Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies

By Jonathan Kramnick

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading.

Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that—a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Drawing on the rich and varied landscape of contemporary criticism, Kramnick changes how we think about the basic tools of literary analysis, including the art of in-text quotation, summary, and other reading methods, helping us to see them as an invaluable form of humanistic expertise. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university.

As the humanities fight for survival in contemporary higher education, the study of literature doesn’t need more plans for reform. Rather, it needs a defense of the work already being done and an account of why it should flourish. This is what Criticism and Truth offers, in vivid and portable form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226830544

Book preview

Cover Page for Criticism and Truth

Criticism and Truth

Thinking Literature. A series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian

Criticism and Truth

On Method in Literary Studies

Jonathan Kramnick

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83052-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83053-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83054-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226830544.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, author.

Title: Criticism and truth : on method in literary studies / Jonathan Kramnick.

Other titles: Thinking literature.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Thinking literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023014969 | ISBN 9780226830520 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226830537 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226830544 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Criticism.

Classification: LCC PN81 .K6958 2023 | DDC 801/.95—dc23/eng/20230612

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014969

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

Introduction · Craft Knowledge

Chapter 1 · Method Talk

Chapter 2 · Close Reading

Chapter 3 · Skilled Practice

Chapter 4 · Interpretation and Creativity

Chapter 5 · Verification

Coda · Public Criticism for a Public Humanities

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

I wanted to give an account of literary studies as an academic discipline. I didn’t want to write a historical study, however, or to claim that our present situation is best analyzed in comparison with an older one. Excellent books of this kind already exist, and I thought a certain clarity and precision might be gained by taking a snapshot of work in the field. I wanted to focus on the distinctive methodology of literary criticism and describe how the practice finds a grip on the world. My reasons were simple, although they had taken on more urgency during the writing. I had for some time been working to understand criticism within a broader picture of the disciplines. Every discipline of study contributes in its own way to making the world intelligible, I had argued, and none ought to be reduced to another. But I hadn’t yet looked closely enough at actual instances of criticism with a view to their status as method. The time had come, I thought, to consider the positive contributions of the field in its granular particularity. In the event, my goal was neither to advocate for something old nor urge that we create something new. It was instead to present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge.

Celebrating what we do strikes me as unusual and timely. For all the varied defenses of the humanities out there, and for all the attention to the history and current state of literary studies, there have been, of late, few positive characterizations of literary critical method. Recent events have made it urgent to fill that void. When I began writing in defense of disciplinary thinking, every humanities field had for some time been subject to conditions of austerity. Nothing, however, could prepare us for the emergency that followed. The decimation of higher education during the COVID-19 era would all but eliminate jobs for younger scholars, threatening intellectual continuity from one generation to the next, and so put in peril the very existence of the discipline itself. Much now remains unclear, but the urgent task for those of us who write from relative security is to make this situation better. In this context, it seems to me that we don’t need one person’s single-minded program for how literary criticism ought to change. We need a defense of work that is already being done and an account of why it should flourish.

For the same reason, it seems to me that we don’t need a long book. I have not attempted to be comprehensive. I have attempted rather to isolate and explain some common and foundational practices that (along with others) might be said to ground literary studies as a discipline of knowledge. I have attempted as well to give an original account of these practices, drawing on my interest in ecological modes of thinking, skilled engagement with the world, and craft as a way of knowing. To go on for too long like this would surely personalize the argument in ways that undercut its validity. The urgency of the moment calls for something brief and sharp and portable.

Jonathan Kramnick

Hamden, CT

[ Introduction ]

Craft Knowledge

If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship The workmanship of risk: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968)

This is a short book making a case for literary studies as a discipline of study. Every discipline has one or more methods that ground its authority to tell truths about whatever part of the world it endeavors to explain. Criticism and Truth examines the truth claims of literary criticism by focusing on close reading: a baseline practice and proprietary method for pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge in the field. I analyze what makes literary studies like and unlike other disciplines, not only in the rest of the humanities but in the social and natural sciences as well. My goal is to spend some time with the methods particular to literary studies and so provide a concise account of its distinctive epistemology considered as one part of a multidisciplinary and pluralist university. My goal, in other words, is to advocate for humanistic expertise as something equivalent to the expertise of the sciences and for literary criticism as an activity undertaken by one discipline among an array of disciplines.

