The Critic

as Amateur
 The Critic
as Amateur
Edited by Saikat Majumdar
and Aarthi Vadde
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 CONTENTS

List of Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Criticism for the Whole Person

Aarthi Vadde with Saikat Majumdar 1

Part 1 The Amateur Impulse

1 In Praise of Amateurism Derek Attridge 31

2 In the Shadow of the Archive Tom Lutz 49

3 “It’s All Very Suggestive, but It Isn’t

Scholarship”  Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 63

4 Beyond Professionalism: The Pasts and

Futures of Creative Criticism Peter D.
McDonald 85

Part 2 The Amateur in the Age of Professionalization

5 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators Christopher

Hilliard 109
6 The Critic as Rasik: Pramatha Chaudhuri, Tagore,
and the New Language of Literary Writing
Rosinka Chaudhuri 129
vi CONTENTS

7 The Sophisticated Amateur: Vernon Lee

versus the Vital Liars Mimi Winick 151

Part 3 The Critic as Amateur in Old and New Media

8 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up: Amateur and

Professional Exchanges in Film Culture
Zlatina Nikolova and Chris Townsend 181
9 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air Emily
Bloom 201
10 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic Melanie
Micir 221
Epilogue: New, Interesting, and Original—the
Undergraduate as Amateur Kara Wittman 243

Index 265
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor at the University of York,

UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books range
from literary theory to South African writing, James Joyce, and
poetic form. The most recent is The Experience of Poetry: From
Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019). He has taught
in England, Scotland, and the United States.

Emily Bloom is Associate Director of the Society of Fellows and

Heyman Center for the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department
of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She
specializes in late modernism with a focus on the interrelations
between media institutions and transnational literary networks. Her
book, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–
1968 (2016), was awarded the Modernist Studies Association’s
First Book Prize.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at

the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She was
also the first Mellon Professor of the Global South at the University
of Oxford, 2017–18. She has written Gentlemen Poets in Colonial
Bengal (2002), Freedom and Beef Steaks (2012), and The Literary
Thing (2013) and edited Derozio, Poet of India (2008), The Indian
Postcolonial (co-edited, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English
(2016), and An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of
Buddhadeva Bose (2018). She has also translated and introduced
Rabindranath Tagore: Letters from a Young Poet (2014).

Christopher Hilliard is Professor of History at the University of

Sydney. His research focuses on literature and literary criticism in
viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

popular intellectual life. His recent work, on freedom of expression

and crimes involving the written word, has taken him into legal
history and social history. He is the author, most recently, of The
Littlehampton Libels (2017) and English as a Vocation: The
“Scrutiny” Movement (2012). Other books include The Bookmen’s
Dominion (2006) and To Exercise Our Talents (2006).

Tom Lutz is the founding editor and publisher of Los Angeles Review
of Books and teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He
is the author most recently of And the Monkey Learned Nothing
(2016) and Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World (2016),
two collections of anecdotes from a life of obsessive travel. His
other books include Doing Nothing (2006), Cosmopolitan Vistas
(2004), Crying (1999), American Nervousness, 1903 (1991), and
the forthcoming Born Slippy: A Novel (2020).

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at

Ashoka University, and the author of three novels, including The
Scent of God (2019), and The Firebird (2015; published in the
United States as Play House, 2017), one of Telegraph’s Best Books
and a finalist for the Bangalore Literature Festival Best Fiction
Award in 2015, and for the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen
Market in 2016. He has also published a general nonfiction title,
College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), on liberal arts education in
India, and a monograph on global modernism, Prose of the World
(2013), a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Award
in 2014.

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature

at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hugh’s College. He
writes on literature, the modern state, and the freedom of expression;
the history of writing systems, cultural institutions, and publishing;
multilingualism, translation, and interculturality; and the promise of
creative criticism. His publications include British Literary Culture
and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997); Making Meaning,
co-edited with Michael Suarez (2002); The Literature Police (2009);
and Artefacts of Writing (2017). He is currently part of a research
team working on PEN and the freedom of expression.
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix

Melanie Micir is Assistant Professor of English at Washington

University in St. Louis. She teaches courses on modern and
contemporary British literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in MLQ, JML,
Modernism/modernity, and several edited collections. Her
first book, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate
Archives, Unfinished Lives, is forthcoming from Princeton
University Press.

Zlatina Nikolova recently completed her PhD at Royal Holloway,

University of London. Her PhD focused on the stylistic and thematic
features of the autobiographical prose and film criticism of the
modernist author Bryher. She has presented papers on the parallels
between Bryher’s and H.D.’s autobiographical prose, on stereotypes
of femininity in Bryher’s Two Selves, the female experience of the
Great War, and on the parallels between Sergei Eisenstein’s film
theories and women characters in Borderline. Her research interests
include the writing produced by the POOL Group, early film culture,
and women’s autobiographical writing.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at the

University of Arizona, where she works on contemporary South
Asian Anglophone and Asian/American literatures and cultural
theory. She has also taught at the University of Nevada, Reno,
and at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned
a PhD in Rhetoric in 2016. An award-winning journalist and
former magazine editor, she contributes essays and reviews to
international scholarly, public, and semi-public outlets. Visit www.
raginitharoorsrinivasan.com.

Chris Townsend is Professor of the History of Avant-Garde Film

in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of
London, and Department Chair. He specializes in the relationships
between film, writing and painting in high modernism. Recent
work includes a study of Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage
Painting as part of a digital project with Tate Britain. A study of
the membership of POOL Group will appear in a special issue of
Papers on Language and Literature in 2019. He is working on a
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

book about the relationship of the inter-war modernist avant-garde

and new media industries.

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University.

Her research focuses on the relationship of literature and media to
globalization. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist
Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2016), winner of the
American Comparative Literature Association’s 2018 Harry Levin
Prize. A special forum on the book was convened in The Cambridge
Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. She has also published
numerous articles in such venues as Comparative Literature,
Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, New Literary
History, NOVEL, and Public Books.

Mimi Winick is Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department

at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is at work on a
monograph provisionally titled Fantastic Scholarship. Her research
concerns the intersections of the history of the humanities, new
religious movements, and imaginative prose in nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Britain. Her essays have appeared in
journals including Nineteenth-Century Literature and Modernism/
Modernity.

Kara Wittman is Assistant Professor of English and Director of

College Writing at Pomona College. She works on the philosophical
experience of wonder in literature, rhetoric, and pedagogy and has
also published on “small” forms of communication: small talk,
phatic speech, marginalia.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Docendo discimus. By teaching, we learn. The same goes for

editing. We are most grateful to our contributors for all their work
has taught us. Without them, this collection would not be possible.
Their enthusiasm for and belief in the project made even the most
mundane editorial tasks worthwhile. Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury
has been an excellent source of advice through the production of
this book. The anonymous readers he found offered intelligent and
generous suggestions in the early stages of design and later stages
of revision. Kathleen Burns provided much appreciated editorial
assistance. We are proud to note that this collection on the critic
as amateur has been a genuinely transnational endeavor. With
contributors based in universities across Australia, India, the UK,
and the United States, we can say for certain that we have ventured
outside our usual professional circuits and been rewarded in kind.
Excerpt from The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy, © 1993 by
Harvard University Press, reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpt from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Copyright
© 1929 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
renewed 1957 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Digital rights and English rights outside of the USA, courtesy of The
Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of
Virginia Woolf.
Excerpt from The Sight of Death by T. J. Clark, © 2006 by Yale
University Press, reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpt from The Secret of Fame by Gabriel Zaid, translated by
Natasha Wimmer, copyright 2008. Used by permission of Paul Dry
Books, Inc., HYPERLINK “http://www.PaulDryBooks.com” www.
PaulDryBooks.com.
 Introduction: Criticism for
the Whole Person

Aarthi Vadde with

Saikat Majumdar

Why a collection on the critic as amateur now? After all, we are living
in a great age of anger, mistrust, and vengeance against professional
experts and the institutions that shelter them. Our political fates
worldwide are being shaped by a euphoria and passion for the
anti-establishment candidate—the iconoclast, the outsider, and
perforce, the amateur. Such a figure embodies, with equal strength,
hope for radical change and cynicism with the technocratic elite.
Calls to “blow it up” and “burn it down” augment political despair
with populist anger. In the minds of many voters on the right and
the left, it is not such a bad idea to blow up a world of career
operators driven more by self-preservation than by public service.
“Burn it down” is the lament of a populace tired of propping up
institutions, cultural and educational as well as political, which
seem to perpetuate inequality rather than diminish it.
This collection turns to the critic as amateur not to endorse the
backlash against experts but to recover a story of literary study
and institutional crossover that might combat it. Our contributors
reexamine the professionalization of modern literary study from the
point of view of the amateur. Yet, from the outset, point of view is
2 The Critic as Amateur

misleading because “the amateur” is not a uniform position so much

as an assortment of perspectives on the practice and purpose of
criticism. Some of our contributors take the amateur as the default
identity of the untrained reader—akin to the common reader—but
passionate enough about books to want to talk and write about
them. Others see the amateur emerging as a legible identity via
the requirements of formal education. Overlapping strongly with
the category of the student (high school, undergraduate, graduate,
and adult learner are among the varieties addressed here), the
amateur emerges in several essays as both a curricular artifact and a
retrospective identity created through professional initiation. Indeed,
thinking about the critic as amateur yields a double-consciousness
of specialist training as some contributors make cases for
revitalizing literary criticism by returning to those moments before
its conventions of reading and writing were second nature.
Still, in an even wider ambit, the critic as amateur designates
a range of impulses that have historically been at odds with the
disciplinary confines of academic literary study in particular and
the consolidation of a cloistered expert culture in general. Our
contributors use a focus on the amateur to think about the place of
authority in the literary field, and they ask when it makes sense to
forgo demonstrable knowledge for demonstrable ignorance. They
understand that specialists in one area of literary study might be
novices in another, and they explore the disciplinary specificities
of professional expertise to build bridges across literary and
nonliterary, academic and nonacademic venues of criticism. In
the process, several essays reconsider the reduction of criticism
to the scholarly monograph or peer-reviewed article and instead
advocate for a wider and more various understanding of critical
activity. Genres like the radio script and journalistic review garner
newfound importance while institutional and do-it-yourself (DIY)
acts of collection, curation, and distribution appear as overlooked
sites of criticism more broadly conceived.
It is not surprising that attention to criticism should draw
humanities professors, which all our contributors are, into a
reflection upon best practices for the fields of literary and cultural
study. Our contributors are scholars as well as critics, which is to say,
they take an interest in the histories of their disciplines, participate
in methodological debates, and contribute to knowledge. What is
surprising is how frequently amateurism emerges in considerations
 Introduction 3

of professional identity across all levels of the professoriate.

Amateurism, for example, is an elective affinity for such luminaries
as Roland Barthes and Edward Said, both of whom saw it as a
riposte to professional insularity and routine. Barthes’s emphasis
on pleasure and Said’s on moral courage, while taking the critic
as amateur in diverging directions, nonetheless share the mark of
aristocracy. Both invoke amateurism from positions of extraordinary
accomplishment—not so much rejecting professionalism as
transcending the field and gaining its fealty in return. Yet amateurism
as an elective affinity need not come only from the upper-echelons of
academia. Historically, as essays on Pramatha Chaudhuri, Vernon
Lee, and Dorothy Richardson show, it has also been the posture
of the eclectic writer-critic regarded as eccentric in the wake of the
academic division and professionalization of the arts. Being difficult
to categorize talents, Chaudhuri, Lee, and Richardson get their due
in this collection. These amateurs turn out to be key players in the
very cultural networks that, upon cohering into distinct disciplines
(literature, psychology, film), would render them anomalous.
In essays broaching the beleaguered state of the humanities
today, amateurism becomes a gesture of authenticity made under
conditions of structural duress. For humanities PhDs facing a
decimated job market, the casualization of academic labor, and
institutional inhospitality to activist projects (antiracist, feminist,
queer, trans, to name a few), categories like “independent scholar”
and “labor of love” take on newly politicized dimensions. Fewer
jobs and bad working conditions are forcing excellent critics out
of the academy, but some are also choosing to leave in order to
pursue otherwise unsustainable modes of inquiry. For such critics,
the amateur is essential to explaining those forms of work that
bear proximity to a calling. Theirs are passions that will be pursued
even in the absence of institutional recognition and monetary
compensation.
Indeed, the entanglement of passion with knowledge characterizes
our contributors’ shared interest in the critic as amateur. The amateur’s
ignoble fate over the twentieth century and even more ignoble rise
in the twenty-first-century resurgence of right-wing populism speaks
to how deeply riven specialist and popular cultures have become.
Despite differing perspectives on how to restore the bonds of
communication, we uniformly assert that the energies of amateurism
are too potent to cede to those who would reject professional
4 The Critic as Amateur

expertise outright, sew division, and exploit others’ ignorance while

masking their own. This collection therefore embraces amateurism
out of the desire to understand criticism as exceeding the strictures
of professionalism even when professionals are the ones doing it.
We believe that the professional study of literature and culture will
benefit from its practitioners yielding to their amateur impulses.
Moreover, we find that amateurism, in its various guises, has driven
the study of the humanities forward in under-credited ways.
The essays that follow this introduction make good on this
conviction by taking three major paths. They explore and question
the genealogies of expertise rather than simply taking authority
for granted. They face rather than repress the contradictions that
arise from studying aesthetic experience via what can be limited
disciplinary vocabularies. They value disparate and lively critical
cultures populated by students, radio hosts, film spectators, small
press publishers, book collectors, and bloggers. Such a motley crew
replaces the construct of the ideal or imagined reader with living,
breathing, rough-around-the-edges critics.

Amateurism and the making

of literary expertise
The long and varied history of the critic as amateur becomes newly
salient within a knowledge society where expertise is paramount,
but professional experts are often maligned. When sociologists use
the term “knowledge society” to characterize the present, they are
not suggesting that knowledge has never played a role in social
organization. Rather, they are crediting the production, distribution,
and reproduction of knowledge with being the “constitutive
mechanism” of contemporary society.1 As societies become more
knowledge-dependent, the ability to claim expertise becomes more
aligned with power, profit, and influence. However, the tendency
to concentrate expertise in a narrow subset of the population—
the professional-managerial class—faces challenges from the very
sociotechnical milieu that has brought the knowledge society to
fruition. At the center of this milieu is the internet.
It is now commonplace to observe that the internet has made
information more accessible. This is more of a truism than a truth, but
 Introduction 5

it is fair to say that the internet has enabled lay people—amateurs—

to do knowledge work that rivals professional institutions in
certain arenas. Crowdsourced websites like Wikipedia, social media
platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and software packages like
Photoshop and Final Cut Pro enable amateur users to develop
and share often self-taught skills (what some sociologists call
“lay expertise”); become “influencers” in fields from fashion to
politics; and develop modes of collaboration (what some media
theorists call “networked expertise”) that have transformed how
print-based industries like publishing do business.2 We mention
these developments not to overstate the power of digital amateurs
or trumpet the equalizing force of Web 2.0 participatory culture,
but to argue that multiple models of expertise are in play on the
internet in highly visible ways.3 It is the place where abstract claims
about the knowledge society feel most palpable.
Knowledge is a form of currency for everyday users on social
media as well as for traditionally knowledge-based industries
striving to adapt to digital media. Information is a commodity for
the technology companies operating the platforms and services that
keep internet culture afloat. Yet, as knowledge becomes increasingly
central to entrepreneurialism, self-management, occupational
advancement, and economic growth, our actual understanding of
the concept grows more remote. Knowledge: the black box at the
center of everything.
What would it mean to claim the mantle of the amateur as a
way of understanding knowledge better? Can the amateur, so
central to internet culture, also help us imagine an outside to the
sociotechnical milieu of the knowledge society? We get one powerful
answer from the writer Pankaj Mishra whose amateurism seems
informed by and yet in direct contradiction to both networked
and professionalized forms of expertise. Mishra, writing in 1998,
recounts sitting in Benares in 1988 and reading authors far removed
from his time and place without knowing anything about their
contexts. Such unscholarly and “disconnected” reading led to new
revelations, not only about these authors’ works but strangely also
about his immediate surroundings.4 In other words, reading with
minimal resources enabled a literary engagement that the mandates
of professional scholarship and the power of the search engine (in
popular use by 1994) would have inhibited. The gaping lack of
historical knowledge, cultural affiliation, and information access
6 The Critic as Amateur

kept Mishra from entering the social context of nineteenth-century

France; consequently, he conjured a new life for Flaubert’s Frédéric
Moreau as a character entering late twentieth-century rural Uttar
Pradesh. Neither such ignorance nor such flights of fancy seem as
plausible or sincere in the age of the Google search, mobile devices,
and always-on computing. And that is the point.
What started as a technological phenomenon—digital
connectivity—has now snowballed into an entire system of values
that prizes more rather than less; more information, we imagine,
will necessarily lead to better knowledge and more freedom. More
information and more informed opinion also necessarily lead to
disputes over cultural authority. The magazines and journals
described in Mishra’s essay—the TLS, Partisan Review, and the
New York Review of Books—rare surprises in 1980s Benares,
are now easily available in any part of the world with an internet
connection, sometimes behind a paywall but often not. Yet, at the
same time, the influence of these traditional arbiters of literary
value is offset by digital literary cultures that increasingly arbitrate
their own set of values separate from or in competition with these
prestigious periodicals. Think Goodreads, Amazon book reviews,
blogs like Book Slut and Moorish Girl, and born-digital highbrow
forums like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.5 A
review in The New York Review of Books is still an important thing
but far less so than it was ten years ago. Who knows what the next
ten years will do to its circulation or cultural capital?
We are not bemoaning the state of legacy media so much as
noting a major shift. For over a decade now, we have witnessed the
move of reader/viewer traffic away from traditional news venues to
sites like Buzzfeed and ScoopWhoop to take just two examples from
the United States and India. Although recent research shows a small
number of this readership returning to the websites of traditional
news venues, such as CNN, Fox News, Washington Post, and the
New York Times, the more important fact is the mass migration of
readership online.6 The proliferation of born-digital media—blogs,
magazines, social media platforms, news feeds—and algorithmically
driven recommendation systems (whether for the New York Times
or Buzzfeed) makes it possible for individuals and whole groups
to dwell in restricted information ecologies while at the same time
believing they have more and better access to information than ever
before. More people now get their news and opinions about the
 Introduction 7

world entirely from the groups they choose and the groups that
search engines, social media feeds, and recommendation algorithms
choose for them. Hence, the contradictory effects of empowerment
and confirmation bias: users banding together can call out and hold
accountable professional experts who think they know better, but
users banding together can also ignore or discredit organs of news
and culture that actually do know better.
The way we understand the evolution of literary studies, as a
specialized field rooted in print modernity, is now inseparable from
the political and epistemological conflicts internal to a digitally
driven knowledge society. The assumption that knowledge is less
a disciplinary domain than a circulating currency, while obviously
thorny in the ways mentioned above, also places needed pressure
on the academic disciplines as we have inherited them from
the Enlightenment projects of the nineteenth century. If natural
philosophy did fine as a term with Isaac Newton, the post-
Enlightenment practitioners of the Newtonian disciplines were
going to need the pointed specificity of the word “science,” and
subsequently, “scientists,” to distinguish their specialties from the
amorphous, all-encompassing ambition of philosophy. The rational
logic of modernity, the modern nation-state, and in some instances,
the project of colonialism would consolidate many of the human and
social sciences in the distinct forms of disciplinary expertise in which
we possess them today. The imperial project, it is now understood,
also had much to do with the inauguration of literary curricula in
the colonies, especially in nineteenth-century India, though it would
not be until Leavisite Cambridge in the early twentieth century that
English literature would attain its full disciplinary significance.
The nineteenth century also saw the rise of the modern research
university (inspired by the Humboldtian model of higher education)
in Europe and North America. As universities and graduate schools
became the primary province of literary study, amateur practitioners
like “the man of letters” found themselves discredited. Whereas the
man of letters drew his literary-critical authority from individual
prestige and perceived moral and intellectual superiority, the
professional specialist who would supplant him based the capacity
for literary judgment upon systematic training and knowledge
acquisition.7 By the 1920s, John Middleton Murry referred to the
gentlemanly amateur in damning terms: “No amount of sedulous
apery or word-mosaic will make a writer of the dilettante belletrist.”8
8 The Critic as Amateur

But as we in this volume argue, amateurism’s demise was never

complete even if the amateurs themselves were shunted out of
disciplinary origin stories. The narrative that emerges from these
essays is that of the amateur’s simultaneous coexistence with the
credentialed expert—sometimes harmonious, other times uneasy
but always illuminating of literary study’s diverse configurations
beyond the discipline of “literary studies.” Not before the explosive
growth of digital participatory culture has the amateur drawn so
much attention or had so much voice. Yet the rise of the digital
amateur, polarizing as such a figure might be, leads us to point
out the myriad ways amateurism and expertise had already been
entwined from the turn of the twentieth century onward.
We argue that the dominant narrative of this period, which
chronicles the rise and consolidation of the professions as well as the
rise and consolidation of academic literature departments, overlooks
the ways that amateurs and professionals forged partnerships
and rivalries.9 Such entanglements at times prefigure the lay and
networked expertise of internet cultures and at other times query
the very definition of and attitudes toward knowledge operative
within knowledge societies. We find that amateurs occasionally do
lay claim to expertise, but more often than not, as with Mishra,
they complicate what it means to be knowledgeable, wield facts,
and perform authority. Spotlighting the history of amateurism, our
collection yields alternative vocabularies for describing the nature
of literature and literary expertise.

