a conservative instinct, and worth noting, but I don't think he wants to admit that to himself. It is a tricky problem, and while his book highlights the problem of the standards being 'culturally determined' he complains that we should not do away with these. But (coming from a left-winger) how could one NOT worry about using these standards or even giving them the importance that they have (or rather had) when strict adherence might mean cultural hegemony? McDonald notes this problem regarding Eliot's notion of tradition and Leavis's Great Tradition, but does not explain how his OWN proposed 'solution' to the double-bind might work out. The struggle is real, people.

I also worry about his insistence that criticism must go back to being evaluative. Again, this probably has to do with political differences. Now, obviously if you find some set of criteria by which 'great' writing can be determined, it is THEN possible to evaluate whether a work is 'good' or 'bad'. I don't have any problems with this. But I do not think this should be a primary concern of the critic. Certainly, if indeed such a non-biased set of criteria exists, it is possible for us to make value judgement of work. For instance, as a literary critic, I can say that Twilight is a shitty book. But this does not make for very interesting criticism. The standards for good criticism (again here Angsty McDonald confuses the assessment of literary merit in works of literature with the assessment of merit in literary criticism, that is, critical works written ABOUT literature, and no the dude does NOT ever sort this out. They're connected but not the same, ok?) should not be to sit in a corner judging books. Certainly I think we should be writing on the merits of 'good' work, but only because we feel its merit, and our critical investigation, while underpinned by that sense of respect and connection we have for the text, should rather explore interesting issues that we have been provoked to think about as opposed to spending the majority of our writing trying to tell others why a work is good (or not).

[hamdy boghdady · Rating 5 out of 5]

"صراع بين كُتّاب المراجعات النقدية من الصحفيين ، قاطني الشبكة العنكبوتية"
مهلًا!
ما سبق اقتباس من الكتاب وتفصيلًا:
كتاب موت الناقد، يعد من أهم الكتب الموضحة لأهمية النقد الأدبي بوجه خاص، النقد عامة.
النقد يقوي العمل إن أخذ المُنتَقد به، أخذ بأسباب ضعفه، قوّاها، هُنا يتحدث الكاتب على لسان المترجم عن أهم المشكلات التي تواجه النُقّاد، دور الناقد.
الفرق بين الناقد الهاوي، الأكاديمي، نُقّاد الإنترنت، الذي أكون واحد منهم، مع مراعاة الموضوعية بقدر إستطاعتي، قراءتي لكتب النقد المختلفة.
كتاب جيد جدًا لمن يهتمون بالنقد.
يشرح كيف كان النقد الأكاديمي، انحصاره في جهات محددة حديثًا، إنتشار النُقّاد الإليكترونيين، ومنهم فئة كبيرة وأعذروني لإستخدام اللفظ العاميّ "طبالين" ، هؤلاء يكون مدفوع لهم لنفاقهم، نقدهم الزائف.
كتاب جيد، استمتعت بقرائته كثيرًا، يستحق خمس نجمات، أنصح بقرائته.

1/10/2016

[Abd-allah · Rating 3 out of 5]

الانا على وشك أني أعمله (كتابة ريفيو عن الكتاب على موقع الجود ريدز أو ممارسة دمقرطة النقد) هو بالظبط الكتاب ضده.
الكتاب حلو، لكن مش عبقري. هو بيقدم سرد تاريخي لتراجع أهمية النقد وبيقدم ليه نعي عنيف غاضب اتفق معاه احيانا واختلف معاه احيانا، لكنه معملش الحاجة الوحيدة القريت الكتاب عشانها والحاجة القال انه هيحاول يعملها مرارا على مر الكتاب، اظهار قيمة حقيقية للنقد، وفشله في ده ناتج عن فشله الحتمي في اكتشاف قيم موضوعية نحكم بيها على العمل الفني خصوصا او الجمال عموما.
الكتاب محتاج مني قراءة اوسع واكثر تفحصا بعد ما اكون وسعت قرايتي عن الموضوع، وبالتالي لازم لازم ارجعله في يوم واكتب ريفيو اطول واكثر دقة من كدا ... عندا في الكاتب 😂

[Ted Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A buddy had just finished a book I'd lent him, The Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald, and was convinced that the theorists needed a severe pounding. His language was such that I had to put the phone down and answer the door for the pizza delivery man. When I got back and picked the phone up again, he was still ranting, unaware, it seems, that I was gone for a couple of minutes. He's a high school pal, someone who like no matter the contrasts in cultural preference, and he likes a critic to perform the service of being a consumer guide. He likes mysteries, Clive Cussler and true crime books, and all he wants is a synopsis and brief evaluations on whether he'll get his money's worth. I have no idea why he wanted to read the book, but he was fired up enough to be convinced that the Usual Suspects McDonald lays out for literary criticism's demise--French theorists, multi-culturists, feminism, variations on the postmodernist riff--had conspired to irritate him .One might understand the response, as in any of those times one volunteers a statement, heartfelt but visceral, not cerebral, about a book they read and enjoyed that might have happened to be the subject of conversation. Once you make your remarks, add your few pennies worth, some smart ass chimes in with caterpillar-length words and odd ideas from two or three different disciplines and leaves you there, lost and humiliated.