I am writing this book at a moment of intense worry about the future of the humanities and intense reconsideration of what critics do and how we do it. In broad form, such concerns are of course not new. For some time, the discipline of literary studies in particular has understood itself to be in decline relative both to its former stature and to what we now call the STEM disciplines. What John Guillory described as a loss of cultural capital has left the discipline especially vulnerable to the defunding and austerity visited in general upon universities over the past several decades.¹ But all of this has accelerated, and the institutional worries are now existential. The present moment stands out in review. When the pandemic hit university finances in 2020, humanities disciplines were already in the throes of a decade-long crisis in employment, with the number of tenure-track jobs diminishing every year and a transition to adjunct or otherwise precarious labor well under way.² The COVID-related hiring freezes and layoffs made all of that worse, exacerbating inequalities among strata of the academic workforce and diminishing prospects for a generation of younger scholars. The ultimate consequences of the employment crisis will not be clear for some time. What it has brought to the surface, however, is that no discipline of study is separate from its material conditions: jobs, classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and an infrastructure of training from one generation to the next. Our worries are existential because we have had to contemplate the end to all of this, an extinction event in the history of knowledge, now fast, now slow, here visible, there hidden.

The collapse of the discipline risks many things, foremost among them the livelihood of younger scholars. The ethical and epistemic fallout here cannot be overstated. The first is perhaps clear enough to picture, even as it requires the constant attention of those like me whose careers have depended on life’s toss of the generational dice. We owe it to those who have chosen our field to fight for its future and to use all the resources we have in the battle. The epistemic fallout, however, is inseparable and equally vital to imagine. In our agonizing about the jobs crisis, we sometimes bracket off talk about employment from talk about the rest of what happens in the discipline, but hiring cuts across and sustains all of academic life. It is the very means by which any discipline survives and changes over time. Disciplines survive by hiring because new positions maintain the skills and knowledge base for ongoing teaching and research. Younger scholars moving up through the ranks develop, refine, and renew the living practice of the field. For this reason, they provide the very impetus for all scholarly engagement. To whom is one writing if not the scholars of the future? Everyone participates in this process, whether they are faculty in graduate programs or not. Every time we write, we are engaging topics, pursuing methods, and visiting archives in such a way that provides a model for others to follow. We are asking questions that will be answered by those who come after us, using tools they have learned from us. At the same time, younger scholars challenge how these questions have been asked, sharpen the tools used to answer them, and create altogether new paths of inquiry. Senior scholars cannot be trusted to challenge their own assumptions about what counts as a good reading or a solid argument, about whose perspectives and what archives ought to be consulted, about what questions are vital to ask and how to go about asking them. Hiring sustains the counterflow of ideas and practices from the young to the old. It makes sure that academic discussions don’t calcify into a liturgy or disappear altogether.

The collapse of the discipline risks our knowing less about the world, about works of literature and the people who create and read them. That is to put the loss rather simply and starkly, but also to focus our attention on the epistemic rationale for what we do. The practice of teaching and writing in a discipline is, in one way or another, the practice of creating and disseminating knowledge. So much should go without saying, and yet needs to be said all the time. Like any other discipline, the study of literature is the study of a part of the world that is presumed to be important for collective flourishing. Every discipline of study makes a claim for its own existence along these lines, whether its domain is numbers or networks or novels. Academic work contributes to making the world intelligible and so transforming it for the better. The study of literature is one part of that project, and its practice is the creation of knowledge worth having. Once again, however, this practice doesn’t exist on its own. It is grounded in syllabi, in methods of argument, in archives that compel inquiry, topics that inspire debate, and above all in the very human labor presently under considerable duress. Much of the recent meta-discussion of method in the literary disciplines has proceeded at a remove from these conditions.