***

It would seem that the more subjective the domain of knowledge,

the stronger the ability of an amateur to rival a professional expert.
It is far easier to ignore the gatekeepers of literature than those
of cancer research, where access to equipment is prohibitively
expensive and the consensus around findings more concrete and
substantial.10 While such an admission might be disturbing to
some readers, we readily ask: Is literature with a capital “L” even a
domain of knowledge?
Professional scholars certainly need literature to be institutionally
recognized as knowledge for our livelihoods, but that need does
not do justice to what literature, as a subset of imaginative and
finely written works, actually is. As Michael Wood writes, literature
 Introduction 9

in its modern sense is difficult to pin down. It “offers something

harder—in the sense of ‘hard’ sciences—than understanding and
something softer than we often imagine knowledge to be.”11 In
drawing this conclusion, Wood builds on Stefan Collini’s pairing
of understanding and knowledge as related terms with distinct
connotations. For Collini, knowledge connotes “accumulated stock”
while understanding—less physical, more processual—emphasizes
the role of human activity in creating knowledge.12 Wood regards
literature in sensuous terms as harder than understanding but softer
than knowledge. Literary study is not cancer research, yet its experts
have acquired something specific from it, namely knowledge “on
holiday.” With this metaphor, drawn from mixing Barthes and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wood argues that literature teaches us to
adjudicate knowledge as a given category by presenting all of its
knowledge hypothetically. A set of possibilities rather than a store
of facts, literature “creates a new zone between work and play.”13
Its liminality solicits readers to consider even the most outlandish
possibility as operative and consequently takes flight where statistical
norms would ground us in the likely, the predictable, the known.
Knowledge on holiday might sound odd. However, just as
professors of literature realize we must justify our vocation via a
claim to knowledge, we are equally prepared for the accusation,
made more with unwitting condescension than malice, that what
we do is not real work. We’re not curing cancer after all. Deidre
Lynch argues that the practices of criticism and pedagogy native
to literary studies remain eccentric within the post-Enlightenment
formation of the disciplines (despite literary criticism’s subjection
to it) precisely because professing literature demands a personal
touch.14 Professors of literature are expected to love their object
of study. Their vocation is not to eliminate pleasure but to ensure
its proper administration; hence, the discipline’s deviation from
the norms of “publicness and impersonality” that govern other
professional occupations.15 Interestingly enough, Lynch’s emphasis
on the propriety of pleasure casts the literature professor as a
descendant of eighteenth-century periodical founders like Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele. Addison and Steele famously turned
to journalism and the genre of the essay in particular to bring
“philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.”16
What is less remembered about this democratizing claim, however,
10 The Critic as Amateur

is their emphasis on using journalistic criticism to regulate the

sociability of the coffeehouses. Periodicals like The Tatler and The
Spectator may have rejected the pedantry of scholasticism and the
insularity of the court, but they were equally opposed to the frivolity
of coffeehouse society where “newsmongers,” idlers, and gossips
threatened to lead each other astray in temperament and values.17
In their role as journalists and essayists, Addison and Steele,
like literature professors to come, turned to criticism to initiate
a restive and autodidactic collective into the conventions of
polite conversation and debate. Whether we are talking about
eighteenth-century coffeehouse patrons or a twenty-first-century
group of undergraduates, the assumption is that transforming opinion
into insight and pleasure into politesse is the work of the trained
professional with a flair for play. Blurring the boundaries between
the workaday and the holiday, the literary professions paradoxically
must stay in proximity of amateur sensibilities, if only to regulate
them properly. The amateur, from the Latin “amare,” to love, remains
essential to the legitimation of professional literary expertise.
This point seems extendable to other disciplines that comprise
an aesthetic education simply because art, music, and film also
inhabit the zone between work and play in the fully administered
world of late modernity. In the parlance of undergraduate advisors,
“passion majors” cover the arts rendered up for disciplinary study
while “parent majors” cover the natural and social sciences that
feed into clear-cut professional paths. The anxiety over the idea and
practice of the professional path is instructive, since it is usually cast
in opposition to the indulgence of private passion. But contradiction
is exactly how the disciplinary and professional contours of literary
study take shape—through a fascinating dialectic of the individual
passion and the collective standard.18
The implicit standards of professing literature in the university
come into sharp relief when creative writers take up the task of
teaching without awareness of ongoing scholarly conversations or
membership in the professional associations that grow up around
the study of literature. Roman Jakobson defended professors in no
uncertain terms when he compared Vladimir Nabokov teaching
literature to an elephant teaching zoology. While we all enjoy the
joke, we should by now be convinced that Jakobson is, at the very
least, half wrong. Unsurprisingly, many poets and novelists have been
far better at criticism than objects and forces have been at playing
 Introduction 11

physicists or elephants at playing zoologists. Creative writers have

been at least as good as politicians at playing political theorists,
and they are significantly ahead of the subjects of auto-ethnography
engaging in its disciplinary practice, a relatively young development
in the field of anthropology.
This point about the object of study becoming the agent of
study goes beyond the simple fact that poets and novelists have
written works of literary criticism. It pertains to the very spirit of
critical writing as a creative practice with possible kinship to poetic,
narrative, and dramatic utterances. If the poetic, narrative, and
dramatic generally distinguish the art of the literary writer from that
of the scholarly critic, then they also have the potential to distinguish
the deliberate idiosyncrasy of the amateur from the necessary
conventionality of the professional commentator on literature.
The amateur assumes a private and particular voice—in keeping
with the individualized style demanded of creative writers—rather
than subordinate herself to the collective voice of the profession.
If one were to simplify (and therefore also vulgarize a bit), at the
heart of the Jakobson-Nabokov feud is the creative writer versus
the community of scholars. The goal of the scholar is to meet the
collective standard and consequently to subordinate (though not
necessarily eliminate) the peculiarities of voice. The goal of the
creative writer as critic is the consolidation of a rich and unique
private voice fortified as much with the power of imagination as
with scholarship.19 In practice, the work of the critic overlaps with
the work of the scholar. In spirit, the critic as amateur seeks the
singular voice of the poet or fiction writer. Roland Barthes brings
this point home when he talks of attempting a novel: “the world no
longer comes to me as an object but as a writing, i.e. as a practice.
I proceed to another type of knowledge (that of the Amateur).”20
Barthes’s distinction between knowing the world as an object and
knowing it as a writing practice informs our distinction between the
critic’s particularized voice buoyed by invention and the scholar’s
specialized one grounded in the sharing of an object of study with
professional peers. These theoretical propositions, while always
threatening to collapse in real-world situations, nevertheless have
important implications for how we explain the various overlaps
readily apparent in amateur and professional commentary on
literature. Contributors such as Christopher Hilliard and Melanie
Micir, for instance, have foregrounded persuasive instances of
12 The Critic as Amateur

communal amateurism—or for that matter, amateur communities.

But, as their essays show, the professional is far more defined by her
membership in an established community with set standards than
the amateur, who works on her own in irregular time intervals and
by affiliating with loosely regulated groups.
In turn, amateurs and professionals alike address audiences who
share their interests and structures of address; yet, in the absence of
systematic training, amateurs refine their voices in comparatively
unruly ways to those credentialed by a degree program. A critic or
a scholar can be either amateur or professional; they can also find
themselves shifting affiliations depending on the context or task at
hand. With full recognition of this fluidity, our formulation regards
criticism as more likely to be amateur in ethos than scholarship,
which necessarily becomes professional in ethos in the course of
satisfying the requirements of university assessment and academic
publishing.
It is, of course, clear that neither literature nor the study of it
can altogether dispense with the power or the centrality of the
individual voice, just as it is clear that a proper historical or technical
understanding of literature is impossible without the specialist
standards of scholarship. The dialectic of the individual and the
collective is as essential to literary studies as it is to literature itself,
yet we in the discipline have given short shrift to those boundary
zones between the particularized and the specialized, the private
and the communal upon which amateurism alights. This collection
is the first sustained attempt by a group of intellectuals to locate the
rifted place of the amateur in literary thought. It is more empirical
than normative—a long and wide look at what has been rather
than what should be, though the latter too stirs at places, sometimes
directly and sometimes through implication.
We have come to think of this collection as more of a mixtape
than a reference guide. It imparts feeling as well as knowledge
and attempts to inject something of the private voice into what
is fundamentally a collaborative endeavor. Amateurism’s secret
history within disciplinary literary study surfaces through
theoretical argument, personal reminiscence, historical case study,
and interdisciplinary conversation across literary and media studies.
Although we have concentrated our study of amateurism within the
field of English-language literature, we have given a sampling of
amateurism in other disciplines (film, book history, media studies)
 Introduction 13

and another linguistic culture (Bengali). As with any good mixtape,

the order of the essays matters and the effect, we believe, is ultimately
cohesive if inevitably selective. Our hope is that this collection will
bring more like-minded projects in its wake and compel readers
of whatever stripe to dig further into the archives we open up
(especially in Parts II and III) as well as identify new ones. Most of
all, in circulating this book, we wish to extend the pleasures we have
found in making amateurism our professional concern.
Which brings us to the question: Isn’t this a professional study
of the amateur? That’s what Tom Lutz suspects in his contribution.
Lutz is Professor of Creative Writing at University of California–
Riverside and the editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, so
it’s hard to say his intervention—as that of the volume on the
whole—is not quite professional. Yet, as Lutz’s essay shows, you
can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country
out of the boy. We find it just as hard to take the amateur out of
literary criticism, no matter how much one tries to professionalize
its practice. This point is partially indebted to the overtly politicized
language of feminist and multicultural criticism in the late
1980s–1990s. During the height of the canon wars, proponents
of identity-based critique questioned the “objectivity” of academic
criticism. Instead of aspiring to impersonality, they turned to
personal and autobiographical writing as tools for dismantling, or
at least refusing to reproduce, a normatively white and patriarchal
culture of knowledge production.21
In identity-oriented work, professionalism became a byword
for the silencing of marginalized and deviant voices, and it is
not surprising that defenses of professionalism emerged among
those critics looking to defend the relative autonomy of literature
from perceived political jockeying. Stanley Fish cynically
saw the rejection of professionalism as one of the finest and
most final marks of professionalism: “Anti-professionalism is
professionalism in its purest form.”22 Derek Attridge will have
more to say about Fish’s accusation in his contribution, but, for
now, we ask whether the elision of the amateur as such from these
polarized debates detracted from attention to literary criticism as
a genre that entwines rather than divides disciplinary and activist
imperatives. In our collection, we submit for consideration a
post-professional rather than an anti-professional approach to
the critic as amateur.
14 The Critic as Amateur

***

In the history of literary criticism, the amateur appears in some

expected places and in some unexpected ones. Since the essays
in this collection focus, for the most part, on the late nineteenth
century and beyond, the collective story that emerges here is of a
period in which literary studies becomes a discipline enshrined in the
university. Literary criticism, when it appears beyond the university’s
ambit (mostly in nonacademic media venues, print, or otherwise),
dwells in breathing distance of its edifice of professionalism, though
that distance varies from time to time.
Our collection opens with four essays that variously reflect
upon and epitomize the enlightened innocence of amateurism.
Each performs to differing degrees the unlearning of learned
behaviors with respect to critical reading and writing. Taken as a
group Derek Attridge’s, Tom Lutz’s, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s,
and Peter McDonald’s contributions could also be said to offer
schematic assessments of the state of literary studies. After all, they
respectively address the professionalization of literary criticism, the
systematic training of eclectic readers into scholars with specialties,
and the metrics of productivity used by university administrators
to assess the worth of their faculty. Yet schematics is precisely what
these critics chafe at, and their writing styles resist the summary
description attempted here. They weave together intellectual
biography with intimate anecdote, confident technical analysis with
the searching desire for experiences of reading and writing that
remain beyond codification.
Derek Attridge’s essay “In Praise of Amateurism” reveals how
deeply entangled amateurism and professionalism are by explaining
how individual responses to literature underpin collective standards
of reading. For Attridge, an individual response to a literary work
always retains elements of the amateur. It is the uniqueness and
intensity of reading as an event that inspires the entire apparatus
we call professional or academic criticism. Recognizing the
unpredictability of literary experience, Attridge champions what
he calls “critical amateurism,” a phrase that recalls Edward Said’s
celebration of “critical humanism” as the kind of practice that
feels enabling after the onslaught on traditional humanism by high
theory and the radical political culture surrounding it. “Critical
amateurism,” Attridge says, “would carry the impulse of the amateur
 Introduction 15

reader into the professional arena; both acknowledging and seeking

to enhance the singular experience of the literary work that lies at
the heart of the institution to which we—students, teachers, critics,
and scholars alike—belong.”
Tom Lutz’s visceral account of his growth and development
as a young American man in a provincial location privileges the
personal, even the idiosyncratic. In doing so, it also provides the
crucial backstory of the shaping of an influential academic and
public intellectual through his very intimate, and one might say,
autodidactic relation to literature. Especially striking is the way
Lutz engages with the story of a provincial youth in a far-flung
corner of postcolonial India to tell his own tale of eclectic education
as a curiously similar figure in the United States.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan locates the tussle of the amateur and
the professional in a place that seems unlikely at first but which, upon
deeper inspection, makes serious and urgent sense: interdisciplinary
humanities study in the contemporary US academy. Anecdotally
speaking, Srinivasan is fond of saying that she has two degrees in
“nothing”: a BA in Literature from the critical-theory inflected
program at Duke—essentially a degree in theory and cultural
studies—and a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California,
Berkeley. Is such interdisciplinary study the privilege of a rarefied
professionalism or an ambitious form of amateurism? Further
complicating this question is the range of institutional responses to
interdisciplinarity: some regarding it as a prestigious line of inquiry
and others dismissing it as an illegitimate form of scholarship. As she
chronicles the refinement of her own critical ethos, Srinivasan comes
to reexamine such responses and ultimately question their location
and assumptions. Her approach fittingly follows interdisciplinarity
out of the university into the experimental spaces of independent
scholarship, the broad church of journalism, and the inwardness of
theoretically infused life writing.
Although based in Oxford, Peter McDonald looks away from the
established canons of Anglo-American criticism as he seeks to find a
critical discourse and idiom sustainable for the field in the long run.
He places two iconic thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore and Maurice
Blanchot, into an innovative conversation that explains as well as
performs his model of “creative criticism.” For McDonald, creative
criticism justifies itself in anti-scholastic terms as it foregrounds
immediate experience over accumulated erudition. It resists the
16 The Critic as Amateur

straitjackets of scholarly writing—the move to define terms, defend

theses, and yield reproducible results. In the course of describing
the affinities between Tagore’s and Blanchot’s accounts of the
creative process, McDonald acknowledges both the evasiveness
and utopianism inherent to creative criticism. Yet, in dark times for
higher education, he contends that its very slipperiness might be
inspiration for true curricular innovation.
Part II of the collection turns to historical case studies that decenter
the dominant story of literary criticism’s professionalization within
the university in the first half of the twentieth century. The essays
in this part follow familiar disciplinary practices into unfamiliar
territory and recover key intellectual figures whose contributions to
criticism are “amateur” insofar as they stand at a remove from the
university or actively dissent from influential academic schools and
styles of writing. Christopher Hilliard’s essay shows how the critical
and pedagogical methods of canonical figures F. R. Leavis and I. A.
Richards were taken up and recontextualized by educators working
with adult learners, high school students, and aspiring creative
writers. His essay reveals the feedback loop of amateurism and
professionalism as the institutionalization of practical criticism in
a variety of classrooms created the opportunity for more amateurs
to learn and alter its methods. Hilliard’s wide net captures the
dissemination of practical criticism as a far from trickle-down
phenomenon. English teachers and student-amateurs of varying
class backgrounds and interests had to renegotiate their relationship
to Leavisian standards as they adapted techniques forged in the elite
college classroom to their classrooms and self-made study spaces.
Rosinka Chaudhuri’s essay on Bengali critic Pramatha Chaudhuri,
the only one in this collection to engage at length with criticism in
a non-Western language, enters deeper into the context of South-
Asian aesthetics and literary thought opened by McDonald’s essay.
Chaudhuri’s celebration of “the critic as rasik” in Pramatha’s
personality and practice is a very important one, if only because
it introduces a hard-to-translate category of amateur sensibility
into what is primarily a collection of engagements with Western
and English-language criticism. It is possible to translate rasik as
“aesthete,” but it would be a poor and inadequate translation.
There are endless shades of play, humor, and even eroticism that
do not necessarily come alive in the term “aesthete,” particularly
with its Pre-Raphaelite connotations in the context of English
 Introduction 17

literary criticism. While its etymology goes back to the classical

Sanskrit idea of rasa, literally meaning “juice” or “taste” but really
implying aesthetic flavor, the rasik in Bangla implies something
of a bon vivant, of the arts as much as of life. Chaudhuri situates
Pramatha, who distanced himself quickly from university life,
within the booming sphere of Bengali letters where he became an
influential writer, editor, and publisher. In reassessing his career, she
simultaneously reflects upon the relation of the rasik to concepts of
amateurism, criticism, and de-professionalization as espoused by
Barthes and Theodor Adorno.
For Mimi Winick, “sophisticated amateurism” flavors the critical
style of androgynous intellectual, Vernon Lee. Drawing on queer
theories of sophistication, Winick argues that Lee cultivated a highly
self-conscious mode of authority that foiled the gendered male
consolidation of professional expertise taking place in the university.
Sophisticated amateurism stands in oblique relationship to the
academy by introducing aberrant forms of affection and attachment
into scholarship’s scientific methods and specialist vocabularies.
Notably, such strategies also differentiate themselves from a naive
amateurism incapable of recognizing that even ordinary, untrained
engagements with literature and culture can come to exhibit distinct
patterns and conventions. Winick’s reappraisal of the continuities
between Lee’s criticism and fiction shows how Lee positioned herself
against, among others, William James, one of the most esteemed
scholars of her era. Attacking his philosophy of pragmatism as a
spurious redefinition of truth, Lee deploys sophistication against
what she takes to be the sophistry of pragmatist argument.
Part III of The Critic as Amateur remains oriented to critical
figures and networks that bring amateurism and professionalism
into unpredictable configurations. However, it also focalizes the
entanglements of high- and middlebrow culture as each essay brings
the history of criticism into conversation with the history of media.
Zlatina Nikolova and Christopher Townsend’s essay on Dorothy
Richardson and Close Up shows us how a prominent little magazine
brought modernism and mass culture together by recruiting writers
from the literary avant-garde and the nascent commercial film
industries. Like Lee, Richardson is a critic better known for her
fiction, yet Nikolova and Townsend urge us to see her through the
very particular lens of her film criticism. Rather than simply declare
Richardson an amateur film critic, Nikolova and Townsend’s essay
18 The Critic as Amateur

opens into an extensive accounting of the amateur and professional

exchanges forged by Close Up. Their argument rejects the premise
that amateurism and professionalism can be fixed identities in a milieu
where “contributors from diverse fields exchanged or intercalated
roles.” Such contributors include women like Richardson, whose
criticism derived from combining their experience as professional
writers with their unschooled positions as film spectators, and
(mostly) men who worked in filmmaking as cinematographers
and editors but had little experience in writing for publication.
Nikolova and Townsend compare the styles of criticism that evolve
through the little magazine and find that Richardson’s style assumes
a more anthropological than aesthetic mode of interpretation. By
emphasizing reception over production, she becomes an important
anthropologist of popular film culture in Britain in the 1920s.
When Nikolova and Townsend centralize Richardson’s film
criticism, they at once contribute new understandings of her
reputation to two fields—literary studies and film studies. They
argue that the influence of cinematic techniques on her modernist
fiction is overstated given the lack of demonstrable interest in those
techniques in her film criticism. In turn, they find that Richardson’s
style foreshadows a professionalized journalistic film criticism that
would contrast the specialized criticism taking shape among industry
technicians. Such a mainstream criticism traded technical expertise
in the medium for camaraderie with lay audiences who regarded
“the movies” as a novel topic of conversation and consumption.
We see a similar rise of the middlebrow over and against the
professionalization of disciplinary literary study in Emily Bloom’s
essay on the BBC radio program “New Judgment.” Working at the
intersection of communications studies and literary studies, Bloom
turns to the airwaves to get beyond the disciplinary circuits of the
university and explore possibilities for a popular literary criticism
directed at mass audiences. Attentive to how a new medium, in this
case radio, pushed writers like Stephen Spender, Elizabeth Bowen,
and Seán O’Faoláin outside their comfort zones, Bloom absorbingly
details how a radiogenic literary criticism demanded new genres
of critical writing, like the feature broadcast, and more relatable
models of authority than the ivory tower professor.
If radio and film made early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary
critics amateurs in new media, Melanie Micir shows how feminist
small presses have survived since the 1970s thanks to amateur forms
 Introduction 19

of labor in the venerable medium of print. Such forms of labor are

rooted in “energy and enthusiasm” rather than “expertise or even
experience.” They also demand a volunteerism that can be at odds
with the priorities of professional recognition, advancement, and
compensation. Micir’s comprehensive foray into feminist publishing
projects—presses, subscription services, collections— broadens the
definition of criticism to include the judgments entailed in literary
curation, recovering and publishing out-of-print titles and collecting
rare books by women. Her expanded definition of criticism calls into
question the university’s or even journalism’s monopoly on it and
points to a number of alternative routes by which feminist publishers
thrive on a shoestring budget. Their intimate publics meet up with
crowdsourced digital platforms; their print audience grows thanks to
their agility with digital forms of opinion sharing: blogs, social media
posts, and monthly recommendations sent right to one’s inbox.
Finally, Kara Wittman’s essay on the undergraduate student
stands as the epilogue to the entire collection. The undergraduate—
even the one specializing in literature—is an amateur by almost any
definition. Wittman’s essay provides insight into how teachers may
make rich use of that amateurism. Is undergraduate training meant
to initiate a shift away from amateurism? Or does such training
preserve amateurism as a tabula rasa for the kind of originality that
quickly becomes jaded within the established practices of academic
training? Wittman’s identification of the paradoxes surrounding
original argument in literary studies throws into relief the various
convictions professed across the arc of the collection. By returning to
the trenches of the classroom, she finds a deep connection between
the practices of criticism outlined in previous essays and the desire
to experience something again for the first time.