That happened to me when I was younger , much younger, mouthing off my platitudes about arts and politics, but rather than getting angry and nurturing a resentment, I was determined to become one of those smart asses, or at least sound as though I belonged to the club. My friend, though, craved his resentments and continued variations of his anti-intellectual beef over the last forty-some years. I assume most of us have friends like that. It was an exasperating conversation. Finally I got him off the phone and made a mental note to not lend him any more books having to do with literary theory or the history of ideas. Rather, I'll offer him some Elmore Leonard. There is a writer we can probably talk about.

On the topic of the book ,it's not that the literary critics are dying as much as people have pretty much ignoring them, preferring the pseudo science of theory, which prefers to wallow in a choking , jargon-clogged solipsism to writing that actually engages a book and it's style, the author's intentions, and the successes or failures contained therein. At some point a generation of young academics hitched their fortunes on the diffusing forces of continental philosophy because they found a method through which they could abnegate their charge to aid readers to sharpen their skills.Literature, by whatever definition we use, is a body of writing intended to deal with more complex story telling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single , intangible supposition.

Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that is resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. The goal of literary criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness, but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeed or fail in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written

Some of us who toyed with deconstruction and the like , when we found that language in general and literary writing in particular couldn't address the world as is,remember the sweetly slippery issue of inter-textuality. Promoted by Derrida and deMan, if memory serves me (and it often doesn't), this was the fancy footwork that while books fail to address the nature things and make them fixed, unchanging situations, texts (meaning books) referred only to other texts, and the coherent systems writers seemed to uncover or create about how things are were in practice drawn from a limitless archive of each text that came before the one you might have in your hand and considering it's fidelity to your experience.

A futile concern, we find, since everything has already been written, everything has already been said. If this were true, we asked, how can it be that some theorists are using language to precisely describe what language cannot do, i.e., precisely describe things? I never read a response that made sense, as the the answers seemed even more steaming heaps of gobbledygook that made the unanchored theory before even more impassable.Interestingly enough, the entrenched theoreticians, reticent to use the metaphorical techniques they had interrogated and attempted to render inert, weren't able to have their ideas stand outside the limits of their terminology and secure a comprehending response from the interested nonspecialist.

A pity, since science writers and even literary researchers themselves were able to explain in easier parlance the purpose, technique and consequence of the minute and verifiable data science was accruing. But no matter, because at the time one had discovered a nice hedge against having to read a book; I am being grossly unfair to the good critics taking their cues from Continental thought, but deconstruction and intertextuality were choice methods of not dealing with what a writer was saying, instead giving a jargonated accord of how all writing and discourse cannot get beyond itself and actually touch something that terms signify.

[ناديا · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب عن دور الناقد في المشهد الادبي.
طالعت اصدار دار المتوسط بترجمة فخري صالح

الصراحة … أكاديمي زيادة عن اللزوم ..
ربما لو أمسيت خريجة دراسة ادبية لاستمتعت بيسر وسهولة :)

لكن ، الكتاب يلقي الضوء على أهمية النقد الادبي، وكيف يتجلى بأفضل صورة، مما يمكنه افادة القارئ العادي المتعطش لمعرفة المتخصص في النصوص المتراكمة في السوق.

نقطة مهمة لفت اليها الكاتب ان افتقادنا للسلطة النقدية تجعلنا نحن القراء فريسة لدور النشر التي غايتها فقط تحقيق ارباح من بيع الكتب

الكتاب قد يفيد قارئ عادي - مثلي - يوجهه لآلية النقد الحصيف، وان أجد ذلك حكرًا لاهل التخصص .

أظنني توصلت الى تسمية مانقوم به كقراء عاديين، بما وصفه هازلت بالنقد الانطباعي! وهو المعتمد بشكل اساسي على بث المشاعر وايصالها .

# ان من واجب الكُتاب الحفاظ على عافية اللغة …. على اللغة ان تتواصل مع الحياة

[عبدالعزيز زايد · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب موت الناقد
للكاتب: رونان ماكدونالد
ترجمة: فخري صالح

سمعنا عن موت المؤلف، ليبدأ دور الناقد بكامل حريته بعد اطلاق المؤلف كتابه، ولكن هنا موت الناقد. الكتاب يتحدث عن النقد وتقييم الكتب، ولأن الزمان اختلف، حتى غاب الناقد الحقيقي في حالة ظهور الناقد غير المحترف وغير المختص، ولنقل أن النقد الاحترافي غاب دوره، باعتبار أن الكل أصبح ناقدًا، ولا ينتظر القارئ كلمة النقاد. الكتاب مترجم، ينقل بيئة الكاتب، ولا ينقل البيئة العربية، إلا أنه لا يخلو من الفوائد، نتطلع لمطالعة كتاب آخر للمؤلف.