The purpose of criticism

Time after time, this volume raises questions of purpose and
motivation. “What is it all for?” asks Peter McDonald. “Why do
we love what we love?” asks Tom Lutz. In their own ways, each
of these essays broaches the project of criticism as a matter of
education. And education is never reducible to acquiring a technique
or mastering a skill set. It is about meeting our emotional as well
20 The Critic as Amateur

as intellectual needs. It is about finding meaning in what we do

over a lifetime. In that sense, as Kara Wittman puts it, we are all in
some way beginning regardless of our stage in school, professional
achievements, or phase of life.
“Treating the whole person” is an approach gaining more and
more traction in modern psychology and integrative medicine. It
represents a turn to mind-body health that is actually a professional
acknowledgment of modern medicine’s limited toolbox. Treating
symptoms, managing diseases, and prescribing drug therapies
are what physicians primarily do, but even they are returning to
categories like “well-being” and “holistic health” in their practices.
Well-being, as humanists know all too well, has its Western origins
in Aristotle’s concept of Eudaemonia, a kind of thriving that is
impossible to define scientifically or measure empirically. Certainly,
what sounds progressive in the medical profession might sound like
old hat to liberal humanists—all the way from the conservative
wing of the discipline to the left-leaning humanists trained in “the
historicist-contextualist paradigm.”23 Regardless of one’s stance on
literary study’s capacity to mold better or happier people, ruling
out the capacity of literature to console, rile up, or provide ethical
direction is to miss out critically on the myriad ways whole people
read and what they read for.24
This collection might alternatively have been called “Criticism
for the Whole Person” because we are aiming to bring the
professionalized practice of criticism back to its foundations
in the experience of reading, the search for understanding, the
finding and refining of one’s own voice, and the lending of that
voice to social advocacy. If humanities scholars ignore or implicitly
diminish these foundations, we will see ourselves quickly usurped
by professionals all too eager to make the whole person their
bread and butter. Beth Blum writes of the “intelligent self-help”
industry as rivaling the university by claiming to supply the cure
for what ails us. Such promises would embarrass or incense
most university-based scholars of the humanities.25 Her primary
example is Alain de Botton whose anti-academic polemics exploit
the friction between high- and middlebrow culture. De Botton
baldly states:

Our most celebrated intellectual institutions rarely consent to

ask, let alone to answer, the most serious questions of the soul.
 Introduction 21

Oprah Winfrey may not provide the deepest possible analysis of

the human condition, but her questions are often more probing
and meaningful than those posed by Ivy League professors in the
humanities.26

This from an article titled “Can Tolstoy Save Your Marriage?”

published in The Wall Street Journal. De Botton plays to a
conservative audience’s attraction to the classics and plays off a
middlebrow sensibility responsive to the notion that practical use
outweighs disinterested study.
Indeed de Botton’s alternative educational institution, The School
of Life continues in the traditions of such middlebrow institutions
as Oprah’s Book Club and its predecessor The-Book-of-the-Month
Club, which as Janice Radway argues, imagine and foster a
community of “general readers” often in direct opposition to an
academic readership judged “focused, professional, technical,
and specialized.”27 Radway’s ethnography of the club shows how
middlebrow culture evolves into a counter-practice against the
properly administered passion (to recall Lynch) of disciplinary
literary studies and the aloofness of high culture periodicals like The
New Yorker, The Nation, and the Partisan Review. An organization
born in the United States in 1926 and still in operation today, the-
Book-of-the-Month Club, in Radway’s Althusserian vocabulary,
“hailed” its members as “subjects with pressing emotional needs
and desires produced by their particular historical situation.”28 De
Botton’s appeal takes much the same form but, despite the invocation
of Oprah, carefully de-feminizes self-help by making it “intelligent.”
De Botton appeals to the great, mostly male, authors and
proclaims his categorical alliance with—and the university’s
abdication of—the highest values: “The modern university has
achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information
about culture, but it remains wholly uninterested in training
students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom.”29 Wisdom. This
is a notoriously difficult word to define. For de Botton, it aligns
truth with that which is “inwardly beneficial.”30 Not many literature
professors would subordinate the truth to that which makes us
feel good. Yet de Botton is not wrong about the tension between a
university humanities education and middlebrow desires; nor is he
wrong about the tension between culture as an object of study and
culture as a repertoire of wisdom.
22 The Critic as Amateur

Talcott Parsons, sociologist and Max Weber’s English-language

translator, foreshadowed this incompatibility back in 1939 when
he identified the peculiar structure of professional authority. Such
authority, he argued, derives not from a manifestation of “superior
‘wisdom’ in general or of higher moral character. It is rather based
on the superior ‘technical competence’ of the professional man.”31
For Alfred North Whitehead, “the discoveries of the nineteenth
century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left
with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it.”32 Such
an accentuation of technical competence is what currently divides
the scholar from the critic in Joseph North’s estimation.33 If the
scholar is the one who analyzes culture and the critic is the one
who intervenes in it, it is fair to say that when we act as critics, we
are making a generalized bid for wisdom that exceeds our technical
competence in a particular theory, period, or geography. When we
cast ourselves as amateur, and study past intellectual figures who
have claimed the mantle of amateurism, we return what we know
as scholars “on holiday” to the generality of life.
Reclaiming the general might be one way in which this collection
echoes the early twentieth-century paradigm of criticism, which
North traces via I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and characterizes
as a particularly successful yoking of specialist techniques to
matters of widespread concern.34 Leavis made so successful a case
for humanistic criticism as the core of a liberal arts education
precisely because he was able to satisfy simultaneously the technical
demands and ethical rationales of the modern research university.
The School of Life smuggles the highbrow generality of criticism
into the middlebrow desires of the general reader. The aim of this
happy synthesis is to fill the vacuum created by the technocratic
turn of humanities education in the university. Yet, as Blum shows,
the corporate university is all too happy to marry technocracy to
a commodified notion of well-being by jumping on the self-help
bandwagon. She cites the creation of wellness centers on campus, the
redesign of undergraduate courses in a therapeutic and instrumental
“how to” vein, and the permeation of all sectors of the university
with “complex advice networks” aimed at mitigating the “effects
of deeper systemic problems: intensifying competition, a fractured
tenure system, racial inequity, and ever-expanding job precarity.”35
In this brave new world of university life, wisdom, truth, and
love grow more elusive not from having disappeared from the
 Introduction 23

discourse on education but from having proliferated through so

many rival advice networks. Our collection takes some of these
networks as case studies in the process of trying to regain a grip on
the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and general states
of human flourishing. Such a task has involved, contra de Botton,
reflecting on the ways in which our objects of study might become
repertoires of genuine wisdom in a work culture bent toward
entrepreneurial innovation and quantifiable proof of productivity.
The Critic as Amateur affirms the need for literary and cultural
critics to use what is specialized about our work—our professional
expertise—to reach people where they live. Such outreach may
take the form of teaching undergraduates in general education
courses, undertaking journalistic projects, founding small presses,
forging networks between the university and other institutions of
education, or simply making a case in written form for the necessity
of an aesthetic education. This book shows how much humanities
professionals are already doing by way of criticism in an expanded
register, but it also proposes we might be doing our best work when
we feel at our most amateur.
What is it all for? Why do we love what we love? Writing about
the critic as amateur has released these questions into a collection
made primarily for an academic audience, but with the hope that
general readers will find some value in it too. We invite whoever
picks up this book to think with us about how the relationship
between the academic and the general reader evolved into one
of mutual suspicion. Most importantly, we look to the following
essays for a criticism that injects vulnerability, passion, and even
ignorance into expertise.

Notes
1 Nico Stehr, Knowledge Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 6.
2 For an early and influential example of celebratory rhetoric about the
web, see Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin,
2008). For explanations of lay expertise and networked expertise,
see Reiner Grundmann, “The Problem of Expertise in Knowledge
Societies,” Minerva 55, no. 1 (2017): 25–48 and Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New
York: New York University Press, 2006).
24 The Critic as Amateur

3 For a discussion of this phenomenon with respect to contemporary

literature specifically, see Aarthi Vadde, “Amateur Creativity:
Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene,” New
Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017): 27–51.
4 Pankaj Mishra, “Edmund Wilson in Benares,” New York Review of
Books, April 9, 1998. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/
articles/1998/04/09/edmund-wilson-in-benares/.
5 For more on these outlets, see Lisa Nakamura, “Words with Friends:
Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads,” PMLA 128, no. 1
(January 2013): 238–243; Houman Bareket, Robert Barry, and David
Winters, eds., The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online (New
York: OR Books, 2017); Evan Kindley, “Little Magazines, Blogs,
and Literary Media,” in American Literature in Transition, ed. Rachel
Greenwald Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
345–359.
6 Rani Molla, “Buzzfeed is Losing Website Traffic as Readers Head
for More Traditional News Media,” November 30, 2017. Available
online: https://www.recode.net/2017/11/30/16709310/buzzfeed-
losing-web-traffic-readers-layoffs-uniques-prefer-news-over-viral-
sites. The decline in Buzzfeed’s traffic is as follows: “69.8 million U.S.
readers in October [2017], a 10 percent drop from the 77.4 million
readers it drew in October 2016, and a 12 percent drop from 2015
when it had 79.3 million readers, according to comScore data.”
7 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, “The British ‘Man of Letters’ and
the Rise of the Professional,” in The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7:385. As Rónán
McDonald argues, anxieties over literary criticism’s association
with “the dilettantism and impressionism of the amateur critic”
continue to this very day. Such fears led many of its leading
practitioners (for example, I. A. Richards and Northrop Frye) to
devise methods that would “scientize the field.” Rónán McDonald,
ed., The Values of Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 8.
8 Quoted in Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 15. Ironically enough, Guy and
Small dub Murry an amateur critic in the tradition of the man of
letters precisely because he drew on his personal authority to make
such rhetorically flamboyant judgments.
9 In making these claims, we join scholars like Jonathan Rose and
Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan who have advocated
for a disciplinary history of English literary study that restores the
centrality of non-elite institutions and learners. See Jonathan Rose,
 Introduction 25

The Intellectual Life of the British Working-Classes (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2002) and Rachel Sagner Buurma and
Laura Heffernan, “The Classroom in the Canon: T.S. Eliot’s Modern
English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The
Sacred Wood,” PMLA 133, no. 2 (2018): 264–281.
10 The cost of scientific research, admittedly, has not stopped climate
change deniers, groups against vaccination, and other skeptics of
established scientific findings. However, such groups’ narratives
are more likely to be classified as misinformation or politicized
propaganda than the literary opinions of nonexpert readers are.
11 Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 54.
12 Ibid., 52.
13 Ibid., 59.
14 Deidre Lynch, Loving Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 4.
15 Ibid., 5.
16 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1965), 10, I:44.
17 See Brian William Cowan, “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public
Sphere,” Eighteenth-century Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 352–353 and
Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 39.
18 Helen Small examines this dialectic between individual response
and collective standards in all its philosophically contentious detail
in The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 162.
19 Saikat Majumdar, “The Critic as Amateur,” New Literary History 48,
no. 1 (2017): 1–25.
20 Roland Barthes, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure
…,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 289.
21 For an influential example of such criticism, see Diane P. Freedman,
Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, eds., The Intimate
Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993).
22 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and
the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1989), 245.
23 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
24 There is, of course, an ongoing conversation about the merits
of critique and postcritique in literary studies. Michael Warner’s
26 The Critic as Amateur

“Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic, ed. Jane Gallop (New York:

Routledge, 2004) and Rita Felski’s body of work from The Uses of
Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) onward are key guides
for integrating middlebrow styles of reading into new reading
methods like uncritical reading or postcritique. In this collection, we
are also interested in the ways that middlebrow reading refuses to be
assimilated into professional practices. Merve Emre facetiously calls
such reading practices bad in Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers
in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
25 Beth Blum, “The Self-helpification of Academe,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2018. Available
online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Self-
Helpification-of/243861?key=d70YTgktpgcK7_T5bad8tW_
q9Vg3M9PbtHLjGTx5g7rXjhWW06_jJI0_00EPRb_
vQVZvY3RrdGdJeE05T0pTUjBZWTM3cFZuN1U5Skxx
YjZXWkUzSlJ5NW5Yaw.
26 Alain de Botton, “Can Tolstoy Save Your Marriage?” The Wall Street
Journal, December 18, 2010. Available online: https://www.wsj.com/
articles/SB10001424052748704828104576021713651690094.
27 Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books (Chapel Hill and London: UNC
Press, 1997), 10.
28 Ibid., 263.
29 de Botton, “Tolstoy,” n.p.
30 Ibid.
31 Talcott Parsons, “The Professions and Social Structure,” Social Forces
17, no. 4 (1939): 460. For more on Parsons in relationship to the
critic as amateur, see Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde, “Obliterature:
Toward an Amateur Criticism,” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 3
(2018): 511–543.
32 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New
York: Free Press, 1967), 198.
33 North, Literary Criticism, 12.
34 Ibid., 180.
35 Blum, “Self-helpification,” n.p.

Bibliography
Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond. 5 vols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, 10, I:44.
Bareket, Houman, Robert Barry, and David Winters, eds. The Digital
Critic: Literary Culture Online. New York: OR Books, 2017.
 Introduction 27

Barthes, Roland. “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure ….” In

The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989.
Blum, Beth. “The Self-helpification of Academe.” The Chronicle of Higher
Education. July 8, 2018. Available online: https://www.chronicle.
com/article/The-Self-Helpification-of/243861?key=d70YTgktpgcK7_
T5bad8tW_q9Vg3M9PbtHLjGTx5g7rXjhWW06_jJI0_00EPRb_
vQVZvY3RrdGdJeE05T0pTUjBZWTM3cFZuN1U5SkxxYjZXWk
UzSlJ5NW5Yaw (accessed August 18, 2018).
Buurma, Rachel Sagner and Laura Heffernan. “The Classroom in the
Canon: T.S. Eliot’s Modern English Literature Extension Course for
Working People and The Sacred Wood.” PMLA 133, no. 2 (2018):
264–281.
Cowan, Brian William. “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public
Sphere.” Eighteenth-century Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 345–366.
De Botton, Alain. “Can Tolstoy Save Your Marriage.” The Wall Street
Journal. December 18, 2010. Available online: https://www.wsj.
com/articles/SB10001424052748704828104576021713651690094
(accessed August 18, 2018).
Emre, Merve. Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Felski, Rita. The Uses of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, eds. The
Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993.
Garber, Marjorie. Academic Instincts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001.
Grundmann, Reiner. “The Problem of Expertise in Knowledge Societies.”
Minerva 55, no. 1 (2017): 25–48.
Guy, Josephine M. and Ian Small. “The British ‘Man of Letters’ and
the Rise of the Professional.” In The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, edited by A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence
Rainey, 377–388. Vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Kindley, Evan. “Little Magazines, Blogs, and Literary Media.” In
American Literature in Transition, edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Lynch, Deidre. Loving Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015.
Majumdar, Saikat. “The Critic as Amateur.” New Literary History 48, no.
1 (2017): 1–25.
28 The Critic as Amateur

McDonald, Rónán, ed. The Values of Literary Studies. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Mee, Jon. Conversable Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Micir, Melanie and Aarthi Vadde. “Obliterature: Toward an Amateur
Criticism.” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 3 (2018): 511–543.
Mishra, Pankaj. “Edmund Wilson in Benares.” New York Review of
Books. April 9, 1998. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/
articles/1998/04/09/edmund-wilson-in-benares/ (accessed June 9, 2018).
Molla, Rani. “Buzzfeed Is Losing Website Traffic as Readers Head
for More Traditional News Media.” Recode. November 30, 2017.
Available online: https://www.recode.net/2017/11/30/16709310/
buzzfeed-losing-web-traffic-readers-layoffs-uniques-prefer-news-over-
viral-sites (accessed June 9, 2018).
Nakamura, Lisa. “Words with Friends: Socially Networked Reading on
Goodreads.” PMLA 128, no. 1 (January 2013): 238–243.
North, Joseph. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Parsons, Talcott. “The Professions and Social Structure.” Social Forces 17,
no. 4 (1939): 457–467.
Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books. Chapel Hill and London: UNC
Press, 1997.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working-Classes. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Small, Helen. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
Picador, 2001.
Vadde, Aarthi. “Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the
Digital Publishing Scene.” New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017):
27–51.
Warner, Michael. “Uncritical Reading.” In Polemic, edited by Jane Gallop.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. 1925. New
York: Free Press, 1967.
Wood, Michael. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
 PART ONE

The Amateur
Impulse
30
 1
In Praise of Amateurism

Derek Attridge

Amateurism vs. professionalism

The figure designated by the term “amateur” has been the object
of both praise and blame for two centuries. At first (in the late
eighteenth century) a neutral term close to its French meaning,
“lover” or “devotee,” it wasn’t long before it was being used to make a
distinction between those who carry out an activity as professionals
and those who don’t—and this distinction led to the possibility of
a pejorative sense for the word and thence to the emergence in the
second half of the nineteenth century of the distinctly derogatory
term “amateurish.” The more obvious the need for professional
expertise in a particular activity, the stronger the criticism implied in
calling someone an amateur: an “amateur train-spotter” is almost a
tautology, an “amateur actor” carries a hint of disparagement, and
“amateur surgeon” is wholly condemnatory.
But there is also a long history of assuming that the
nonprofessional is to be preferred to the professional. This idea is
much older than the word “amateur” itself. It is there in Plato’s
representation of the rhapsode Ion in the dialogue of that name in
which Socrates makes fun of the professional performer of Homeric
epic who claims to be an expert but can’t say what it is he is an
expert in; it is reflected in the many self-deprecating comments
made by poets from antiquity to the present (the rhetorical trope
32 The Critic as Amateur

of recusatio is one version of this apologetic stance); it governs the

Renaissance ideal of the gentleman who carries out difficult tasks
with easy sprezzatura. In this latter instance, its close association
with class is evident: as a gentleman (and it was unquestionably a
masculine accomplishment) you demonstrated your superiority to
the lower echelons of society by doing naturally what they had to
work diligently and obviously at.
These class implications lingered until the recent past and perhaps
linger still in certain quarters. Sport is one example. I grew up in
South Africa playing rugby union, a strictly amateur game, and was
expected to regard the professionals who played the rugby league
version of the sport as distinctly ill-bred. The slow acceptance of
professional athletes into the Olympic Games during the course of
the twentieth century testifies to similar class issues. Looked at from
this angle, only those who can afford to pursue a sport or a study
project without financial recompense are able to be true amateurs.1
Praise of amateurism may not be as unprejudiced a posture as it
seems.
A related phenomenon is the mistrust of the expert.2 Here is the
blurb for a recent book as it appears on Amazon:

Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. We

have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical
and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In The Amateur,
thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our
lives—work, knowledge, cities, politics—have fallen into the
hands of box tickers, bean counters and rule followers.3

This mistrust was disastrously evident in the campaign in favor of

Brexit, when predictions of the dire economic effects of Britain’s
departure from the European Union were dismissed by populist
politicians on the grounds that they were the not-to-be-believed
utterances of experts, and similar rejections of available knowledge
have proved politically useful on a number of other occasions around
the world, not least in the most recent US presidential campaign as
well as in denials of the human responsibility for climate change
The prizing of the amateur has been in evidence in British
culture (and many other cultures) over a long period. The enduring
Romantic ideal of organic wholeness influentially advanced by
Schiller is opposed to the specialization that cultivates only one
 In Praise of Amateurism 33

aspect of human potential, while Wordsworth’s related attack on

the meddling intellect that murders to dissect has had numerous
echoes since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Victorian
age was the great era of the prominent amateur; the men we call
the “Victorian sages” did not acquire their eminence through any
professional association or endorsement but through their own
achievements.
The field of literary study has been particularly marked by this
tendency. Doubts about literature as an academic subject produced
much opposition to its acceptance as a legitimate subject for
university study, and the hostilities did not end when its supporters
were victorious. In 1937, for instance, Stephen Potter published The
Muse in Chains, whose title gives a clear pointer to its argument,
and in 1969 John Gross brought out, to wide acclaim, The Rise and
Fall of the Man of Letters in which he lamented the disappearance of
the taste-making literary colossus under the onslaught of academics
and experts.4 Exactly when this was supposed to have happened
remains unclear; Gross asserts that the founding of The Review of
English Studies in 1925 indicated that “the academic apparatchiks
were in full command” (189), but he also finds professionalism
rearing its blood-drained head in earlier centuries. Some of the
most heavy-hitting literary critics of the mid-twentieth century, F.
R. Leavis, R. P. Blackmur, and Kenneth Burke among them, had a
queasy relationship with academic specialisms,5 and the widespread
resistance to the influx of theoretical writing in the latter part of the
same century often reflected a distaste for technical terminology
deemed to be distant from the simpler and more genuine expressions
of literary appreciation.6
Echoing these diagnoses, but from a very different perspective,
Terry Eagleton argues in the Function of Criticism that “the
founding of English as a university ‘discipline’ […] entailed a
professionalization of literary studies which was quite alien to
the [Victorian] sage’s ‘amateur’ outlook, and more resolutely
specialist than the man of letters could afford to be.”7 He continues,
“Criticism achieved security by committing political suicide; its
moment of academic institutionalization is also the moment of its
effective demise as a socially active force.” Within academic English,
the conflict between “amateur” and “professional” was to continue,
transposed into a quarrel between “criticism” and “scholarship”
(65). In Loving Literature: A Cultural History, Deidre Shauna
34 The Critic as Amateur

Lynch traces the history of the idea that literary works are things
we might love, and, although she stops her narrative just before
the introduction of English literature into the university curriculum,
she notes the tension between the two conceptions of literary study
embodied in its academic institutionalization:

Our pursuits of rigor or campaigns for a new professionalism

have often been shadowed by expressions of nostalgia for
a past ostensibly readier to acknowledge that the project of
really understanding literature necessarily eludes the grasp of
expert cultures—readier to acknowledge that literature involves
readers’ hearts as well as minds, and their sensibility as well as
training.8

Some commentators on this tension between heart and head

regard it as not simply an opposition between two very different
approaches to literature but as the manifestation of a more
complicated relationship. One such was Stanley Fish, who, in a
set of essays collected in Doing What Comes Naturally (1989), set
his sights on the question of the bad odor into which the idea of
professionalism appeared to have fallen.9 Of these essays, the one
most fully relevant to the question of amateurism bears the title
“Anti-professionalism” and reaches the characteristically Fishian
conclusion that “anti-professionalism is professionalism in its purest
form” (245): in other words, expressing antagonism toward the
inroads of the bean counters and box-tickers, the narrow specialists
and the promotion-seeking game-players, is a quintessential gesture
of the academic professional. Furthermore, Fish argues that this
apparently self-contradictory state of affairs is not one we should
object to, since it is a manifestation of the paradox by which we live
our lives, wholly determined by the conditions and conventions of
our place and time yet unavoidably operating on the assumption
that we are not. Amateurism understood in this way, to extrapolate
from Fish’s argument, is the belief that we can best function as fully
active and astute human beings by trusting in our own free exercise
of powers and shunning the narrowness of disciplinary formations
and the lure of financial reward. And this belief is, Fish claims, at
the center of our professional activities and principles, since not
to hold it would be to surrender to helplessness in the face of our
determining context.
 In Praise of Amateurism 35

Bruce Robbins also argues that it is too simple to oppose the

amateur, in the guise of the “public intellectual,” to the professional.
“There are no more intellectuals today, we are told,” he writes in
Secular Vocations, or else there soon will be none, largely because
there is no longer room for them in our compartmentalized,
commodified, bureaucratized society. Society today makes room
only for professionals—credentialed carriers of institutionally
defined expertise who sell their commodity on the market, academic
or otherwise, and are thus constitutionally incapable of carrying on
the intellectuals’ public, independent, critical functions.10
Robbins’s challenge to this view begins with two chapters that
complicate the simple opposition between the amateur intellectual
and the professional academic, the first an analysis of the film
western The Professionals and the second, partly in response to
Fish, a discussion of the “professionalizing of literary criticism.”11
Although he is more receptive to the possibility of political action
on the part of the professional academic than Fish (or Eagleton),
Robbins, too, sees the stance of anti-professionalism as an aspect
of professionalism. Professional literary critics, he argues, “adopt
[…] an anti-professional point of view which seems capable of
representing and bestowing the legitimacy they fear they lack,”
concluding that “anti-professionalism is a ritual of professional
legitimation” (74).
Marjorie Garber echoes these refusals of an absolute distinction
between amateur and professional, though in a more sweeping
manner: “What is most fascinating is the way in which these terms
circulate to make the fortunes of the one rise higher than the
fortunes of the other, while determinedly resisting the sense that
one is always the necessary condition for the other.” And she adds
a further twist: “Not only are they mutually interconnected. Part of
their power comes from the disavowal of the close affinity between
them.”12 It would be impossible to intertwine the two apparently
opposing attitudes more intimately than this.

The amateur impulse

To write in praise of amateurism in literary studies, then, is to
plunge into this already full stream of debate and dissension. My
36 The Critic as Amateur

aim is to identify what might be valuable about the amateur impulse

without making myself complicit either with the naïve view of the
professional and the expert as blights on the living organism of
literary appreciation or with the sophisticated view that to do so
is merely a typical expression of professionalism. It is easy but not
very interesting to condemn the excesses of professionalism, such as
the overuse of technical terminology, the slavish following of critical
fashion, or the prioritizing of peer recognition and financial reward
over genuine inquiry, and this kind of objection, as Fish, Robbins,
and others have shown, is indeed part and parcel of the discourse
of professionalism itself. If to be professional in one’s dealings with
literature is to be aware of these dangers while acknowledging, and
attempting to embody in one’s work, such virtues as objectivity,
careful argument, scrupulous and thorough research, responsible
treatment of sources, and honorable behavior vis-à-vis one’s
colleagues, it is a label I willingly own up to. How, then, is it possible
to praise the amateur impulse in literary studies without falling into
either of the traps I have sketched and doing so in a way that avoids
undervaluing the real virtues of professionalism?
Let us first consider the vast professional edifice that has grown up
around literature. Very familiar are the various institutions involved
in the publishing industry, producing both works of literature and
works about literature: the agents who mediate between authors and
publishers, the teams of editors, designers, production managers,
proofers, indexers, and others who convert manuscripts into books
ready for the press, the printing and distribution industry that
produces and disseminates the book once it is made, the marketers
who advertise it, the booksellers who get it to the reading public,
the reviewers who assess it, and the lawyers who guard its copyright
and pounce on anyone they deem guilty of plagiarism. Then there
is the academic arena: the scholars who undertake research into
literature or use literature as evidence, the journals that publish
reviews and articles on literary topics, the libraries that hold
copies of books for general reading and materials for scholars to
consult, the universities that house and foster literary research, the
academies, institutes, and subject associations that promote literary
study, the workshops, conferences, and invited talks at which
literature and the investigation of literature are discussed. A further
huge field is that of education: the teachers, students, examiners,
administrators, and writers of textbooks who enable works of
 In Praise of Amateurism 37

literature to reach each successive generation, and the schools and

colleges in which literary education takes place. We may add to
all these the second-hand bookshops and auction houses selling
rare manuscripts and editions that find their way into collectors’
and libraries’ holdings. Literary works also play a major role in the
world of theater, which employs actors, directors, designers, and
front-of-house staff, and the world of cinema, which has an even
larger array of employees. All these activities require buildings to
be built, serviced, and maintained; finances to be organized and
maintained; and personnel to be trained and provided with the
necessaries of employment. This list, lengthy though it is, is far from
exhausting the catalog of occupations and institutions that make
possible the circulation, consumption, and study of literature.13
Now let us visualize a series of scenes: a man sitting on a bench
on a sunny afternoon with an engrossing novel in his hands; a
woman in her living room reciting a favorite poem to a visiting
friend; a theatergoer convulsed with laughter at a witty riposte
from a character on stage. And let us assume that these people are
not associated with one of the institutions listed in the previous
paragraph or any other branch of literary professionalism: each of
them qualifies as an amateur responding to a literary work. What is
the connection between these scenes and the massive enterprise that
constitutes the literary profession? My answer is straightforward:
the latter would not exist without the former.14 Were it not for the
experience of an individual reading, hearing, or seeing a literary
work, an experience repeated countless times through history
and across geographical spaces and social classes, there would be
no libraries of literary works; no literature classes or degrees; no
funding for literary research; no call for literary editions, histories,
biographies or exegeses; no literary academics, journals, or presses.
I’ve taken the case at the opposite pole of the professional
engagement with literary works, the out-and-out amateur, but
there is no reason why we should regard an amateur response as
limited to this category: professionals in the literature business, and
I include myself, when not grubbing in libraries, holding forth in
classrooms, speaking at conferences, writing our articles and books,
and so on, may well pick up a novel to read for the pleasure it
brings, enjoy a colleague’s recitation of a poem, or laugh at a comic
retort on stage, without doing so in what might be thought of as
a “professional” manner. The individual in question may be an
38 The Critic as Amateur

expert in stylistics or literary history or practical criticism, and he

or she may be a professor or a journalist or a reviewer, but in the
moment of engagement with the words of the text this expertise
takes second place to the singular, intimate, unpredictable response
to the literary work.
This is the point at which it is important to bear in mind the
inadequacy of the view that the amateur is opposed to the professional
and the expert through being untainted by external influences and
free to act as a completely autonomous being. It would be wrong,
and retrograde, to regard the moment of individual engagement
with the text as a moment of pure literary appreciation, the subject
liberated from the constraints of culture and convention interacting
with the words, or the genius, of the author. Every reading act,
which is also a reading event, is undertaken by an entity constituted
by a complex of cultural knowledges, habits, predilections, and
aversions; though we would normally call this entity a subject or
a self, I prefer to call it an idioculture, a neologism I have ventured
elsewhere on the model of idiolect, the unique version of a language
spoken by an individual.15 The reader or hearer is a singular
nexus in the network of cultural processes and products, and the
amateur experience I have described, whether by a professional or a
nonprofessional, is an encounter between a subjectivity constituted
by that cultural nexus and the equally complex cultural web
that comprises the literary work. Neither of these is an organic,
unchanging whole; on the contrary, it is their self-dividedness and
internal tensions that make creative engagements possible.
The idioculture of a literary academic, or agent, or editor, will
include elements derived from their profession, and it would be
foolish to try to exclude these in order to achieve a “pure” response
to a work of literature. I bring to my engagement with John Donne
the residue of my many forays into Renaissance literature, my study
of English meter, my somewhat shaky grasp of British history, my
knowledge of Early Modern English, and so on, but this does not
prevent my experience in reading or reciting from memory, say, “A
Valediction, Forbidding Mourning,” from being an amateur one in
the sense I want to advance. The man on the park bench with no
links to literary institutions also brings a richly complex idioculture
to bear on the work, some aspects of which may be more germane to
the novel he is reading than anything he could have acquired from
such institutions.16 The best reviewers of literary works in the mass
 In Praise of Amateurism 39

media may have little in the way of professional background but they
bring to their task the knowledge of a wide range of literary works
as well as other kinds of information, and sometimes the practical
awareness gained from their own creative efforts. The development
of the internet has made available an enormous, and enormously
hospitable, venue for critical responses to literary works, allowing
readers with greatly varying intellectual and cultural resources to
join the discussion.17
Crucially, however, an amateur reading, no matter by whom,
involves an openness to whatever the work, on a particular
occasion, will bring—a readiness to have habits and preconceptions
challenged and a willingness to be changed by the experience. A
professional reading in the narrowest sense of the word, by contrast,
will approach the text instrumentally, scrutinizing it for such things
as evidence of some historical trend, an insight into the psychology
of the author, signs of the influence of a precursor, or examples of
a stylistic device.18 Both kinds of reading, no doubt, bring pleasure,
but the pleasure of the scholar who has added to a bank of data is
different from the pleasure generated by a reading of the work as
literature, which is to say as the product of an author’s (or authors’)
creativity.
Reading or hearing a literary work, or seeing one performed, is
a multifaceted activity, and the contrast I have drawn between two
varieties, amateur and professional, is, of course, a simplification. I
can read “Goblin Market” for the sheer pleasure of its sounds and
images while at the same time making a mental note of its metrical
oddities or the impress on it of Victorian capitalism, and I can be
cognizant of the use of plot conventions in The Importance of Being
Earnest while chuckling at the comic repartee. Nevertheless, even
though both kinds of reading may operate simultaneously, both
often occur on their own. The distinction will allow us to pursue
the implications of amateurism further.

Roland Barthes, amateur

One writer who had a particular interest in the figure of the amateur
was Roland Barthes. In his autobiographical jottings, Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes compares his own piano-
40 The Critic as Amateur

playing and painting in watercolors to the genteel pursuits of the

nineteenth-century maiden who “produced uselessly, stupidly, for
herself, but she produced: it was her own form of expenditure,” and
this comment is followed by a paragraph headed “The amateur,”
which explores briefly the kind of production in question.19 Though
Barthes is not talking about the amateurism of reading, it is worth
noting his emphasis on the noncompetitive, non-heroic, self-pleasing
nature of the performance of the amateur. An engagement with
literature on this model would be noninstrumental, undertaken not
in order to achieve financial gain or professional advancement but
for the sake of the pleasure and insight provided by the experience
itself. In Camera Lucida, Barthes again addresses the question of
the amateur:

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the

artist: someone who cannot—or will not—achieve the mastery
of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it
is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the
professional: for it is he who stands closer to the noeme of
Photography.20

The amateur photographer is not trying to produce a work of art

but simply recording what is there. Again, we see the absence of a
motive beyond the most immediate impulse, and it is not difficult
to extrapolate from this scenario to an amateur engagement with
literature.
The figure of the amateur was more than a passing concern for
Barthes; it was central to his thought, as Adrien Chassain shows
in an essay that traces this fascination through several phases of
his career.21 For Barthes, the discourses of the lover (l’amoureux)
and the amateur are related: both are outside fashion, politics, and
theory.22 But, Chassain argues, the idea of the amateur eventually
changed for Barthes from a simple descriptive category to a figure
that he placed at the center of his utopian thought. In “Vingt
mot-clés sur Roland Barthes,” Barthes—echoing the famous passage
in Marx’s German Ideology on the distribution of labor that will
allow someone to fish, hunt, herd cattle, and write criticism at
different times of the same day—notes: “I can imagine a society
of the future, completely unalienated, which, in terms of writing,
would know only the activities of the amateur.”23 In a note that
 In Praise of Amateurism 41

did not make it into the published version of Roland Barthes by

Roland Barthes, he relates his adolescent dream of the “the role
of a universal amateur, capable of all types of writing.”24 Although
Barthes is still thinking of production rather than of consumption,
this utopian vision of the supremacy of amateurism is an appealing
picture that is worth adapting for reading practices. In fact, as I
have been arguing, it is already widespread, since only the most
died-in-the-wool fact-chaser does not, at times, read for the sake of
amateur pleasures.

Critical amateurism
What, then, are the implications of the notion of amateur reading
for critical practice? I am not, let me say at once, making an
argument for the cessation of scholarly work in such fields as
literary history, ideology critique, stylistics, or biography, even
though some of these activities may not be directly concerned
with the primary amateur experience of literature. I am arguing,
rather, for a recognition that none of these fields would exist
were it not for that primary experience, and for a better balance
between the amateur impulse and the professional apparatus in the
academic study and teaching of literature than exists at present.
Recent decades have been dominated by what Joseph North has
termed the “historicist/contextualist paradigm,” which he describes
as “the production of cultural and historical knowledge for an
audience of specialists.”25 Tom Eyers, in a further telling critique
of the ascendancy of empirical methods, identifies the rise of the
“digital humanities” as another culprit in the drift away from the
particularity of literary experience.26 These two new books are
among the signs of a heartening rebalancing in literary studies; as
Eyers himself puts it, “The years since the turn of the millennium
have seen a number of calls for a moratorium on the primacy of
historical and empirical methods, and for a return to the question
of what makes literature, literature” (11).
The obstacles to such a recalibration are significant, however.
A large number of academics in literature departments today were
trained as historians rather than as literary critics, and graduate
students are still urged to find topics that involve empirical
42 The Critic as Amateur

research rather than an engagement with the literary qualities

of the works they are studying or a theoretical reflection on the
operation of literature. The attraction of empirical approaches can
be understood partly as the availability of an immense storehouse
of subjects for PhD dissertations, articles, conference papers, and
monographs, often requiring only a modicum of literary sensitivity
and very little breadth of literary knowledge. There is no limit to
the nooks and crannies of cultural history that can be examined,
or the manuscripts and printed publications that can be edited, or
the ephemera that can be counted and classified. The marketization
of higher education has gone hand in hand with a privileging of
science and technology, and the humanities are now expected to
demonstrate the same subservience to the world of facts as the
scientific disciplines. Funding bodies look more favorably on data
collection than literary criticism, researchers are encouraged to
work in teams, and, in the UK at least, jobs are increasingly likely to
go to applicants who can demonstrate their skill at “grant capture”
rather than their ability to understand and appreciate novels,
poems, and plays. The very word “research,” with its scientistic
overtones, pushes the literary scholar into empirical zones. The
term “professional” sometimes gets attached to this understanding
of what constitutes literary study (a misuse of the term, to my
mind), and no one who is under its sway would reach for the word
“amateur.”
The best hope for a new emphasis on the amateur impulse
in literary studies, perhaps, lies in the classroom.27 The zeal for
positivist and empiricist approaches, it is true, has made itself felt
in high school and undergraduate teaching; a couple of decades ago
teachers of A-level English in England found themselves directed
to include attention to “context” (in an unavoidably impoverished
form), and many undergraduate students find themselves being
introduced to obscure corners of literary history at the expense
of more central works. The welcome expansion of the canon over
the past fifty years has sometimes led to a neglect of questions of
literary value in pedagogy, and students who are made to study
poorly executed literary works, which provide little in the way of
enjoyment, are not going to become the best critics. Nevertheless,
the primary activity in these classrooms still, I believe, is the
training of young people to become good readers of outstanding
literary works—readers, that is, who are sensitive to the formal
 In Praise of Amateurism 43

properties of works, alert to their handling of meaning, cognizant

of their relations to other works (contemporaneous, earlier, and
later), and, as I’ve stressed already, open to being surprised and
changed by what they experience. There is no reason why these
skills should be left behind by those few who go on to graduate
study and the even fewer with aspirations to join the academic
profession.
It is, at the very least, a useful exercise to imagine what
the academic study of literature with full acknowledgment
of the importance of the amateur impulse might look like. For a
start, the employment of literature purely to advance historical
knowledge would be left to history departments, unless it was the
history of literature that was being examined. Graduate students
would be encouraged to choose topics that involve the close
study of literary works (assuming these are works that merit such
study); promotion and funding committees would be as open to
critical studies as to data mining, archival research, and contextual
investigation; more academic books would foreground specifically
literary issues and fewer would be confined to a narrow historical
period. Critical commentary, instead of being driven by the need
to say something ingenious and unprecedented, would aim at an
accurate reflection of the critic’s experience.28 Perhaps a stronger
sense would emerge of the literary work as an event to be lived
through rather than an object to be examined, and formal features,
which are often either ignored or treated as static structures, would
be understood as an important part of the happening of the work.29
There might develop a greater overlap between the categories of
“scholar” and “critic,” and the idea of “research” in the humanities
would become more flexible. There would be fuller recognition
of the role of literary criticism in affirming and sustaining the
best literature—and in continuing to question the meaning of
“best” in this context. The classroom would become less a place
where information is conveyed and interpretations from different
approaches assessed and more a place where students are inspired
to let literary works affect them directly and individually.
As one illustration of the importance of amateurism, I will take
the study of meter. Generations of students have found this a subject
of forbidding complexity and one that bears very little relation
to their own experience of poetry. It is a highly professionalized
neck of the academic woods: there are long books sporting arcane
44 The Critic as Amateur

symbols and lists of forbidding Greek terms, and journals feature

lengthy disputes about the way to divide up particular lines or
analyze familiar rhythmic patterns. Having perpetrated some of
this material myself, I am not going to say it is a waste of time; it
is not for all comers, however. Much more valuable to the student
who wants to savor poems in regular meters to the full is the
amateur appreciation of rhythm, by which I mean the familiarity
with patterns of beats and offbeats that comes from listening to
thousands of examples of metrical song, as most young people will
have done by the time they are in college. Hip-hop in particular
inculcates a sophisticated, bodily understanding of the relation
between a regular beat and the accentual patterns of the language,
but all popular song relies on a metrical form that allows departure
and return, tension and release, in an onward pulsing movement.
If students can harness this understanding in responding to poems,
they need only the simplest technical methods to record it on the
page and discuss it with one another.
Critical amateurism, then, would carry the impulse of the amateur
reader into the professional arena, both acknowledging and seeking
to enhance the singular experience of the literary work that lies at
the heart of the institution to which we—students, teachers, critics,
and scholars alike—belong.

Notes
1 On the class distinctions implicit in the amateur/professional
distinction in sport, see Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5–9.
2 Ezra Pound, interestingly, makes a clear distinction between the
professional and the expert in the matter of poetry criticism,
preferring the amateur “quite often” to the professional but
upholding the expert against the amateurs who are trying to
“drown out the masters.” The expert, for Pound, gains mastery from
experience. See A. Walton Litz and Lawrence Rainey, “Ezra Pound,”
in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, volume 7, eds. A.
Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66.
3 Andy Merrifield, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You
Love (Second edition, London: Verso, 2018).
 In Praise of Amateurism 45

4 Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1937); John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of
Letters: Aspects of Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1969).
5 One of Blackmur’s best-known declarations was “Criticism, is, I take
it, the formal discourse of an amateur” (Language as Gesture [New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1952], 372).
6 For one book-length example of this resistance, see David Bromwich,
Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
7 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to
Post-structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 65.
8 Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.
9 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and
the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1989).
10 Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionals,
Culture (London: Verso, 1993), ix–x.
11 Chapter 2 of Secular Vocations is titled “Culture and Distance: On
the Professionalizing of Literary Criticism.”
12 Garber, Academic Instincts, 5.
13 Although the focus of this chapter is on literature, a similar picture
could be drawn of the institutions and practices pertaining in the
other art forms; the visual arts, in particular, have spawned a vast
speculative market driven by monetary appetites. The argument that
follows is equally applicable to these other branches of art.
14 As Garber would insist, the dependence operates in the other
direction as well: it is hard to imagine a reader who is immune from
the influence of such institutions as education and publishing. (Indeed
the very medium by means of which the work has reached the reader
carries the traces of several professional bodies.)
15 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Abingdon:
Routledge Classics, 2017), 28–30 and passim, and The Work of
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33 and passim.
16 In “The Critic as Amateur,” Saikat Majumdar gives an eloquent
account of the knowledges every reader brings to the act of
reading. “It can be any kind of knowledge,” he writes, “—that of
child-rearing, sports, furniture design, nature, banking, or, for that
matter, the affective knowledge of love, grief, or boredom” (New
Literary History, 48 (2017): 1–25, citation on p. 6).
17 The purchase of the comment site Goodreads by Amazon in 2013
signaled its success as a repository for amateur opinion, and in April
46 The Critic as Amateur

2016 it was reported that the site had hosted 50 million reviews
(https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/04/07/goodreads-reaches-new-
milestone-fifty-million-reviews/).
18 Reading instrumentally is not limited to professionals, however: an
amateur may read for the purpose of self-help or comfort—though
unless this purpose is wholly dominant, the work is always capable
of providing more (or less) than the reader bargained for. My thanks
to Aarthi Vadde for this point.
19 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52. A book-length
version of Barthes’s observation is Wayne Booth’s account of his
own amateur cello-playing in For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its
Rivals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
20 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 98–99. By the
noeme of photography Barthes means its essence, which he defines as
“That-has-been.”
21 Adrien Chassain, “Roland Barthes: ‘Les pratiques et les valeurs de
l’amateur’,” LHT Fabula, 15 (October 2015). Available online: http://
www.fabula.org/lht/15/chassain.html (accessed May 23, 2018).
Although Chassain finds a similarity between Barthes’s praise of the
amateur and Brecht’s, the latter’s approval of amateur acting had
more to do with the alienation produced by a certain clumsiness.
22 See Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).
23 “Je peux imaginer une societé à venir, totalement désaliénée, qui, sur
le plan de l’écriture, ne connaîtrait plus que des activités d’amateur.”
Cited in Chassain, “Roland Barthes,” from “Vingt mots-clès sur
Roland Barthes,” in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 4, Livres, Textes,
Entretiens, 1972–1976, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 861.
24 “le role d’un amateur universal, apte à toutes les écritures.” Roland
Barthes, Le lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’Ecole pratique des
hautes études 1973–1974 suivi de Fragments inédits du « Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes, » ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris:
Seuil, 2007), 261.
25 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 81, 115. North
provides a trenchant account of this turn, though he is less
convincing in his account of the critical practice he would like to see
in its place.
26 Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the
Critical Present (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Eyers offers a critique of the digital humanities as a “new positivism,”
with particular attention to the work of Franco Moretti and Stephen
 In Praise of Amateurism 47

Ramsey (34–56). He refers elsewhere to “the strangulating hegemony

of historicism in the literary disciplines,” “Theory over Method, or In
Defense of Polemic,” Critical Inquiry 44 (2017): 139.
27 See the essay by Kara Wittman in this volume for a discussion of the
undergraduate experience of literature.
28 For a discussion and examples of such “minimal interpretation,” see
Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on
Minimal Interpretation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
29 This sentence crystallizes one of the main arguments in Attridge, The
Singularity of Literature and The Work of Literature.

Bibliography
Attridge, Derek, and Henry Staten. The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on
Minimal Interpretation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. 2004. Routledge Classics.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
Attridge, Derek. The Work of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. Le lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’Ecole pratique
des hautes études 1973–1974 suivi de Fragments inédits du « Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes,» ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot. Paris:
Seuil, 2007.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1979.
Barthes, Roland. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 4, Livres, textes, entretiens,
1972–1976, ed. Eric Marty. Paris: Seuil, 2002.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Blackmur, R. P. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952.
Booth, Wayne C. For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Bromwich, David. Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group
Thinking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Chassain, Adrien. “Roland Barthes: ‘Les pratiques et les valeurs de
l’amateur’.” LHT Fabula. 15 (October 2015). Available online: http://
www.fabula.org/lht/15/chassain.html (accessed May 30, 2018).
Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to
Post-structuralism. London: Verso, 1984.
48 The Critic as Amateur

Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical

Present. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
Eyers, Tom. “Theory over Method, or in Defense of Polemic.” Critical
Inquiry 44 (2017): 136–143.
Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and
the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1989.
Garber, Marjorie. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001.
Gross, John. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of Literary
Life since 1800. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
Litz, A. Walton and Lawrence Rainey, “Ezra Pound.” In The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism, volume 7, edited by A. Walton Litz,
Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, 57–92.
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Merrifield, Andy. The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love.
Second edition. London: Verso, 2018.
North, Joseph. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Potter, Stephen. The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1937.
Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionals, Culture.
London: Verso, 1993.
 2
In the Shadow of
the Archive

Tom Lutz

The Critic as Amateur: immediately one recognizes the prompt, a

good idea for an essay, an excellent occasion for a collection of
essays, and the time seems right for reasons easy to uncover. For
those of us in this volume, though, it’s hard not to notice that we’ve
been given a contradictory task. The phrase can’t really apply to
us since we are all professional readers, professional critics, or
we wouldn’t be here. Most of us started as amateurs—at least I
have yet to meet the person who decided to become a professional
reader the way one might decide to become a stockbroker, or an
orthodontist, as a career choice that could marry talent and ability
to income and status, as a rational, economic choice. People become
tax attorneys for all sorts of reasons, but rarely because they were
reading IRS regulations under the covers with a flashlight as
children. Radiologists don’t begin their lives in love with reading
X-rays, and no one reads X-rays as a hobby, as a pleasure divorced
from professional duties. But people almost always love reading
novels or poetry long before they have any professional relation
to them. We readers are amateurs before we are anything else. We
become critics, at least in part, as a result.
They say everyone’s a critic, but they don’t mean everyone writes
criticism. Writing criticism, being a critic, is much more like being
an orthodontist. We don’t do it without a professional reason. We
50 The Critic as Amateur

might have opinions about a book and share them; we might even
blog about them, chat about them, bring them up at dinner parties.
But criticism—criticism recognized as such by other critics—is
something else. It’s not for amateurs.
Even now, as I write this, I find myself wandering away from
any love I have for the object—reading, books—toward various
professional goals, as if, much as I would like to talk about what I
love, the reading I love, the novels I’m reading right now that I love,
the novel that, as a boy, made me realize that I loved novels (The
Black Stallion)—much as I would like to talk about love, I almost
never get to it; I wander away. I’m pulled toward professional
business, toward criticism, toward those concerns that have little to
do with my life as a lover, pulled toward the thing I do after I have
been moved by a piece of writing or after I have failed to be moved
by a piece of writing: this, I watch myself thinking, this is your mind
on criticism.
I wander around the net following my Google search of the
phrase “the critic as amateur” and see what Saikat Majumdar has
to say about it—Majumdar’s essay is a reading of “Edmund Wilson
in Benares,” an autobiographical essay by Pankaj Mishra about his
reading life as a young man. I see what he says that Pankaj Mishra
has to say about it; I read Mishra, see what he feels Edmund Wilson
has to say about it, and then back to Majumdar’s piece, where
he talks about how Bruce Robbins and Marjorie Garber help us
understand Mishra’s postcolonial moment.1
And then, a few Google entries down, I come upon a piece Leslie
Fiedler published back in 1950, “Toward an Amateur Criticism,” in
The Kenyon Review: “The discrepancy,” he writes there, “between
the metaphors typical to the creative mind and those typical to
the critical mind in our world (and this is true often in the single
individual who practices both as poet and critic) indicate a quietly
desperate cleavage.”2 I begin to feel situated as I read these things,
I begin to feel like a critic, I begin to lose the object. I am cleaved,
I am whole.