[Annegida · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ik vind het een interessant fenomeen en zeker iets wat vandaag de dag relevant is, echter is McDonald meer een probleem denker dan een positief iemand, hij zoekt vooral veranderingen in de trends van vandaag zoals boekenblogs. Hij grijpt hiervoor terug in de geschiedenis van de kritiek op een heel uitgebreide en onnodig lange wijze. Al met al een goed overzichtsboek maar teveel met zijn mening doordrongen en te negatief.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is one opinion "as good as another"?

It’s an indicator of how divorced literary discussions can be from the rest of the world that the question ‘Is one opinion as good as another?’ can be taken seriously or even tabled for discussion. The answer is emphatically no. My opinion on how to fly the plane is nowhere near as good as the pilot’s.

I bought this when it was first published and have been rereading it. It's a passionate, readable polemic in defense of the evaluative literary critic, which narrates the by now standard history of academic criticism in the twentieth century, the search for scientific rigor, the theory wars, the rise of cultural studies, and the gradual with drawl from evaluative criticism. A retreat from asking “is this a good poem” to a scrutiny of the perceived ideology of the text.

Along the way McDonald makes some thought provoking points. Without famous critics new work like Beckett’s may never have found its audience. The radical cultural critics who dissolved ‘the canon’ were no less elitist, no less dismissive of popular culture, than the 'elitist literary critics' they claimed to replace.

Sometimes, he reduces the effect of his argument by over simplifying, for example in his dealings with Narratology, which is far more supple than he allows and can be used in the evaluative criticism he is advocating.

However, the absence of informed evaluative criticism which McDonald laments is a genuine problem. He doesn’t say this but it’s probably why Blurb writers get away with nonsensical claims on the back of poetry books, and the general atmosphere of jubilant historical ignorance which allows poets and publishers and critics to claim innovation for writing that is a stale echo of something done better a long time ago.

The book’s major flaw, however, is not whether you agree with him or not but that the argument operates exclusively within the terms of its own binary. On one side, evaluative criticism performed by the informed professional critic: on the other the mess of blogs and tweets and whatnots of internet opinionating.

The binary is not the only game in town, but once you play inside it you’re doomed, as McDonald or his critics are, to taking sides and trying to defend the indefensible.

Academic uses of literature are not synonymous with the thing itself. The book panders to the myth that what goes on in University Literary departments really matters to anyone outside them. It may have in the first half of the 20th century, and that may not have been a good thing, but it hasn't for a long time.

It does not matter that no act of literary criticism is ever one hundred percent objective. The idea that it could be so pure is a laughable comment on the mess Literary studies got themselves into when they entered the university. The desire for it to be so is totalitarian in so many ugly ways. This does not invalidate criticism.

On the other hand there is nothing worth celebrating in the ignorant opinionating of someone who cannot see that “I like this book” says nothing about the book and is of no value to anyone else beyond the writer’s circle of acquaintances.

To discuss value: better than/equal to/lesser than, requires knowledge of the field. Some people’s knowledge is greater than other’s, some people’s ability to apply that knowledge in ways that are useful to strangers is better than other’s. Why is this a problem?

For readers, and writers, evaluative criticism is always useful to suggest what might be worth reading and why. Is it better than, equal to or less than and if so how and why? Great criticism either introduces you to new work, or sends you back to the text you thought you knew and invites you to reconsider it. But both McDonald and the people he criticizes miss the fact that every act of literary criticism is a statement open to consideration and evaluation, one part and nothing more than one part of a conversation between text and reader and critic.

If there were anyone who ever thought ‘Leavis or Eliot or Trilling wrote this, therefore it must be so and I have no need to evaluate their argument’, then they excluded themselves from any definition of intelligence.

[Nigel Beale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reports of the Critic’s death have been greatly exaggerated

Contrary to what the title of Ronan McDonald’s new book may tell you, the critic is not dead. He’s alive and crowing on the Internet.

Today we can get all the criticism ever voiced in history, on the Web. We also get what rankles right now, real time, with many newspaper reviewers and bloggers posting their thoughts within moments of writing them down. The Gutenberg Project gives us copyright-free criticism at no charge, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, now The Atlantic, and many other sources provide free access to all that’s literary in their pages. Paid-for services give us the rest. We’re awash in criticism. Amazon and other book selling sites are crammed with reviews. New books of criticism seem to appear every week.