***

I loved The Black Stallion as much as I loved horses back then,

the horses I loved before I read the book, despite the fact that the
book was as close to a horse as I had ever been. Conjuring those
 In the Shadow of the Archive 51

heady days of first, complicated literary engagement, I remember

the taste, the flavor, the rich visuality, the overfull experience of
that reading. I loved that beautiful, complicated, brilliant horse,
which the boy and the trainer go to pick up halfway around the
world; I loved the boy; I loved the world of the book, its density, its
artistry, its astounding ability to intertwine its visions with my own
desires—none of this, of course, even close to articulable for me at
the time. And ever since, I have fallen in love over and over again,
first with my sisters’ Nancy Drew books and Sherlock Holmes and
Fail-Safe, then Jack Kerouac, and Joseph Heller and Philip Roth
and Grace Paley and Flannery O’Connor, and somehow I began
reading Apuleius and Rabelais and Emily Brontë and Borges—all
of that and so much more when I was still an amateur, before I had
tasted criticism any farther than the New York Times Book Review,
before I knew the professional meaning of canon or context or
narrative or genre, before I had learned to think like a critic. Like
Mishra in Majumdar’s essay (and maybe I should mention that
I found myself, just now, flirting with amateurism, wanting to
say not Mishra in Majumdar’s essay but Pankaj in Saikat’s essay,
because when I was an amateur, authors and narrators felt real, not
like markers, not like ideas, or territories, or stand-ins for critical
concepts, but like, well, people, people who “talked” to me, who
told me stories)—at any rate, like Pankaj Mishra, I’ll say, I was an
autodidact. I was a prickly, rebellious youth: reactive, Oedipal. I
knew nothing and knew everything, especially knew that I didn’t
need the man to tell me what to read, didn’t need college, didn’t
need the establishment. The names and ideas that flashed by me
in the pages of the Book Review undoubtedly had some impact,
and I had a job in high school as a page at the public library and
saw a lot of books go by. My mother read literary novels, and
before I was a page I would see her stack of books sitting on
the dryer waiting to be taken back to that library and register
the names on the spines. Some would repeat, like Malamud and
Bellow, and so I intuited they had value. I remember nothing from
my English classes in high school, the high school from which,
like Spicoli, I rolled out of in a cloud of marijuana smoke—did
we even read books in those classes? I don’t know. But on my
own I read rapaciously, insatiably, before and through those years
and beyond. I remained wildly undereducated and undisciplined
but not unexposed to our field, not entirely lacking some idea,
52 The Critic as Amateur

however inchoate, of the literary. And perhaps that notion, that

there is a subset of books that are literary, is the first slip down the
slide from amateur to critic.

***

My evolving canon, during my twenties, was formed by the used

bookstore. For a few years I lived near Iowa City, and I bought
books from Alandoni’s on South Dubuque St. near the railroad
tracks, books that, I surmised later, had been used by students at
the Writers Workshop, an institution I hadn’t heard of yet. For fifty
cents or a dollar a piece I was thus accidentally introduced to the
stuff writers read. Alandoni, long-haired, bearded, and bespectacled,
was noticeably proud of his operation, and I understood, although
I didn’t have the words or concepts for it yet, that he was proud
of his curation. He was a sophisticated reader with strong tastes
that ran to the metafictional, so I read Barth, Barthelme, and
Pynchon, and wow, was I in over my head, and wow, did I love it. I
appreciated the parodic mimicry of The Sot-Weed Factor somehow,
despite never having read a single word written in the eighteenth
century.
I spent some of this time speed-dating authors, some of it as
a serial monogamist—reading all of Hesse in a row, then all of
Nabokov—and I reached new levels of ecstatic bewilderment
reading Ada. The French and Russian and German sprinkled
through that book was thrilling, and now it makes me wonder: how
much reading pleasure is like that, aspirational, aloft in the cloud of
unknowing, full of the promise of some future self that might read
a book like that and understand it, a future self that could read
French, German, and Russian?—after all, this guy, this Vladimir, he
could read and write them all, it was possible, it was doable, it was
within reach. I loved thinking of myself as the kind of person who
one day could really read the book I was reading.
So, an amateur. A lover. Very much not a professional. And as
I write about that time in my life I find myself having little flashes
of dread—my readers here, that is, the readers of this chapter, this
volume, are all critics, all careful analysts, all alert to my missteps.
They will immediately know that I’m just wandering around,
drifting, meandering around the subject, not getting anywhere, not
scoring any points, hardly professional even now. So, in a panic,
 In the Shadow of the Archive 53

I look for a citation, something that will justify me, something to

shore against my ruins. I grab this from Leslie Fiedler’s essay, as he
tries to explain why criticism will never be a science:

The primary act of faith which makes criticism possible compels

the critic under any circumstances to speak as if to men and not
to specialists. The compulsory comprehensibility of the critic is
not a matter of pandering to indolence, prejudice or ignorance,
but of resisting the impulse to talk to himself or a congeries
of reasonable facsimiles of himself. In an age of declining
sociability and the widespread failure of love, it is difficult to be
an amateur.3

I love that, but it doesn’t help my cause much. Even Fielder, in

defense of the amateur, tells me not to do what I’m doing: I’m
writing as if to readers, yes, but very much to congeries of myself,
too. Maybe I can’t be a critic and an amateur at the same time?
Perhaps it’s impossible, and perhaps that means that this whole
volume’s premise is a problem, not a proposition? I wonder if what
I should do is act like a critic, write like a critic, think like a critic as
I praise the amateur, elevate the amateur, pretend that a critic can—
despite the widespread failure of love—indeed love the amateur,
appreciate the amateur, explain the amateur. Because at least, if
nothing else, we can be the amateur’s critic; schooled in the tools of
appreciation, we can perhaps appreciate the amateur.
Majumdar’s piece on Mishra, Saikat’s on Pankaj, is this, in
part: an appreciation. He reads Mishra’s amateurism as a lack of
professionalism, which, to be fair, is how Pankaj presents it himself.
But Saikat’s essay is not just about amateurism, not just about
reading; it is about the world and about the relation of reading
to the world. He makes us feel the oddity, the fish-out-of-water
tentativeness of Pankaj, this provincial autodidact, sneaking into the
library of a quasi-provincial university in what Mishra would go on,
years later, to call “the ruins of empire,” fueled by, in Majumdar’s
words, a “vague but ineluctable” desire to read, a desire that is
always also a yearning for an achieved cosmopolitanism, reading
being, it turns out, for Pankaj, for me, for so many, the sweet price
of acquiring cosmopolitan identity.4

***
54 The Critic as Amateur

My own provincialism at the age of eighteen was intense, despite

how physically close I was to the center of empire, growing up an
hour outside of New York City. Pankaj, 8,000 miles away, was
reading the TLS, Partisan Review, and New York Review of Books,
none of which I had ever heard of, even though the latter two were
published within thirty miles of my house. The shadow of empire
is cast very close to its center, cast there perhaps not dissimilarly to
the way it shades its outposts; that is, as I read Majumdar’s piece,
I felt an absolute kinship with Pankaj. We both read compulsively,
both felt our provincial stain, both consorted with desperate and
criminal characters in our reading and our lives, both craved an
arrival that was textual—we weren’t looking for money (except
to eat) or careers, we were looking for some transcendence we
had endowed literature with the power to bestow. The boy in The
Black Stallion was not me, really—he had a horse, he traveled to
“Arabia”—but Pankaj, the boy with the cosmopolitan longing in
Varanasi, trying to quench that thirst by reading, yes, c’est moi. “The
dream of cosmopolitanism conceived in the provincial periphery”?
Yes, that was my dream, the offstage prize I fumbled toward,
marooned in my own ignorance on the suburban periphery, then
on the Midwestern periphery, working with my hands at building
sites, at farms, at restaurants—Mishra’s cosmopolitan dream was
my dream, the achievement of it promising to lift me not out of my
socioeconomic position, but out of my witlessness.
Mishra, as we know, quickly became a professional: no amateurs
publish regularly in the New York Review of Books. Mishra’s route
to professional reading was, again like my own, circuitous, though
he had several years of college under his belt by the time he was
having trouble understanding Edmund Wilson. Among my odd
jobs in my amateur years was one cooking breakfast and lunch for
students at a small college in Dubuque, Iowa. I was an anomaly
there, the one young man working with a half dozen middle-aged
women, and they quite religiously enforced our coffee and lunch
breaks on the precise right minute each day, at which point I would
pull out a book and read while they talked about their lives, lives
of husbands and kids that had very little overlap with my own
countercultural debauchery. They thought I was an oddball, but we
were all quite friendly. The used bookstores in Dubuque were not as
strenuously curated as Alandoni’s, but most used bookstores result
in a coherent curriculum of sorts: a combination of the shopowner’s
 In the Shadow of the Archive 55

taste, the books that ended up in someone’s library before death

caused their boxing up and dropping off, the books that sold
enough copies that at least some were likely to survive the ravages
of time, the books that were assigned in courses so had a better than
average chance of still being on a shelf.
And we used bookstore buyers develop a keen sense of our own.
Certain bindings draw the aficionado of beach reads, certain trim
sizes stand out to the avant-gardist, and since shopping often means
wandering down uncategorized shelf after haphazard shelf, taste
culture becomes physicalized, the shopper becoming like a gold
panner, sifting through stacks to spy the ore. I had gone on a Freud
and Nietzsche kick, and when the school’s financial aid director saw
me reading Beyond Good and Evil during one of the kitchen staff’s
coffee breaks, he stopped and asked me what my story was. Not
sure what he was asking, I just said: Story? Yes, he said, I see what
you’re reading every day. Are you a college graduate? No, I said and
laughed, no, never went to college, and I wondered how much of
my complex emotions about that I betrayed—it was both the chip
on my shoulder and the self-conferred epaulet that covered it. He
said, well, you could go here for free if you wanted.
College after all. It turned out, I realized later, he was just
looking for warm bodies to attach Pell Grants to, another camel to
transport Pell Grants across the small college desert, but at the time
I was, well, honored, flattered, and I agreed. For the next couple
years I cooked from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM and then went to classes
in the afternoons and evenings. I very quickly realized that there
were people, called professors, who talked about books for a living,
read books for a paycheck. I wanted a job like that, a job that
involved no piles of grilled cheese sandwiches, a job where reading
was not just lunch-break enthrallment but work, a calling, a living.
I started to become a professional, almost from my first day as
long-in-the-tooth undergraduate; I started to become a critic.

***

Of course now this chapter has devolved into a somewhat boring

story, which would probably be told much better by someone else
and would no doubt be much more captivating if it was about
somebody else, preferably a famous writer. I worry that, so far, the
story is not particularly compelling, however to the point it might
56 The Critic as Amateur

be, and we know that, as Fiedler says, “The critic’s unforgivable sin
is to be dull.” My professional self put that line in, again suddenly
desperate for a citation, a source, an authority, and it’s a paltry
offering, since Fiedler was such a disreputable professional, such
a renegade figure, writing against professionalism and in favor
of pornography, so committed to being a maverick it appeared
contrived. Still, I feel the need to buttress this all with some
critical concepts and references, and he’s better than nothing. I
need to demonstrate my fealty to the archive, as Majumdar says
the professional must, even as I try to understand how I came to
read without one. I find myself wondering, as I muck about in the
residue of those years, why Nietzsche? Freud made sense—he was
the world’s most famous psychologist; I was screwed up and needed
help. But Nietzsche? How did I come upon him? Then I realize:
someone must have talked about him in another book—yes, that’s
it; my syllabus was generated intertextually. Aha! A concept. An
archive! I’m making some progress!
Until I started taking courses in my late twenties, the closest
I came to having an archive I recognized as such was the
board-and-cinder-block shelf full of books I had read and about
which I was overweeningly proud. It was possible, I was told as I
registered for classes, to get credit for outside learning and skip some
requirements; I needed just to bring a list of books to a professor, who
would examine me on them and give me credit for a corresponding
course. I put together a list of all the novels I had read and was
again quite pleased with myself. It was a long list, a hundred books
or more. I asked to be given credit for a survey of English literature.
The professor looked at it and smiled. All but three or four of these
books were published in the last fifty years, he said. Okay, I thought,
wondering why he thought that might be worth saying and also
marveling that I had never noticed it. Very few of them are British,
he added, and many are translations. He smiled again, finding me
an interesting specimen. I’m very glad you’ve read all these books,
he added, it’s all very impressive, but it is not a survey of English
literature; it’s a survey of the mid-twentieth-century American novel
with some translations and random texts thrown in. There is no
poetry, no nonfiction, nothing between Beowulf and Virginia Woolf.
(There was no Beowulf or Virginia Woolf, either, he just couldn’t
resist the joke, which I filed away to understand later.) I’m afraid, he
said, I can’t exempt you from the survey course for this.
 In the Shadow of the Archive 57

And so my reading started to be professionalized, even in

retrospect. I understood there were historical periods, and that they
mattered. There were national boundaries, and they mattered. There
were original languages, and that mattered. Everything in my little
archive shifted. Marjorie Garber claims that the terms amateur and
professional “produce each other and they define each other,” but
that doesn’t feel exactly right.5 The professional simply redefines
the amateur object. My amateur reading was being transformed,
retroactively, by professional categories.
But perhaps not completely transformed. I remained undisciplined
(and remain so yet). I managed to find a new university that allowed
me to design my own major and then went on to a do-it-yourself,
interdisciplinary PhD program that allowed me to continue my
amateur recklessness. Mishra writes, in the original NYRB essay
(how it eases my professional panic to call on him to say what I
want to say): “I read randomly, whatever I could find, and with
the furious intensity of a small-town boy to whom books are the
sole means of communicating with, and understanding, the larger
world.”6 And Majumdar (ditto, what a relief to have him pitch in
here) understands the autodidactic impulse and its frustration with
curricula, and that frustration’s relation to provincial self-fashioning
and provincial self-loathing. I spent my time in these schools
never losing my sense of being a rube, my self-identification as the
working-class kid who didn’t go to college—and, indeed, I emerged
from that decade of immersion with a Stanford PhD feeling as
unsophisticated and frightfully undereducated as ever, with no field
to call my own, no sense of mastery, no worldliness, no sense of
arrival, the yearning and desire to be at home in the world as fresh
as it had ever been.
My self-image was fictional, full of contradictions: how can a
kid who didn’t go to college have a PhD? Well, as it turns out, it is
easy to hold such contradictions—it’s just me; it’s me in my own
deepest story. How can someone still feel like an outsider after four
years at Stanford as a TA, however transient that position is? And
then I spent three years in the belly of that institution as a full-time
lecturer. But in my story, I remained unschooled, and being inside
did nothing to alleviate the feeling of being outside. Even these
many years later, officially a Distinguished Professor, I still feel like
I don’t belong, that I am not like the other Distinguished Professors,
that I am an autodidactic, undereducated, not-very-well-brought-
58 The Critic as Amateur

up, etiquette-challenged, insufficiently professionalized poseur, an

imposter in academic regalia.
But this chapter can’t go on being about me and my little
quandaries, can it? Where’s the central idea? Where’s the
disciplinary context? What is the critical theory validating this
excursus? Like the idea that Shakespeare is the greatest writer
because he never appears in his text (Iris Murdoch: “He’s the most
invisible of writers”), most forms of criticism shun the personal,
certainly the confessional, the anecdotal, because we understand
the paucity of the personal, the fallacy of the affective, and so we
mostly ignore the feeling of what happens when we read—unless,
of course, we happen to be writing about “the reader,” which,
in critical discourse, always means the amateur reader, not the
professional.7 In any case, if so many authorities agree, it must be
right: the author should disappear. Flaubert: “The artist must make
posterity believe he never lived.” And so should the critic. Kundera:
“The archive’s ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous
common grave.”8 I hope it is clear I am upping the RPM now, the
references per minute, as a defense against the eruption of personal
feeling, a defense against the anecdote. And I hope it is clear that I
mean it to be a little funny.
Because all of this is always already (wink) personal, always
situated in experience, as Majumdar reminds us. Like Mishra,
Nirad C. Chaudhuri was a provincial autodidact, and also a
“polymath,” a label that is an honorific form of “undisciplined.”
Chaudhuri’s distaste for specialization and the curricular structure
of the university, according to Majumdar, was a form of active
resistance to the colonial project, which it very well may have been,
and yet, Chaudhuri, c’est moi, aussi. His “absurdly utopian desire
to become a polymath scholar”? Everything I’ve done, from the
motley assortment of books I’ve written, all of which manage to
slip through multiple disciplinary cracks, to Los Angeles Review
of Books—all my work has been wayward and resistant to
specialization, all of it displays utopian polymathic tendencies. I
am, if anything, a hopeless encyclopediac, and this undoubtedly is,
again, a cosmopolitan desire. Perhaps it is also a very understandable
méconnaissance: the archive as crooked mirror. C. L. R. James, V. S.
Naipaul, Chaudhuri, Mishra—all these postcolonial writers of the
former British empire teach themselves a polymathic relation to
the archive rather than a specialized one, and for Majumdar this
 In the Shadow of the Archive 59

is central to their resistance. I suppose that, since America housed

some of the earliest postcolonial subjects, it is not surprising that
we have consistently sprouted autodidact polymaths (Benjamin
Franklin, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass,
Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Thomas Edison, Emma Goldman, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Malcolm X, Steve Jobs) and autodidact writers (Louisa
May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Faulkner, Maya
Angelou). Autodidacticism can be the result of a desire lacking
means of fulfillment—that is a lack of educational opportunity—
or it can be a quirk, a choice, a resistance. What determines the
idiosyncrasies of our méconnaissance? Why do some of us allow
our amateur lives to be erased by professionalism? Why do some
resist the very professionalism that pays our rent?
Perhaps it is a bit like asking why some of us love Gertrude
Stein while she leaves others cold. Why do some of us, never
having met a horse, fall in love with horses? Why do some of us
embrace nationalism, or a region, or a race, while others desire
cosmopolitanism, the more tenuously rooted the better? Why do we
love what we love, whatever our profession? And of whom should
we ask these questions? The amateur, the scholar, the critic? The
rootless cosmopolitan in me says: all three.

***

We wandering cosmopolitans in the shadow of the archive

desire nothing more than to devour it, piece by piece, to assimilate
the object of our enrapturement. The scholar and the critic pretend
to have already ingested it all, pretend to a comprehension that we
know—that we even explicitly argue—is unachievable. The black
stallion glistens in the morning light; the Arabian desert stretches
out, consumes my life, my bed, my world, my night, as the bright
low rising Middle Eastern sun makes of me a different boy, a boy
who has left New Jersey forever, who lives in some larger world,
who partakes of so much more than my little postage stamp of soil
can offer. The stallion is afraid of the boat that will take him across
the sea, afraid of the storm. The horse’s trainer, the professional,
tries to calm him, to help him venture into new worlds, help him
cross the immeasurable ocean to his new home, but the stallion
60 The Critic as Amateur

is inconsolable. Can it be that only the boy knows how to touch

the animal, that only he knows how to caress the sleek beast’s
wildness?
Yes: only the untutored boy, it turns out, in his boundless yearning,
knows how to become one with the steed, how to bring him home,
how to allow for the squalls and waves smashing and shuddering
the hull (they are not real! he tells the horse), how to allow for the
messiness, for glorious incomprehension, for incommensurability,
for love, under the covers, falling into a dream.

Notes
1 See Pankaj Mishra, “Edmund Wilson in Benares,” New York Review
of Books, April 19, 1998. Available online: https://www.nybooks.
com/articles/1998/04/09/edmund-wilson-in-benares/ and Saikat
Majumdar, “The Critic as Amateur,” New Literary History 48, no. 1
(2017): 1–24.
2 Leslie A. Fiedler, “Toward an Amateur Criticism,” The Kenyon
Review 12, no. 4 (1950). Available online: https://www.
kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/kenyon-reviewcredos/selections/
leslie-a-fiedler-656342/.
3 Ibid.
4 Majumdar, “Critic,” 24.
5 Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 5.
6 Mishra, “Edmund Wilson,” n.p.
7 Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature,
ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1997), 262.
8 Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel,
trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

Bibliography
Fiedler, Leslie A. “Toward an Amateur Criticism.” The Kenyon Review 12,
no. 4 (1950): 561–574. Available online: https://www.kenyonreview.
org/kr-online-issue/kenyon-review-credos/selections/leslie-a-
fiedler-656342/.
 In the Shadow of the Archive 61

Garber, Marjorie. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2001.
Mishra, Pankaj. “Edmund Wilson in Benares.” New York Review of
Books. April 9, 1998. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/
articles/1998/04/09/edmund-wilson-in-benares/.
Majumdar, Saikat. “The Critic as Amateur.” New Literary History 48,
no. 1 (2017): 1–24.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher. New York:
HarperCollins, 1998.
Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” In
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature,
edited by Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin, 1997.
62
 3
“It’s All Very Suggestive, but
It Isn’t Scholarship”

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

It is essential to emphasize that there is nothing definitive here …

I have done scarcely more that put down some preliminary
markers for more detailed future investigations. My concerns are
heuristic and my conclusions are strictly provisional.
—Paul Gilroy1

It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought,

taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully
and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able
they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was, that
his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated
into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the
other.
—Virginia Woolf2

I was preparing for my doctoral qualifying exams. The professor

and I were discussing Paul Gilroy’s 1993 work of diaspora theory,
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. I take
meticulous notes (notetaking, a practice in which I have no training,
only practice, has always been my primary research methodology)
and so I know that it was March 25, my mother’s birthday.
64 The Critic as Amateur

I also know that my responses to the Gilroy were organized

around the following subjects, central to the book: tradition,
modernity, culture, diaspora, music, the self. These were mammoth
assemblages, transnational and transhistorical, necessitating both
Gilroy’s interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies
and his idiosyncratic archive, spanning subjects and texts like
the late nineteenth-century Fisk Jubilee Singers, Richard Wright’s
reconfiguration of black authorship, and Toni Morrison’s 1987
novel, Beloved.
Gilroy’s method in The Black Atlantic is associative, cocreative,
analogical, comparative. In order to theorize the transatlantic
black diaspora, he draws connections across genre and time. He
offers, as quoted in the first epigraph, “nothing definitive.” This
self-description situates Gilroy, who received his PhD from the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham
in 1986, and worked as an editor and columnist before becoming
an academic, in the tradition of the bricoleur, who puts to page the
“preliminary markers” that are ready to hand (the song he has just
heard, the novel he has just read). His conclusions are “provisional.”
He “does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution …
[he speaks] through the medium of things: giving an account of his
personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited
possibilities.”3
Neither Gilroy’s archive nor approach troubled me. I had
arrived at Berkeley’s interdisciplinary PhD program in Rhetoric
from Duke’s interdisciplinary program in Literature, where
“Introduction to Cultural Studies” was a required undergraduate
course. In between degrees, I worked as a magazine editor. I was
accustomed to moving across fields, to marshalling motley objects
in service of my subjects. I was jazzed about Gilroy’s theorizations
of “tradition as a changing same,” “countercultures of modernity,”
“anti-anti-essentialism,” the “magic” audibilities of music, and
the generatively homonymic “roots” and “routes” that structure
diasporic sensibilities. I was making connections to a wide range
of thinkers, including Benedict Anderson, Rey Chow, Inderpal
Grewal, and Stuart Hall.
After listening for some time to my exuberant exegesis of the
text, the professor’s nod gave way to a qualified dismissal. “Yes,
yes,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s all very suggestive, but it isn’t
scholarship.”
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 65

It’s all very suggestive

Because that’s what I was supposed to be learning: how to be a
scholar, conduct research, and approach the literary text as an
object of knowledge qua knowledge through accepted disciplinary
methodologies. How to master the text, become an expert, or at
least, perform expertise. Gilroy’s “preliminary markers for more
detailed future investigations” apparently didn’t cut it, and that
exchange over The Black Atlantic has stayed with me for nearly
a decade. If The Black Atlantic, published by Harvard University
Press, no less, wasn’t scholarship, what was it? And what was
its relation to a constellation of adjacent genres, like literature,
journalism, creative nonfiction, and criticism? While withholding
a direct critique of cultural studies, the professor was calling into
question the interdisciplinary and political thrust of Gilroy’s writing.
In specifying “suggestion” as the opposite of scholarship, he further
implied the following: first, that a text’s associative threads, however
finely knitted, did not constitute a scholarly archive; second, that a
text’s ability to provoke its reader did not count as a contribution
to scholarship; third, that a scholarly text was one that offered
instruction, not interlocution.
Association. Provocation. Interlocution. Each of these qualities
characterizes a mode of writing that resounds with what Virginia
Woolf memorably calls “the power of suggestion.” These words,
quoted in the second epigraph, appear in the final chapter of A Room
of One’s Own in which Woolf considers Coleridge’s theory of the
“resonant and porous” androgynous mind that “transmits emotion
without impediment; that … is naturally creative, incandescent,
and undivided.”4 Mr B’s remarks on poetry, by contrast, emerge
from a wholly masculine mind; “acute and full of learning” though
they are, they do not transmit emotion and are neither creative nor
undivided. “Thus,” Woolf continues, “when one takes a sentence of
Mr B in to the mind it falls plump to the ground—dead.”5
Woolf’s has always seemed to me the best description of the
highest aspiration of writing: that it lives. Granted, I am taking
liberties by moving from the juxtaposition of suggestion and
scholarship, anecdotally offered, to Woolf’s discussion of gendered
criticism. But I am inferring from Woolf’s negative description of
Mr B that he is guilty of precisely that which Gilroy avoids and
which the professor’s ideal “scholarship” offers: definition, mastery,
66 The Critic as Amateur

avowals of expertise. Mr B is guilty, in other words, of thinking

he is thinking great thoughts, which, to cite poet Kay Ryan, “do
not nourish / small thoughts / as parents do children.” “Like the
eucalyptus,” Mr B’s plump, dead sentences “make the soil / beneath
them barren. / Standing in a / grove of them / is hideous.”6
Mr B’s criticism, in contrast to Gilroy’s, leaves the reader
unmoved, unnourished. Unlike Coleridge’s androgynous sentences,
his words do not “[give] birth to all kinds of other ideas”; they
lack “the secret of perpetual life.”7 They present on the page, but
midwife nothing. This is not only a defect of nonfiction. Reading a
celebrated novel by Mr A, Woolf criticizes the inspiration-blocking
egocentrism of its first-person narrative: “the dominance of the
letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which like the giant beech tree, it casts
within its shade. Nothing will grow there.”8 Mr A’s is an “I” that
divides and directs, instructs and describes, leaving the soil beneath
it barren. It is significant that the writers under consideration are
Misters A and B, along with Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling, who
Woolf identifies as “crude and immature,” lacking the “spark of
the woman,” which also means lacking (crucially, for our purposes)
“suggestive power.” “And when a book lacks suggestive power,”
Woolf continues, “however hard it hits the surface of the mind it
cannot penetrate within.”9
Arid, barren, lifeless: the text lacking in suggestive power,
the masculine text. Incandescent, undivided, nourishing: the
androgynous text, resonant with suggestive power. For Woolf, it is
the female principle that cocreatively enables the latter to “penetrate”
the mind of the reader. Importantly, however, this is not the kind of
penetration that feminist writers like Trinh T. Minh-ha describe as a
scientistic will to knowledge that “perforate[s] meaning by forcing
… entry,” “a mentality that proves incapable of touching the living
thing without crushing its delicateness.”10 The mode of penetration
Woolf describes does not force entry into the object to be known;
instead, it goes below the surface of the mind of the knower-reader
in order to plant there a seed. To give life to new thought. To suggest.
“Suggestion” (n): the process by which an idea brings to the mind
another idea by association or natural connection; a prompting
from within.
Suggestive, not scholarship, the professor said: as if the text’s
ideas, quotable nuggets and Easter eggs, redolent coinages, were
impure, unearned, products of spontaneity not rigor.
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 67

“Suggestion” (n): the putting into the mind of an idea, an object

of thought, a plan; the insinuation of a belief or impulse into the
mind of a subject by words, gestures, or the like.
Suggestive, not scholarship: as if the text were planting wayward
seeds within its reader, which might sprout into beanstalks but only
at the risk of her losing herself in the clouds.
It was all very suggestive, but it wasn’t scholarship. And why not?
Because there was “nothing definitive here.” No “definition” (n): the
setting of bounds or limits; limitation, restriction; determination,
decision; the action of making definite. No “precise statement of the
essential nature of a thing.” No “stating exactly what a thing is, or
what a word means.”
Definition is singular. Suggestion, plural. Definition is pledge.
Suggestion, potential. Definition is closed and bound. Suggestion
open, unbound.
To define is to fix, to render timeless, to answer. To suggest is to
lay bare the contingent, to inhabit the temporal, to question.
To define is to master; there is no definition without knowing. To
suggest is to wager, to suspend the pretense.
Definition avows certainty over suggestion’s possibility.
To define is expert. To suggest, amateur.
And yet.
Without the power of suggestion, no sound carries.
Without the power of suggestion, no unification of meaning.
Without the power of suggestion, death.

But it isn’t scholarship

After the exchange over The Black Atlantic, I passed my exams,
earned a PhD, and became faculty in an English department. But
I am still thinking through the professor’s distinction between
“suggestion” and “scholarship.” On the one hand, it was neither
strictly negative (scholarly vs. non-scholarly) nor simply about
credentials (scholar vs. layperson). On the other hand, it was a
clearly damning judgment of interdisciplinary criticism that spans
the academic, journalistic, and creative. In what follows, I examine
instances of such criticism in a range of institutional contexts in
order to situate Gilroy’s forgoing of the definitive in the broader
68 The Critic as Amateur

context of a “critical amateurism” that characterizes suggestive

writing across genres.
I am an academic who identifies as a “writer” more than as a
“scholar.” This is in part because of my background in journalism.
I started submitting letters to the editor and personal essays to
local outlets as a preteen. When my classmates were aspiring
doctors, I said I would be “an essayist.” At fifteen, I began writing
a regular column for India Currents, a features and opinions
magazine that had been a mainstay for California’s Indian
American immigrants since the late 1980s. After graduating
from college, I became the chief editor of that magazine. Once
in graduate school, I freelanced for venues on three continents,
from international standard-bearers like The New Yorker and The
Caravan, to a range of publications at the intersection of academic
and public writing, like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public
Books, and Guernica.
My editorial and journalistic work was often directly related
to my doctoral research; on many occasions, I was edited by
other academics. But as the language of my public and creative
essays began to cross-pollinate with that of my dissertation, some
faculty chafed. I was cautioned against being journalistic (“This
introduction reads like a movie trailer”). I was told to return to
the literature, not labor to produce my own. As I wrote myself into
treatments of texts by which I felt hailed, I was urged to desist.
“What are you doing? … Is what you are doing scholarship, or
are you moonlighting? … To whom are you writing these hybrid
texts?”11 Write scholarship, not journalism. Write scholarship, not
literature. Write scholarship, not creative nonfiction.12
I was participating in what LARB editor Evan Kindley describes
as “a boom in public writing by younger academics.”13 This boom
has been widely discussed in relation to two concurrent phenomena:
the evisceration of the tenure track and adjunctification of higher
education, which leads many graduate students into journalism, first
as an “alt-ac” side gig and then as a profession,14 and the rise of a
new culture of public intellectualism and the advent of hybrid “little
magazines” welcoming to academics “hungry for new audiences and
broader forms of intellectual exchange.”15 My aims were somewhat
different. It wasn’t a new audience I was after exactly, nor publicity
as such, and I was not audaciously pursuing the mantle of public
intellectual. Rather, I sought opportunities to publish in what Lili
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 69

Loofbourow and Philip Maciak term “semipublic” forums because

of the form of writing such outlets afford.16
For Loofbourow and Maciak, semipublic writing is like “giving
a public lecture, starting a colloquium series, or organizing a
conference.”17 For Sharon Marcus, editor of Public Books, semipublic
writing is “teacherly”: “[it] does not avoid difficult ideas or terms; it
explains them … adopt[ing] a pedagogical stance.”18 I find the term
“semipublic” useful as a qualification of Kindley’s “public writing.”
The semipublic bridges critical and scholarly genres, public and
academic audiences, and the institutional contexts of journalism
and the university. Stylistically, this might mean that endnotes are
permissible, yet spare. References to scholarly texts abound but are
explained. Professional academics are valued but not privileged
addressees. Unlike writing that seeks the widest possible public
address, the semipublic informs a relatively rarefied audience. By
that same token, it is more collaborative than scholarly writing:
multiple editors are typically involved, and the swift publishing
pace enables timely reader feedback.
Semipublic writing is one example of what I am calling critical
amateurism. It approaches Gilroy’s and Woolf’s descriptions of the
non-definitive and suggestive. It pursues moments of re-cognition,
values readerly pleasure, catalyzes experiences of understanding,
and renews positions of enunciation. It opens something up in and
for its readers. It “turn[s] around a foreign thing or turn[s] it around
to play with it … while [respecting] its realms of opaqueness.”19
Broadly speaking, these are the aims of all my writing, whether for
journalistic, literary, or academic outlets, and whether for ethnic,
public, or disciplinary audiences (which are not, I should stress,
necessarily discrete). Although the style of my writing is modulated
by its intended audience (I might use Hinglish colloquialisms in
personal essays; I lead with a hypothesis in journal articles), I strive
to maintain a consistently amateur approach to my subjects. I
present problems with multiple possible resolutions or none. I take
artistic license and brandish the authority of biography. I try to
create space in the text for the reader. I invite response, qualification,
refutation, noise. I do not presume to know.
My identification as a “writer,” as opposed to “scholar,” stems
from my journalism background. But this is only part of the story. I
also have an interdisciplinary PhD, which is a bit like saying I don’t
have one.
70 The Critic as Amateur

Anyone who has been in an interdisciplinary program—whether

in Area Studies, Identity Studies, or “Critical Studies”20—knows
that there can be real anxieties among professors and students about
the legitimacy of such training. If, to borrow Saikat Majumdar’s
description, “the scholar is defined by his commitment to his
archive of study,” then what of the scholar who promiscuously
tracks between archives? If the professional scholar is one who
“comes from an organized community that has institutionalized
elements and traditions of knowledge held to be essentially allied
to its archive of study,”21 then what of the scholar who comes from
a plurality of communities, each differently institutionalized as a
counter-traditional and canon-busting knowledge project? What of
the writing of this scholar, untethered from disciplinary constraints?
Is such a scholar, an interdisciplinary scholar, an amateur? And if
so, when is interdisciplinary scholarship scholarly enough? Such
questions were at the heart of the professor’s ambivalent response
to The Black Atlantic, itself a richly interdisciplinary text written
by a scholar variously described as a historian, sociologist, social
theorist, and cultural critic.
Although times are changing, faculty in interdisciplinary
programs like those in which I was trained typically hold doctorates
in disciplines like English, philosophy, and history. For such faculty,
interdisciplinarity is earned through a rejection of disciplinary
location and re-housement in programs that largely didn’t exist in
their present configurations until the late twentieth century.22 For
their students, interdisciplinarity is a given; yet, in order to produce
legible scholarship, they must establish second homes in traditional
disciplines. That’s how I became an English professor, despite
holding no English degree.
To be clear: interdisciplinarity is not new, and Gilroy’s training at
the Birmingham School is a case in point. What is relatively recent
is the widespread phenomenon of institutional reverse migration
in which my generation has participated. My faculty moved from
English to cultural studies and media, philosophy to feminist theory,
and history to history of consciousness. I, one of the congenitally
interdisciplined, moved from cultural and critical theory (back)
into English. I am not a canon-schooled, archive-committed scholar
now doing canon-busting, archive-expanding work. I was trained in
canon-busting and archival promiscuity, and my writing necessarily
reflects that mode of intellectual formation.
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 71

Over and above intervening in traditional disciplines, it is apparent

now that interdisciplines are themselves tradition constituting and
enabling of particular forms of scholarship. Recent investigations
into the institutional histories of interdisciplinary fields bear this out. I
am thinking, for example, of Robyn Wiegman’s critical interrogation
of the desires for social justice that animate identity knowledges and
Mark Chiang’s work on how the symbolic capital of race intersects
with the cultural capital of literature in the production of Asian
American Studies as a field contradictorily animated by desires for
representation within the academy and for autonomy from it.23 Both
Wiegman and Chiang ask how institutional affiliations, in addition
to disciplinary locations, variously enable and constrain the creative
criticality of scholarship. What forms of scholarly writing do the
disciplines enable, versus the interdisciplines? For that matter, what
form of scholarship might it only be possible to produce outside
the academy? Is there a relationship between interdisciplinary
scholarly formation and the production of independent scholarship
by researchers without academic posts?
I do not claim a definite correlation between interdisciplinary
training and a rise in the number of independent scholars; such a
statement would require empirical research beyond the scope of this
discussion. But it is certainly the case that some scholars become
“independent” because of the illegibility of interdisciplinary work.
The cultural theorist E. Dawson Varughese finished her PhD in
2007 and taught until 2011 in a UK university. She then resigned
in order to conduct research that “did not sit easily within extant
research cultures.” Despite her university’s professed commitment to
“real interdisciplinarity,” Varughese told me, her work “confused”
other academics: “She’s not a ‘proper’ literary studies academic and
yet, not a ‘true’ social scientist either.” Varughese also craved more
creative outlets: “My desire to work with the public through literary
arts and visual cultures was going to be difficult to enact as part
of my academic role. Part of becoming an independent scholar was
to pursue that drive towards the creative industries.” Since leaving
the academy, Varughese has written four monographs and numerous
articles, while founding an international literary-arts organization,
Karvan. She attends conferences, serves on academic editorial boards,
and has held visiting fellowships in India and the UK. “I don’t think
that I could have pursued my research interests to the extent that I
have,” Varughese says, “if I had been in a formal academic post.”24
72 The Critic as Amateur

There are other reasons to leave the academy, as in the case of the
feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s 2016 resignation from Goldsmiths
College, London, as a protest against the university’s failure to
adequately address the problem of sexual harassment. Ahmed’s
most recent book, Living a Feminist Life, was written after her
resignation; it offers accessible, semipublic glosses on each of her
previous books along with creative meditations on its titular subject.
“A bruise can lead to a wall; a bruise can be a break,” Ahmed writes
in a typical passage. “When a stone breaks, a stone becomes stones.
A fragment: what breaks off is on the way to becoming something
else. Feminism: on the way to becoming something else.”25 Even as
Ahmed offers visions of feminism, she questions the knowability of
the category itself. Some sections read like a series of Zen koans,
rhetorical devices meant to focus the mind: “What is already
willed is not encountered as willful”; “To be in question is to
question being”; “We can refuse to miss what we are deemed to be
missing.”26 Such elliptical, aphoristic statements serve to crystallize
Ahmed’s key arguments, while also demonstrating their inherently
paradoxical nature: in order to be a feminist killjoy, one must have
joy; to take a stand in the academy, Ahmed stands outside it.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who identifies as “poet, independent
scholar, and activist” as well as “Black feminist love evangelist,”
maintains her independence from the academy in part “to
fortify the efforts of teachers of all kinds,” not just those within
“institutions of higher education.”27 Gumbs has published two
books of poetry and theory which each respond to a single work
of scholarship (all the endnotes in her 2016 Spill refer to Hortense
Spillers’s Black, White, and in Color; in her 2018 M Archive, they
refer to M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing). Here is
Gumbs’s description of Spillers: “Again and again, there were
phrases in her work that did far more than make her point. They
made worlds. They invited affect.”28 For Gumbs, Pedagogies of
Crossing “works to create textual possibilities for inquiry beyond
individual scholarly authority.”29 Her sustained responses to these
suggestive texts evidence a pedagogical ethic consonant with that
of Jacques Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster,” who ignores the
inequality between writer-pedagogue and reader-student so as not
to stultify the latter with avowals of her ignorance relative to the
former’s expertise.30 As Gumbs says, “Transformative education is
not about transforming students. It is about being present for their
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 73

inherent brilliance and assisting them in transforming their and our

relationship to oppressive institutions.”31
Reading Gumbs, I find myself asking if a junior scholar on the
tenure track would have been able to respond to Spillers’s invitation
to “affect” or Alexander’s invitation to forgo “authority” with such
generically hybrid, formally experimental work. The question is
whether or not such work would count as scholarship. Are books that
engage established archives and theoretical apparatuses scholarship
by default? Is Varughese’s research, produced outside the academy,
legible as academic? Would Ahmed’s and Gumbs’s recent books be
judged by a university review committee as merely “suggestive”?
Might they be profitably read as works of critical amateurism instead?
The questions to be asked about independent scholarship are
akin to those I posed earlier about interdisciplinary work. Do
“scholars” always produce “scholarship”? Must scholarship be
disciplinarily legible or institutionally housed? The conventional
story about interdisciplinary and independent scholars is that
they do double duty: they know what they know and what the
traditional scholars know. But the reality is that those of us who’ve
been schooled in interdisciplines, like those who work outside the
academy, know differently. We’ve read more of certain things than
scholars in disciplines, and we’ve also read less than those scholars
in the areas in which they’re trained and actively working. We are
not canon-bound, which may mean we are not versed in canon, but
as Melanie Micir (this volume) observes of contemporary feminist
publishing, repeating the past you don’t remember can actually be a
good thing. Any account of the tradition-busting, paradigm-moving
potential of interdisciplinary and independent work thus has to take
seriously that one of the qualities we bring to the table is ignorance.
Non-knowledge is an enabling condition of our work. If we don’t
know what we don’t know, we are free to know otherwise. We may
not define, but we are free to suggest.

Writing against knowing

We are free to be amateurs.
Amateurism is not, of course, ignorance. It is not strictly
non-knowledge, either. It is a mode of thinking, being, and
74 The Critic as Amateur

writing untethered to formal license or qualification. It is also the

disposition that motors suggestion. Three recent performances
of amateurism by a novelist (Jhumpa Lahiri), journalist (Mark
Greif), and poet (Brian Blanchfield), each of whom also holds
a professional academic post, bear out its critical and creative
capacities.
First, however, a note on the romance of amateurism. During my
editorial tenure at India Currents, I solicited essays from writers with
varying levels of journalistic experience. A particularly memorable
contributor was investment banker Keerthik Sasidharan, who
followed that foray into journalism (I was, he says, his first editor)
by contributing to numerous international venues. A decade later,
now a well-known public writer with a contract for a three-volume
work on Hindu mythology and history, Sasidharan describes his
amateur impulse:

[I] am often reminded of my father’s friends, who, after listening

to K.J. Yesudas’ singing or Nikhil Banerjee’s sitar, decided to
learn music or purchase a sitar. As a child, I found their efforts
mystifying. After all, they would never perform in front of an
audience. Nor would they be any good at it compared to a child
half their age … Their exertions seemed like an indulgence …
But now … I have begun to see what they truly were after: soak
themselves in the warm afterglow of something they intuited
as larger than themselves … they were the first amateurs I had
met in my life; individuals who weren’t overwhelmed by the
enormity of the journeys they had embarked on … they were
like how I am with my own efforts — relieved to just be without
any pressure to be smart, clever, or have profound insights. I plod
along, perhaps for the pleasure of plodding itself. It is this which
distinguishes the amateur from the professional: to travel with
no intention of reaching the destination.32

Sasidharan voices here an amateurism of pleasure and following

one’s inclinations. Politics, literature, art, philosophy, physics:
whatever escaped his attention during his education and professional
training he now explores with gusto. As an amateur, he need not
have “profound insights.” Free of the pressure to be original, he can
be citational: in the “warm afterglow” of each subject he pursues,
he imitates, references, and tries on for size.
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 75