No, the critic is not dead. Thanks to blogs and burgeoning... read the rest here:


http://nigelbeale.com/2008/05/sunday-...

[Barnaby · Rating 2 out of 5]

This contains a useful (if somewhat partisan) overview of the recent history of critical theory, but, ultimately, comes off as a willfully blinkered view of things. Even the history part has been done better elsewhere - Terry Eagleton or Herman Rapaport are two writers whose work comes to mind - and the rest of the discussion seems little more than an attempt to discredit emerging academic discourses. McDonald sees the borders of cultural studies as "impossible to draw", for example, completely missing the point that it is theory itself which helps to set investigative boundaries.

[Mirte · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this book for a course in literary criticism, and as such it is very useful. Though the first chapter was dreadful to get through, it got better as the next chapters had more apparent narrative rather than theory. The last chapter contains a sort of rage against cultural studies, which was so personal it started to bother me. And there were A LOT of spelling mistakes - I don't mind one or two, but I noticed at least fifteen, and that's kind of ridiculous in a book on properly writing criticims, imo.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very readable text which argues for the necessity of the critic. Perhaps it should be entitled, Long Live the Critic!, but the current title captures the urgency of McDonald's appeal. He contends that the open arena of public opinion written in popular venues, such as blogs, by non-specialists may seem like a democratic procedure. However, it leads, he argues, to conservatism in which uniformity and sameness is justified and none is challenged or expanded.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My manifesto. McDonald beautifully articulates the contemporary critical situation. It's written for laymen, but is probably not a great read if you're not fascinated by the dynamics of lit/art criticism.

[احمد محمود · Rating 3 out of 5]

ربما لم يمت الناقد ولكنه تم تنحيته جانبا ليأخذ سنة من النوم
ليعود يقدم نقدا تقويميا

[Nat]

I'm an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK, but I spend most of my time in the US, usually in San Francisco but currently in Washington D.C. (because my wife just got a job out here). I ordered a used copy of this book, which turned out to be a decommissioned library copy...from the University of Reading library! And the author, Ronan McDonald, was a lecturer (junior prof) at the University of Reading in the English department when the book was written.

The "critic" whose death McDonald mourns in this book is someone willing to make strong, compelling evaluative judgments about literature in its broader cultural context, and someone people listen to: Susan Sontag, Raymond Williams, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, William Hazlitt. The heart of criticism in McDonald's sense is aesthetic judgment, and there are two parts to aesthetic judgment (at least in a vaguely Kantian/Cavellian sense): a feeling in response to the object being judged, and a "discipline of accounting" for that feeling, a willingness to argue, to give reasons for why the feeling should be shared. The death of criticism (and the critic who practices it) is caused by a fracturing of aesthetic judgment into those two parts: academic scholars of literature give up on the feeling side of aesthetic judgment in favor of purportedly objective or scientific approaches to the study of literature (psychology for I.A. Richards, a focus only on the text for the new critics, sign systems for structuralists), and "public critics" inherit the feeling-evaluative side of judgment but without the discipline aesthetic judgment calls for.

McDonald recommends (I think his intended audience is other academics in literature departments) a return to aesthetic judgment in its full blown evaluative sense. I feel fortunate that in philosophy there was never a full retreat from this kind of evaluative criticism—Stanley Cavell is a good example of someone who practiced it consistently without overselling its potential.

[Veronica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remember handing an essay draft to some professor during my second year of undergrad. He immediately returned the paper and told me to start where I ended. Wishing someone had given McDonald the same advice.

Also don't feel like homage to Barthes was earned.

[Farouk Adil · Rating 5 out of 5]

من اهم الدراسات النقدية الادبية والتي تبين اهمية النقد ودور الناقد الاكاديمي واهميته بعد تراجع النقد واهمية النقد الاكاديمي النخبوي وحلول مراجعات عن صحف او اعلام بدل الناقد المتخصص ،صدر هذا الكتاب بطبعة ثانية جديدة عن منشورات المتوسط ،كتاب مهم ومرجعي لاهمية النقد الادبي والنقد الفني .

[أحمد عزيز سامي · Rating 5 out of 5]

باختصار.. إن غاب القط، العب يا فار.

[Mark Ludmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useuful analysis of the history of criticism, focusing on academic literary criticism, but assessing the importance of “evaluation” for criticism more generally to be relevant to a wider public.

[Tráese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm... have checked this out from the library now 2x's and I still marvel at the tidbits I glean.

*

[Iris Windmeijer · Rating 2 out of 5]

His point is very interesting, but he is slightly repetitive.

[الوصيف خالد · Rating 4 out of 5]

ممتاز كمدخل للعناوين الكثيرة التي تم الربط بينها في سياقه. عرض بارع للفكرة. ترجمة بديعة.

[حسن عدس · Rating 5 out of 5]

مهم الكتاب دة