The romance of amateurism finds expression in each of the

works I am about to discuss but with an important qualification.
For Sasidharan, and as the old saying goes, it’s the journey that
counts, not the point of arrival. Note that this commonplace
preserves the destination as out there somewhere, reachable for
some professional others, if not the amateur. For Lahiri, Greif, and
Blanchfield, by contrast, “it’s the journey that counts” because there
is no destination. These amateurs plod along not as an alternative
to achieving profundity but as the only possible mode of knowing
once they’ve dispensed with the illusion of the profound.
Take for example Lahiri’s 2016 In Other Words, which the
Pulitzer-winning English-language fictionist wrote in Italian. The
memoir recounts Lahiri’s decision to move to Rome and read and
write only in Italian, which she has long loved. The move is “a
choice … a risk,” “an act of demolition, a new beginning.”33 Having
achieved international literary renown in the Anglophone world,
Lahiri decides to strip herself of skill and become an amateur in
the field in which she is already a celebrated professional. This
renunciation of linguistic expertise enables her to experiment with
being an “author” who doesn’t “feel authoritative.”34
Lahiri’s project bears some of the “indulgence” Sasidharan first
suspects of his father. The writer has financial resources, contacts,
and editorial support that few others could match. Moreover,
Lahiri’s amateurism is compelling precisely because she is no
amateur. The fascination of In Other Words is the opportunity to
read bad writing by a master writer, to revel in the knower’s knowing
engagement with not knowing. That said, it would be a mistake to
read Lahiri’s project solely in these terms. As she explains, she is
after a sustained condition of partial, “useful” ignorance.35 Thus,
if she should ever become as fluent in Italian as she is in English,
the game would be up: “If it were possible to bridge the distance
between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.”36
The appeal of writing in Italian is that she can never become an
Italian writer.
Lahiri’s experiments in amateurism are instructive. For one, by
trading “certainty for uncertainty,” she is able to “[learn], again,
to write.”37 “My knowledge of English is both an advantage and a
hindrance,” she explains. “I rewrite everything like a lunatic until
it satisfies me, while in Italian, like a soldier in the desert, I have
to simply keep going.”38 Whereas Lahiri’s English prose bears the
76 The Critic as Amateur

burden of her mastery, her Italian is free to be imperfect, awkward,

peculiar. In short, her Italian lives and allows her to feel alive. Her
English, condemned to perfection, “no longer appeals to [her]” and
falls plump to the ground.39 Ironically, writing in Italian has the
unintended effect of improving Lahiri’s English. The journey into
non-knowledge reconfigures the knower.
Lahiri’s writing career has involved a series of moves away
from scholarship qua scholarship—from credentialed academic
dissertation in Renaissance Studies, to English-language creative
fiction, to Italian-language writing that revels in ignorance—though
she is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton. My next
example of critical amateurism is by Mark Greif, a cofounder of
n+1 who was at the vanguard of the “little magazine” movement
credited with energizing the semipublic writing discussed above.
Greif is also a professor of English at Stanford, and his work tracks
between the modes of scholarly, journalistic and academic.
Around 2009, Greif resolved to learn how to rap. Barack
Obama had just become president, and, Greif writes, “The feeling
I had at his election was that I ought to change, too. I ought to
learn something.”40 He developed a method of approach: he would
learn only “the classics … songs I could live with forever.”41 Greif
had no intention of mastering the art of rap or becoming a rapper;
he vowed not to write original pieces or perform in public. Like
Sasidharan and Lahiri, he aimed at a deeply internal reconfiguration
of the self that would involve both complete “detachment” and
“immersion.”42 “I just had the idea,” he writes, “that I could fix
myself, privately.”43
“Learning to Rap,” the essay that recounts this effort, is included
in Greif’s 2016 Against Everything, which collects his widely
circulated takes on exercise, Radiohead, and Octomom. The rap
essay is a comparatively minor piece, but it illuminates Greif’s
larger concerns with knowledge and cults of authority. In an essay
“On Food,” Greif queries the value of experience in relation to
expertise, asking, “Could there be anything I know that the usual
food critics … don’t?”44 In an essay on Thoreau, he confesses that
the philosopher became for him “the most important thinker”
before he had even read his work.45 This is the way in which we
often “know” what we know: not as books read, but as books to be
read; not as what we have learned, but as what others have told us;
not as who we are, but as who we sense we ought to be.
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 77

Against Everything is really against knowing, against thinking

one knows, and against thinking one knows without thinking
about why one thinks one knows. “Learning to Rap” is full of
such cautions: “Even I, knowing nothing …”46 As Greif grapples
with rap’s intricate lyricism, he acknowledges that he is struggling
belatedly with things “all hip-hop listeners already know.”47 But his
point is not to offer some original theory of rap, not to know better
than others, nor even to know differently. Rather, Greif aims to also
know, to almost know, and to approximate knowing. Deferring
knowledge in this way is an amateur’s tactic, one that allows Greif
to focus on the desires, anxieties, and experiences that propel his
quest—that is, the “why” of knowing, as opposed to the “what.”
Approximating knowing is also the project of poet Brian
Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, my last example
of critical amateurism. The book offers a series of short essays
on topics ranging from foot washing to tumbleweeds. Each is a
proxy for knowledge of its titular subject, “a stand-in” liable to be
asked “on what authority” it performs its approximations.48 For
Blanchfield, who is a professor of creative writing and literature
at the University of Idaho, the appeal of the proxy is that it
“expresses a kind of concession to imprecision, a failure”; in the
sciences, he notes, proxy is “the word for a subject you choose to
study to produce data that can approximate the data you’d get
from the actual, desired subject, if it were not prohibitively hard to
apprehend.”49 As he engages his surrounds and revisits formative
texts, Blanchfield offers readings that suggest what one might know
about the “actual, desired subjects” of literature and the world, if
they were not always just beyond reach.
Like Erich Auerbach, who wrote Mimesis without access to a
research library, Blanchfield writes without looking anything up.50
Unlike Auerbach, Blanchfield refuses access to that which he might
easily obtain. It is a tactical deferral of knowledge like Greif’s that
allows him to explore the epistemological value of error. “I wrote
these essays with the internet off,” he explains. “I determined not
to review again the books and other works I consulted in memory,
and I did not … verify assertions or ground speculation or firm up
approximations.”51 If scholarship is the product of research-based
conclusions, Blanchfield’s essays are deliberately “unresearched
… analytic but nonacademic.”52 He quotes without verifying
quotations, cites without confirming sources, and paraphrases with
78 The Critic as Amateur

impunity. Proxies closes, however, with an extended “Correction”

that revises the primary text. In some cases, the corrections
are factual: North Carolina’s state tree is the longleaf pine, not
the flowering dogwood. In others, however, they are nuanced
qualifications that deepen the original text.
In “On Reset,” an essay that begins with Blanchfield watching a
series of videotaped soap opera auditions and ends by meditating
on poetry, Blanchfield quotes Muriel Rukeyser:

Choose your poet here, or, rather, do not choose but recall … the
light of a new awareness that was not something you learned but
something rather that you seemed to remember.
This is the multiple time-sense in poetry, before which your
slow mortality takes its proper place.53

These lines bolster Blanchfield’s argument that poetry does not teach
the reader so much as it renews for her what she already knows,
enabling a form of self-return that in turn constitutes the reader as
poet. This is a theme developed throughout Proxies: that the best
writing enables the reader to discover “as though remembering”;
that Blanchfield’s own writing will “[lay] the propitious conditions
for others to come into their own as though it were a return.”54 But
Rukeyser’s actual words are these:

Remember what happened to you when you came to your

poem, any poem whose truth overcame all inertia in you at that
moment, so that your slow mortality took its proper place, and
before it the light of a new awareness was not something new,
but something you recognized.
That is the multiple time-sense in poetry, that is the ever new,
which is recognized as something already in ourselves, but not
discovered.55

There are subtle differences between the two passages, including

the difference between remembrance and recognition. In the first
iteration, the reader does not learn from a poet or poem but is
moved to recollection of former knowledge by the work in question.
In the second iteration, the reader is already poet; poetry is in and
constitutive of the truth of the self. Whereas the multiple time-
sense in the first iteration is external to the self, in the second, it is a
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 79

property of the self. By offering the corrected quote fifty pages after
its misquotation, Blanchfield invites the reader to query not only
Rukeyser’s theory of poetic awareness but also the functioning of
our memories in relation to the readings we carry within us. What
we know, we only ever know in fragments. What we write is always
taken up in pieces, refracted variously by our addressees. This is a
theory of life as much as it is a theory of critical amateurism and a
first premise for scholarship worthy of the name.

***

As a professional academic, I am invested in the question of

what “scholarship” is—thus, my lengthy response, years in the
making, to the professor. As a writer who strives to infuse my work
with the amateurism of suggestion, I am even more interested in
what it could be. What kinds of scholarship would we produce
if we pursued our subjects the way Lahiri pursues Italian: “as if
[it] were a book that, no matter how hard [we] work, [we] can’t
write”?56 What if we proceeded from the premise that we are not
experts, will never be experts, but rather, in Greif’s words, “slow
learners”?57 We would be content that our work be brought to
fruition by others. We would be willing, to quote Blanchfield’s
reading of Roland Barthes, to “[open] the dossier wherein much
more lies, should anyone wish to pursue it.”58 And we would
recognize that at its suggestive best, scholarship, too, is “always
unfinished, always being remade.”59
This is, at the time of writing in 2018, yet another “the sky
is falling” moment for humanistic inquiry. Political upheaval,
economic and social divestment from public education, rampant
anti-intellectualism—and that’s only to state the obvious. But crises
also present opportunities for us “to engage in experiments that
will allow us to shift and adapt to new ecosystems.”60 Critical
amateurism at the intersections of scholarship, journalism, and
creative writing is one such experiment that humanists can embrace
in our pursuit of renewal, both within and outside the academy.
Writing toward a horizon of mastery that is always already deferred
by the knowledge of knowing’s impossibility, we will demonstrate
how ignorance can be a creative asset, as opposed to an alibi. We
will show how “near knowing” is epistemology, and expose when it
masks not knowing at all.
80 The Critic as Amateur

That is, in any case, the kind of scholarship I aim to write. Call
it amateur. Call it criticism. Call it—what was that word again?—
well, you know.

Notes
1 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), xi.
2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929: New York: Harvest,
1989), 101.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, Ltd. (1962: Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 21.
4 Woolf, Room, 98.
5 Ibid., 101.
6 Kay Ryan, Say Uncle: Poems (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 46.
7 Woolf, Room, 101.
8 Ibid., 100.
9 Ibid., 102.
10 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 48–49.
11 Lili Loofbourow and Phillip Maciak, “Introduction: The Time of the
Semipublic Intellectual,” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 439.
12 These positions are not uniformly shared by senior scholars. Sharon
Marcus, Dean of Humanities at Columbia University, argues, “The
ability to be intellectually bilingual, by which I mean the ability to
translate specialist knowledge into more accessible terms, should
never detract from a junior scholar’s merits…public writing is a
positive contribution to knowledge.” See Sharon Marcus, “How to
Talk about Books You Have Read,” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 478.
13 Evan Kindley, “Growing Up in Public: Academia, Journalism, and the
New Public Intellectual,” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 471.
14 There are many more writers who fit this bill than I can list here;
what follows is a partial and idiosyncratic list. For examples of PhDs-
turned-journalists, see Aaron Bady, Jacob Brogan, Sarah Kendzior, Jo
Livingstone, and Lili Loofbourow. Many scholars maintain formal
perches in the academy while engaging in semipublic writing. See, for
example, Jelani Cobb, Merve Emre, Eve Ewing, Hua Hsu, Amitava
Kumar, Emily Lordi, Kate Manne, Namwali Serpell, Richard Jean So,
and Amia Srinivasan (see also graduate students Marissa Brostoff,
Andrea Long Chu, Jane Hu, and Clint Smith). Finally, there are
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 81

numerous PhDs who are also creative writers. To name a few from
my research field of South Asian Anglophone literature, see Amit
Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Saikat Majumdar.
15 Loofbourow and Maciak, “Introduction,” 441.
16 As I was completing this essay, and observing the radical
incompleteness of note 14, I began to wonder if Kindley’s “boom”
has not been more directly implicated in the ongoing “bust” of
the academic humanities in the United States than is typically
acknowledged. In addition to the semi-public outlets and little
magazines I mention above, there are numerous institutions now
devoted to channeling academic writers into the public sphere,
like The OpEd Project, The Conversation, The Immanent Frame,
and Arcade. Numerous peer-reviewed journals now also publish
semipublic content online (for example, boundary2 has b2o, Social
Text has Periscope, Post45 has Contemporaries, and Public Books is
affiliated with Public Culture). Contributing to public and semipublic
outlets seems to be becoming a new norm in the academy, not the
exception. This is in part because of the swelling ranks of PhD-
holding editors, whose academic interests motor both the content
they solicit and the writers to whom they turn. Then, there is the
fact that academic writers are a knowledgeable, reliable source
of creative and critical content who are, in most cases, otherwise
salaried and therefore willing to write for free. Does this movement
represent an amplification of academic writing or its displacement?
This is a question to be explored at length elsewhere. Here, I wish
to underscore that my call for a critical amateurism of suggestion is
intended to deepen and extend the category of scholarship, not to
evacuate, nullify, or replace it.
17 Ibid., 445.
18 Marcus, “How to,” 476–477.
19 Trinh, Woman, 48.
20 What I am provisionally calling “Critical Studies” programs include
those in which I studied, Berkeley Rhetoric and Duke Literature, as
well as the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought,
Brown’s Modern Culture and Media, NYU’s Social and Cultural
Analysis, History of Consciousness at Santa Cruz, Culture and
Theory at Irvine, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at
Minnesota, and Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford.
21 Majumdar, “The Critic as Amateur,” New Literary History 48, no. 1
(2017): 1–24.
22 While the pioneering Birmingham School was founded by Richard
Hoggart in 1964, departments like Duke Literature and Berkeley
Rhetoric were not refashioned as cultural studies and critical theory
programs until the 1980s and 1990s. For a discussion of Duke
82 The Critic as Amateur

Literature, albeit a polemical one, see David Yaffe, “The Department

That Fell to Earth,” Lingua Franca 9, no. 1 (1999): 24–31.
23 See Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies:
Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New
York University Press, 2009) and Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
24 E-mail correspondence with Varughese, June 10, 2018.
25 Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2017), 186.
26 Ibid., 113, 134, 185.
27 Heather Laine Talley, “Brilliance Remastered: An Interview with
Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” Feminist Teacher 22, no. 2 (2012): 165.
28 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), xi, my emphasis.
29 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), ix, my emphasis.
30 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” ArtForum 45, no. 7
(2007).
31 Talley, “Brilliance Remastered: An Interview with Alexis Pauline
Gumbs,” 165.
32 Keerthik Sasidharan, “In Praise of Amateurs in an Age of
Professionals,” The Hindu, January 14, 2018. Available online: http://
www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/in-praise-of-amateurs-in-an-
age-of-professionals/article22437509.ece (accessed May 21, 2018).
33 Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), xiii, 207.
34 Ibid., 37, 83.
35 Ibid., 43.
36 Ibid., 95.
37 Ibid., 37, 213.
38 Ibid., 65.
39 Ibid., 117.
40 Mark Greif, Against Everything (New York: Vintage Books, 2016),
163.
41 Ibid, 137.
42 Lahiri, In Other Words, 183.
43 Greif, Against, 139, 136.
44 Ibid., 54.
45 Ibid., xi.
46 Ibid., 141.
47 Ibid., 139.
48 Brian Blanchfield, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (New York:
Nightboat Books, 2016), viii.
49 Ibid., viii.
 It’s All Very Suggestive, But Not Scholarship 83

50 The story about Auerbach is recounted in Majumdar, 21.

51 Blanchfield, Proxies, vii.
52 Ibid., vii.
53 Ibid., 127.
54 Ibid., 20, 22.
55 Ibid., 177.
56 Lahiri, In Other Words, 29.
57 Greif, Against, 299.
58 Blanchfield, Proxies, 97.
59 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, xi.
60 Eric Hayot, “The Sky Is Falling,” Profession, May 21, 2018. Available
online: https://profession.mla.hcommons.org/2018/05/ (accessed July
18, 2018).

Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press,
2017.
Blanchfield, Brian. Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. New York: Nightboat
Books, 2016.
Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies:
Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: New York
University Press, 2009.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Greif, Mark. Against Everything. New York: Vintage Books, 2016.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. M Archive: After the End of the World. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2018.
Hayot, Eric. “The Sky Is Falling.” Profession, May 21, 2018. Available
online: https://profession.mla.hcommons.org/2018/05/ (accessed July
18, 2018).
Kindley, Evan. “Growing Up in Public: Academia, Journalism, and the
New Public Intellectual.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 467–473.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. In Other Words, trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2016.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, Ltd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 (1962).
Loofbourow, Lili and Phillip Maciak. “Introduction: The Time of the
Semipublic Intellectual.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 439–445.
84 The Critic as Amateur

Majumdar, Saikat. “The Critic as Amateur.” New Literary History 48,

no. 1 (2017): 1–25.
Marcus, Sharon. “How to Talk about Books You Have Read.” PMLA
130, no. 2 (2015): 474–480.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” ArtForum 45, no. 7
(2007).
Ryan, Kay. “Great Thoughts,” Say Uncle: Poems. New York: Grove Press,
2000.
Sasidharan, Keerthik. “In Praise of Amateurs in an Age of Professionals.”
The Hindu. January 14, 2018. Available online: http://www.thehindu.
com/opinion/columns/in-praise-of-amateurs-in-an-age-of-professionals/
article22437509.ece (accessed May 21, 2018).
Talley, Heather Laine. “Brilliance Remastered: An Interview with Alexis
Pauline Gumbs.” Feminist Teacher 22, no. 2 (2012): 165–167.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and
Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harvest, 1989
(1929).
Yaffe, David. “The Department that Fell to Earth: The Deflation of Duke
English.” Lingua Franca 9, no. 1 (1999): 24–31.
 4
Beyond Professionalism:
The Pasts and Futures of
Creative Criticism

Peter D. McDonald

Trigger warning: the following does not contain a definition of “creative

criticism” which is not a determinate or determinable critical method and can
never be a school. Using Rabindranath Tagore and Maurice Blanchot as guides,
the essay takes an alternative, anti-scholastic route through the labyrinth of
a multilingual intellectual history in order to explore the promise of creative
criticism as a practice, particularly in today’s corporatized university, and to
reaffirm the public value of innovative literary writing in all its unpredictable,
generative and experiential dimensions.

for Mike Holland

“Can the criticism of literature and culture really be

professionalized? With such objects of study, does criticism retain an
amateur impulse even as it evolves into a highly specialized activity
enshrined in the university?” These are the central questions this
collection seeks to address. In my view, we cannot approach them
today without first considering two pairs of awkwardly juxtaposed
quotations. Here is the first pair:
86 The Critic as Amateur

Professionalism is a means not an end. Less is more. Professors

are better off when they professionalize less and risk extinction
when professionalization is primary.1

An academic can get on a treadmill where the task is just to

keep on churning out papers for the peer-reviewed journals
without looking up and asking oneself that most challenging of
questions—what is it all for?2

And here is the second pair:

Any attempt at serious thought, be it mathematical, scientific,

metaphysical or formal, in the widest creative-poetic vein,
is a vocation. It comes to possess one like an unbidden, often
unwelcome summons.3

This talk will argue for a transformative vision of the university

that positions it not as a separate enclosed space but as a busy
informational crossroads in which the university clearly identifies
the “value added” it provides and takes an active role not only
in creating and disseminating knowledge but also in directing it
toward better and more productive practices that contribute to
human and planetary flourishing.4

If I was giving this as a talk, I would pause at this point to allow you
to reread each statement without being distracted by any thought
of its provenance. But since this is a piece of writing, I will have to
move swiftly on to the who, the when, and the where.
The first is thesis no. 1 of the “95 Theses” the poet-academic
Charles Bernstein published on the MLA Profession website in
October 2016. Part mock-Lutheran pronouncement, part “swan
song” or “duck soup,” as he prefaces them, the theses are both a
preretirement speech-manifesto, drawing on his experience of the
American university system as a salaried academic and a playfully
aphoristic warning about the perils of over-professionalization, given
in his guise as a leading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. Having made
his literary debut in the mid-1970s, Bernstein took his first academic
job at SUNY Buffalo in 1989. He retires as Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.
The second quotation comes from A University Education (2017),
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 87

a memoir-cum-PR exercise by the British Conservative politician

David Willetts who, as Minister for Universities and Science from
2010 to 2014, led the latest phase in the marketization of higher
education in England. He makes his own observation about
solipsistic (Sisyphean?) professionalism in a passage justifying the
introduction of impact assessments in the 2008–2014 Research
Excellence Framework (REF), a state audit of research in UK
universities the Thatcher government initiated in 1986. While
researchers allegedly feared the new requirement “brought the
barbarians even closer to the gates of academe,” Willetts insists it
was meant simply to encourage them “to think about the potential
contribution their research can make to economy and society.”5
The second pairing is less extreme but perhaps no less
consequential. Rather than putting a poet-academic alongside
a politician, it juxtaposes two academics with apparently very
different interests, sensibilities, and much else besides. The first
comes from Errata (1997), George Steiner’s memoirs of an academic
career begun in the late 1940s. Though primarily concerned with
the fate of “high culture” in “mass-consumption and egalitarian
democracies,” a preoccupation that reflects his indebtedness to
the Frankfurt School of the 1920s and 1930s, Steiner does not
restrict the “vocation” of “serious thought” to major artists and
thinkers alone: “Even the teacher, the expositor, the critic who lacks
creative genius but who devotes his existence to the presentment
and perpetuation of the real thing, is a being infected (krank an
Gott).”6 This idea of the critic in turn reflects his understanding of
the university as a place where “the student is brought into personal
contact with, is made vulnerable to, the aura and the threat of the
first class.”7 In the second quotation, the critic N. Katherine Hayles,
who made her name with How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), sets out
her stall for a lecture she gave in March 2018 entitled “Universities
at the Crossroads.” Various forms of online learning, she believes,
“pose significant challenges to traditional ideas of the university as
a cloistered space where students came and learned about subjects
they could not access otherwise,” making it incumbent on academics
to develop “robust modes of discourse that reach beyond scholarly
communities to the general public.”8 In fact, as the lecture itself
reveals, Hayles is wary of this brave new world and has far more in
common with Steiner than her overly provocative billing suggests.
88 The Critic as Amateur

So, looking across the pairings, we have, on the one hand, an

unlikely trio—an avant-garde poet, a scholar of new technologies,
and a Thatcherite politician—articulating a consensus of sorts about
the hazards of academic professionalism. I say “of sorts” because this
is the only point on which they agree. Among other things neither
Hayles nor Bernstein shares Willetts’s enthusiasm for a particular
brand of economics Mark Fisher aptly calls “capitalist realism.”9
Adopting its characteristic idiom, Willetts repeatedly represents his
marketizing interventions as a challenge to the “producer power”
of universities in the interests of the student-consumer—this is
the language of “realism,” the only language its proponents take
seriously.10 Despite her appeals to a readily definable “value added”
and her call for academic knowledge to be directed toward “more
productive practices,” other favorite phrases in the “realists”
lexicon, Hayles spends a significant portion of her lecture pointing
out the damaging effects of corporatization in the United States,
echoing the sentiments of Bernstein’s mordant thesis no. 42: “The
poetry and poetics I read and write are not a product of the world
financial system but of the world semantic system.”11
On the other hand, again looking across the pairings, we have in
contrast to this oddly discordant trio Steiner’s lofty tenor coruscating
in a self-consciously antiquated if semi-secularized theological
language of vocation. True, he does not talk about the “gates of
academe” or celebrate the university as “a cloistered space”—he
is too interested in the disruptive effects of being “exposed to the
virus of the absolute”—but he is in no doubt that his untimely
minoritarian meditations on culture, criticism, and the university
“will strike the vast majority of ‘normal’ citizens as absurd and
even offensive.”12 Having outlined his credo, he comments: “I
think of myself as a Platonic anarchist. Not, I realise, a winning
ticket.”13 Part of the challenge, then, is how to think the “amateur
impulse”—a phrase to which I shall return—when the pressures, if
not the attacks, on professionalism both from within and beyond
the university are so various and acute and when it often appears
as if the only way forward involves either a capitulation to the
“business ontology” of “capitalist realism” or a knowingly defeatist
return to a theology of vocation.14
The awkwardness of these various conjunctions, no less than the
extremity of the disjunctions, may be peculiar to our times. The
quarrels about professionalism within the university are not: they
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 89

have shadowed and often shaped the history of literary studies since
at least the 1920s. Just as I. A. Richards was seeking “to habilitate
the critic” as an “expert in matters of taste”—in the face not just
of a commercialized mass culture but as a counter to censorious,
inexpert moralists and to an older generation of critics wedded to
a bankrupt version of 1890s aestheticism—Rabindranath Tagore
was provocatively comparing academic professionalism with all its
disciplinary disputes over boundaries to the “Cult of the Nation,”
describing it as “the region where men specialise their knowledge
and organize their power, mercilessly elbowing each other in the
struggle to come to the front.”15 This reflected Tagore’s life-long
unease about expert critics who have, as he put it in an essay of
1894, “worked out a fixed weight and number of set formulations
for literature.”16
These early tensions persisted, morphing over time and
resurfacing at various charged moments, notably with the rise of
cultural studies in the 1980s. For Bruce Robbins, a proponent of and
commentator on that particular turn, the expansion of “academic
literature departments” in the “decades immediately before and
(especially) after the Second World War” helped institutionalize the
idea of “culture, art, the aesthetic” as marking “a distance from
the sordidness of the material, utilitarian, power-ridden world
where livings are earned.”17 This idea then fostered, and was in turn
fostered by, the emergence of a “professional anti-professionalism”
in which the academic critic figured at best as a “self-appointed
conscience of society,” at worst as a “free-floating Luftmensh.”18
Rejecting this particular brand of professional bad faith, Robbins
defended cultural studies as a “secular vocation,” though not in
Steiner’s sense.19 If his new-style cultural critics of the 1980s did
not disavow professionalism like the old-style literary critics of
the 1950s, neither did they claim a Steineresque “unaccountable
authority.”20 According to Robbins, the only professionalism that
mattered for them was one that “appeals to (and helps refashion)
public values in its efforts to justify (and refashion) professional
practice.”21
Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for this new development.
Echoing Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), the academic
critic Rónán McDonald blamed cultural studies for precipitating
a fatal “turn from evaluative and aesthetic concerns in university
humanities’ departments.”22 Admittedly, other factors, some
90 The Critic as Amateur

internal to the profession, others external to it, played a part as

well. He highlights “the tendency of academic criticism to become
increasingly inward-looking”—in this case as a consequence
of “Theory”—and, following the rise of the internet and the
blogosphere, “the momentum for journalistic and popular criticism
to become a much more democratic, dispersive affair, no longer
left in the hands of the experts.”23 Yet since it was cultural studies
that really “led to the death of the critic” as an “arbiter of public
taste,” these developments were only secondary.24 By forsaking
“evaluation,” apparently in the interests of democratic engagement,
cultural studies cut academic critics off from “a wider public,”
relegating them to the specialist journal and the seminar room.25
McDonald’s is not a counsel of ironized despair like Steiner’s,
however. “Perhaps the critic is not dead,” he comments cautiously
in his conclusion, “but simply sidelined and slumbering” like
a fairy-tale princess.26 He pins his hopes of a revival on a new
Prince Richards bearing “the idea of artistic merit.”27 Not that he
believes Richards can simply come back from the dead. For one
thing, any pretender to his eminence would have to relinquish
his claims to scientific authority because “the discipline of
English literary studies needs to make room for impressionistic,
subjective response.”28 No pretensions to scientific objectivity,
then, nor, indeed, any old-style anti-professionalism—he insists
“it will take years to master the art of criticism”—but an
accredited, and presumably publically recognized, expertise
based on firm convictions about literary value (recall Steiner’s
“real thing”) leavened or checked by subjectivist impressionism.29
For university-based critics concerned about the future of the
profession and committed to understanding and promoting the
public value of literature, McDonald, in my view, offers neither a
viable way forward nor a plausible means of coming to terms with
the various historical and contemporary entanglements I have
sketched so far. Yet, if we also discount Steiner’s more baroque
retro-vision, then what other possibilities are there? As ever, some
lie in the obscure recesses of the past or, as I shall argue in this case,
in a series of unlikely affinities between two writer-philosophers
of the long twentieth century: Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).

***
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 91

I start with Blanchot’s short essay originally published in

French as “Qu’en est-il de la critique?” (What about Criticism?)
in 1959. For my purposes it is important that Blanchot begins by
briefly situating his own question in the context of a wider debate
about institutions of knowledge creation in postwar France. As
he saw it, literary criticism at that moment occupied an uneasy,
even “compromised” position—“a half-way house” in Hill’s
translation—between “two weighty institutions”: journalism and
the university, the one producing “day-to-day knowledge, which is
rushed, inquiring and ephemeral,” the other “scholarly knowledge,
which is established and permanent.”30 Blanchot’s own essay
originally appeared in Arguments, which was also neither one thing
nor the other. A short-lived little magazine produced by a dissident
group of Marxists and fellow travelers who broke with the
strongly Stalinist French Communist party following Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin in 1956, it included a range of political,
cultural, and literary essays—that is, neither ephemeral newspaper
reviews nor solid scholarly articles. Blanchot’s own contribution
appeared alongside others by Jean Starobinski (on psychoanalysis)
and Lucien Goldmann (on Marxism) under the general heading
“Ou en est la critique aurjourd’hui?” (Where Is Criticism Today?)—
hence his interest in its institutional locations.31
Rehearsing Blanchot’s answers to this question would be
impossible today. Under pressure from the digital revolution and
a collapse in advertising revenues, contemporary newspapers
devote less and less space to literary reviews whether in print or
online, though, for Katharine Viner, editor of the UK Guardian,
this is the least of their problems. Their very raison d’être as a
primary source of “day-to-day knowledge,” not to mention their
“weighty” institutional standing, is itself threatened as the likes of
Google and Facebook replace “editors with algorithms—shattering
the public square into millions of personalized newsfeeds, shifting
entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and
argument.”32 The same cannot be said of the university, which has,
for better or worse, become criticism’s principal host, some might
say, at the expense of “scholarly knowledge” in Blanchot’s sense. Yet
its prestige is no less precarious than journalism’s and for similar
reasons. While various forms of corporatization have steadily
hollowed out universities in the UK, the United States, and beyond
over the past three decades, other forces have proved as corrosive
92 The Critic as Amateur

elsewhere in more recent years. Speaking as president of the Central

European University in Hungary, Michael Ignatieff, for instance,
argues that a combination of factors—the digital revolution coupled
with the rise of populism and the turn toward authoritarianism—
have made institutions like his own as vulnerable as the “free
press” in many parts of the world.33 Echoing Hayles’s defense of
university autonomy, albeit without embracing her enthusiasm for
its potential as a “busy informational crossroads,” he calls on fellow
academics to defend its traditional mission in terms Blanchot may
well have recognized, reaffirming its responsibility to “winnow the
hard facts of knowledge from the chaff of opinion, rumour, fantasy,
paranoia, tweets, blogs and the whole deluge of false information
which makes it almost impossible for societies to deliberate freely
on a basis that we actually know to be true.”34
This is of course not the whole story. Criticism’s uneasy liaison
with journalism may have weakened as much as its compromise
with the university has gained strength, but alternative venues, like
that represented by Arguments itself, have survived and continue to
emerge. Arguments may have run for only six years (1956–1962) but
it served as a model for the British New Left Review (1960–), which
still appears bimonthly, and new forums, like the print and digital
magazine n+1 (2004–), and the online journal Prac Crit (2014–),
still create space for a kind of criticism self-consciously positioned
outside the mainstream media and the university. Also worth noting
in this regard is the writer Amit Chaudhuri’s “literary activism”
initiative, which has been running since 2014. Responding in part
to the rise of cultural studies in terms McDonald would recognize,
this initiative is directed primarily against the “market activism”
characteristic of the corporatized publishing world that emerged in
the mid-1990s, which, Chaudhuri argues, deformed the Anglophone
cultural landscape of the new millennium by reconfiguring literary
value in exclusively commercial terms.35
In his brief survey of the very different landscape of late 1950s
France, Blanchot was less concerned about criticism’s institutional
compromises than he was about their consequences for literature.
“Literature is what criticism is applied to,” he notes, identifying
the key challenge, “but criticism does not manifest literature.”36
Instead, given its dependency on two institutions each “having a
firm direction and organization of its own,” it simply shows “how
journalism and the academy assert themselves.”37 In effect, caught
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 93

between the journalistic and the scholarly, criticism at that point

revealed little or nothing about literature as such and rather a lot
about the interests, forms of knowledge, and discourses of the two
powerful institutions on which it depended for its very existence.
This claim sounds exaggerated, perhaps even anachronistic given
the many changes both have undergone since the 1960s, but only if
we discount the testimony of some contemporary writers. Consider,
as one example among many, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s response to a question about postcolonial theory:
“Postcolonial theory? I don’t know what it means. I think it is
something that professors made up because they needed to get
jobs.”38 Given that the university is now criticism’s main host, it is
unsurprising that this offhand, not to say knowingly deflationary,
comment caused a stir, especially among academics.
Yet do criticism’s entanglements with journalism and the
university mean it has no serious function even in these terms?
On this question Blanchot keeps an open mind but only just: “It
may be, of course, that the conclusion to draw from this is that
criticism plays a fairly important role, which is to establish a
relationship between literature and such realities, which are indeed
significant ones. The role of criticism, it could be said, is to mediate,
and that of the literary critic to act as honest broker.”39 Think of
McDonald’s “public critic,” perhaps, or the idea of criticism James
Wood advocates in books like The Nearest Thing to Life (2015)
and the space he has made for himself in the Guardian, New
York Times, London Review of Books, and New Yorker, among
others, since the early 1990s—though he has been Professor of the
Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard since 2014.40 Any more
institutionalized university critics doubtful about the mediating
aspirations underpinning this kind of writing could do well to reflect
on the latest publishing figures for academic monographs. A major
British report of 2017 shows that while the number of titles in the
“Literature” category produced annually between 2005 and 2014
rose by 37 percent (from just under 8,000 to just under 11,000),
the average sales per title fell from 88 to 34. Literary criticism is the
largest sub-category, accounting for 70 percent of titles published in
2014, but it garnered only 38 percent of sales. Literary biography,
by contrast, made up 12 percent of the titles and 30 percent of the
sales; whereas literary theory represented 4 percent and 6 percent
respectively.41 As these figures suggest, UK-based academic critics
94 The Critic as Amateur

do not need state-imposed impact assessments to remind them to

ask, what is it all for? No doubt the answer has rather a lot to do
with career advancement within the university as well as recognition
within increasingly disparate academic micro-communities
(guilds? cliques? cults?), linked via hyper-specialized conferences
and journals, and almost nothing to do with mediating between
scholarly and journalistic forms of knowledge. Recall Bernstein on
the risks of extinction.
Not that Blanchot thought much of the prospects for critics
willing to play any such mediatory role in postwar France. As his
own syntax implies, he does not give the public critic much credence.
All this rather hapless figure requires, he observes sardonically, is “a
degree of competence, a talent for writing, a willingness to please
and a measure of good will”—and “this hardly amounts to much; it
could even be said to amount to nothing at all.”42 Rather than call
for this kind of critic to be revived, as McDonald did in 2007, he
embarked on a “quest” to characterize an alternative, non-mediatory
mode of writing that might do justice to literature as such or to echo
his reflexive French formulation, through which it might affirm itself
rather than the interests of journalism and the university.43
What to call this other kind of writing? “Creative criticism” is
one label Blanchot suggests though this downplays the emphasis
he puts on “the movement of self-effacement” essential to its
operations.44 “Precisely because, modestly, obstinately” this kind of
critical writing “ceases to distinguish itself from its object,” he notes,
it “takes on the mantle of creative language,” willingly “fading as
to nothing” itself.45 Shifting into a more philosophical register,
and returning to his preoccupation with forms of knowledge, he
elaborates:

“Criticism,” in the sense intended here, might be said to be closer

(though the comparison is misleading) to critique in the Kantian
sense: in the same way that critical reason in Kant is a questioning
of the conditions of possibility of scientific experiment, so
criticism, or critique in the sense I am using it here, is inseparable
from an exploration of the possibility of literary experience;
exploration here is however not purely theoretical, it is the way
in which literary experience is constituted, and constituted in
the act of challenging and testing out its own possibility in the
process of creation itself.46
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 95

This passage is not just philosophically intricate. It includes some

knotty problems of translation because Blanchot uses one word
(critique and l’expérience) where Hill, quite understandably, uses
two (criticism/critique and experiment/experience). Keeping all
the semantic possibilities in play, we could parse it as follows: the
creative critic who engages experientially with innovative forms
of literary writing is obliged to rediscover the amateur within on
each occasion. By temporally suspending the acquired learning,
established forms of disciplinary knowledge, and specific interests
that constitute her professionalism, she allows herself to emerge
from the experience with a transformed critical language attuned
to, as well as expressive of, the new ways of writing, reading,
thinking, and knowing the work opens up. The interdependency
is key: on the one hand, the innovative work obliges the critic to
unlearn her previously acquired expertise; on the other, the work’s
generative capacities become manifest only through her exploration
of literature’s “conditions of possibility” in all their theoretical and
experiential dimensions.
Just what creative criticism in this exacting sense might entail
becomes a little clearer when Blanchot turns to the question of value.
Anticipating McDonald’s objections to cultural studies, he notes
that “the complaint is sometimes made that criticism is no longer
capable of judging.”47 Yet, for Blanchot, “it is not criticism which
lazily [or, according to McDonald, culpably] resists evaluation, it is
the novel or poem that withdraws from evaluation because it seeks
to affirm itself in isolation from all value.”48 Returning to the idea
of interdependency, he adds:

Criticism is no longer a form of external judgement, which

confers value on a literary work and, after the event, pronounces
on its value. It has become inseparable from the inner workings
of the text, it belongs to the movement by which the work comes
to itself, searches for itself, and experiences its own possibility.49

Importantly, when talking of value, Blanchot does not have in

mind McDonald’s aestheticist criterion of “artistic merit,” let alone
Steiner’s Neoplatonist “real thing.” He pointedly refers to “all
value,” that is, something closer to Robbins’s concept of “public
values,” in the context of describing the contribution innovative
literary writing and creative criticism, working in concert, can
96 The Critic as Amateur

make to the refashioning or Nietzschean transvaluation of all

collective or communal values, whether literary, philosophical,
political, religious, economic, legal, or something else. In his
conclusion, he calls this larger project “one of the most difficult,
but most important tasks of our time,” characterizing it as “the
task of preserving and of releasing thought from the notion
of value, and consequently opening history up to that which,
within history, is already moving beyond all forms of value and
is preparing for a wholly different—and still unpredictable—kind
of affirmation.”50 The relevant “notion of value” here is absolutist
both in Steiner’s philosophical sense and in the political, specifically
nationalist, sense Blanchot championed in the 1930s as an apostle
of the extreme French right. I shall return to his volte-face later.
For now, I simply note that while his non-mediatory, perpetually
renovating amateur-professional practice of creative criticism might
in some respects be akin to Kantian critique, it is the obverse of the
professionalized “ethos” of “critique,” which Rita Felski argues has
dominated and deformed the Anglo-American academy for the last
forty years or more.51

***

Blanchot was well aware that he was thinking about criticism “in
Western cultures like our own.”52 Yet, somewhat uncannily, given
their very different backgrounds, not to say political positions in
the 1930s, Tagore anticipated many of the later Blanchot’s central
tenets—that is, the Blanchot of the 1950s and 1960s who shifted
allegiance to the radical French left—while developing his own
practice of creative criticism in the world of Bengali letters over half
a century earlier. As I have already intimated, Tagore had his own
reservations about academic professionalism and critical expertise,
which he justified in equally uncompromising, anti-scholastic terms.
Prefiguring Blanchot’s later insistence that “the essence of literature
is precisely to evade any essential characterization,” for instance, he
begins an essay of 1889 noting that “the essence of literature does
not allow itself to be trapped within a definition.”53 In part, this
reflects his indebtedness to the Buddhist traditions that cast doubt
on all rationalistic and reifying forms of thought, but when it came
to literature his anti-scholasticism had as much to do with his own
lived experience of the writing process. “I have myself experienced,
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 97

over and over,” he remarks in the same essay, “what is probably

familiar to everyone: when immersed in literary composition, one
seems to achieve a kind of superconscious state, as though an inner
self separate from my own has run off with the greater part of my
consciousness, and is carrying out its task half unknown to me.”54
He then goes on to distinguish “construction,” which “consciously
exercises the authority of the self” from “creation,” which, being
partly involuntary, involves a degree of self-extinction.55 Though
well aware that this sounds implausibly “mystic,” he insists “one
cannot put the matter more clearly” because the creative process
blurs boundaries between “the witting and unwitting experience I
have gathered, the Real and the Ideal within me, my everyday self
and my potential self.”56 The idiom may be peculiarly Tagore’s but
many writers across the twentieth century from Woolf to Coetzee
attest to the underlying sentiment, Blanchot among them.57 Though
he would have been wary of Tagore’s idea of the “superconscious,”
given his debts to Mallarmé’s more negatively construed poetics
of impersonality, he too understood writing as a process of
self-extinction. “If to write is to surrender to the interminable,” he
notes in The Space of Literature (1955), “the writer who consents
to sustain writing’s essence loses the power to say ‘I’.”58
For Tagore, as for Blanchot, this way of thinking about the
generative process of writing has direct consequences for criticism,
beginning with the question of value. This is why he objects to
the “worthy critics” with their “set formulations for literature”
who rely on “a pair of scales,” weighing each work as if it is a
commodity with a set market value, effectively seeing criticism as
“a form of external judgement.” “Whatever composition is placed
before them,” he comments wryly in the essay of 1894, “they can
confidently stamp it on the back with the appropriate number and
seal.”59 Yet, since literary creativity for Tagore opposes all forms
of reification, his doubts apply not just to the question of value
but to any of academic criticism’s “set formulations.” “We do
not properly understand literature,” he comments in an essay of
1907, “if we reduce it to place-time-pot (desh-kal-patra),” which
translates roughly as “context,” but equally we cannot see the
innovative work merely as a “constructed artefact” because it
constitutes “a world,” the generative potential of which is always
“ongoing” and “incomplete.”60 This puts pay simultaneously to the
historicist’s curatorial object and to the formalist’s well-wrought
98 The Critic as Amateur

urn. The reason? Innovative literary writing is an expression

of creative “ananda” (“joy” or “delight”), a cognitive-affective
experience, which, for Tagore, sets it apart from all rationalistic
forms of thought, whether political, economic (e.g., “capitalist
realism”), or, indeed, literary-critical, and links it to an array of
other seemingly gratuitous or superfluous human activities, ranging
from the elaborate rituals of a wedding ceremony to the needless
theatricality of warfare, which are also manifestations of “man’s
excess, his wealth, that which overflows all his need.”61
Like Blanchot, Tagore recognizes that any critical writing
equal to the challenge of engaging with this “vital power” has to
be just as creative.62 This is partly why he preferred to describe
himself as an “amateur,” particularly when addressing scholars in
an academic setting.63 Eschewing “the professor’s rostrum” in a
talk simply entitled “Literature,” which he gave at the University
of Calcutta in 1924, he insists, “I have gleaned the answers to my
queries from the experience of joy out in the world and within
my own heart.”64 Earlier, and in a similar spirit, he applauds the
amateur critic who abandons the professional’s “set of weights”
and strategies of “argument and classification, wishing to gift his
readers only with the state of mind induced in him on reading the
poem.”65 This sounds like McDonald’s subjectivist impressionism
but, given Tagore’s wider ambitions, it is more plausible to see it
as a forerunner of Blanchot’s creative criticism, which is at once
immersed in the uncertain, often disorienting but always potentially
generative flow of “literary experience” and part of a larger project
to do with the transvaluation of public values. For Blanchot, as we
have seen, this was “the task of preserving and of releasing thought
from the notion of value”; for Tagore, it concerned the no less
demanding challenge of thinking interculturally in ways that are at
once anti-absolutist, radically situated and open.
“Falling between the push and pull of two sides,” he wrote in
1912, “we will realise that it is by knowing other peoples that we
truly know ourselves and by knowing ourselves that we know all
others; we simply must understand that just as to sacrifice one’s self
in the desire for the other is useless beggary, so too, to diminish one’s
own self by forsaking the other is the ultimate impoverishment.”66
The “we” in this case refers to India’s diverse communities and
the “two sides” to the rivalrous but, for Tagore, equally absolutist
forces of British imperialism and Indian anti-colonial nationalism.
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 99

Rejecting both, and, contrary to the standard “Western” idea of him

as an otherworldly “Eastern” mystic, embracing what he called in a
poem of 1910 the “grand concourse of humankind,” he dedicated
the last three decades of his life to “opening history up to that
which, within history, is already moving beyond all forms of value”
and to “preparing for a wholly different—and still unpredictable—
kind of affirmation” centered on a decolonized, intercultural future
yet to come.67 Here too the connections with the later Blanchot are
suggestive. Responding to the insurrectionary spirit of May 1968
and summarizing his own by then strongly anti-nationalist and
anti-imperialist convictions, Blanchot wrote:

Everything that allows men to become rooted, through values

or sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, is
the principle of alienation which constitutes man as privileged
in so far as he is what he is (French, of precious French blood),
imprisoning him in contentment with this own reality and
encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as a
conquering assertion.68

For Blanchot, it was Marx who first recognized this, declaring “with
calm forcefulness: the end of alienation can only begin if man agrees
to go out of himself (from everything that constitutes him as an
interiority): out from religion, the family and the State.”69 Marx may
have been the first to recognize alienation in these terms but it was
Tagore who first understood how innovative literary writing and
creative criticism might work to overcome its effects, anticipating
Blanchot’s own postwar commitment to an anti-absolutist,
open-ended relationality and to an idea of writing that “will never be
confined by us in a book, for a book, even when open, tends towards
closure, which is a refined form of repression”—for “book” in this
sense we could just as well substitute Tagore’s “place-time-pot.”70

***

So much for the cunning passages of history. What of the

future? Can creative criticism in the Tagore-Blanchot sense even
be said to have one, particularly when its fate now seems tied to
the embattled, increasingly corporatized, and over-professionalized
university of today? Here, for all the ongoing resonance of their
100 The Critic as Amateur

thinking, Blanchot and Tagore are less useful or even plausible as

guides. Like many leading French intellectuals of his generation,
Blanchot never returned to the university after studying philosophy
in Strasbourg in the 1920s, making a career as a political journalist
in the 1930s—the period in which he associated with the extreme
French right—and then as a literary reviewer and essayist in the
postwar period. Despite his principled aversion to publicity—he
practiced what he preached about the disappearance of the author—
he became a particularly influential figure during his radical left
phase in the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote regular reviews for
the revived Nouvelle Revue Française, then one of France’s most
eminent literary magazines.
By contrast, having escaped the strictures of formal education
and the pressures of having to earn a living from his writing largely
because of his wealthy family background, Tagore went on to found
the counter-university he called Visva-Bharati in Bengal in 1921.
As he wrote in The Centre of Indian Culture (1919), this gave
institutional expression to two of his guiding principles: first, that
the “shock” of the “foreign” was “necessary for the vitality of our
intellectual nature”; and second, that the imposition of “European
culture” via the colonial education system not only turns the
colonized into “hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning,” it
“kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of new
thought power by a new combination of truths.”71 In essence,
he founded Visva-Bharati—the name can translate as “World-
Learning”—as a pioneering center of Indian intercultural studies,
dedicated to a Tagorean transvaluation of values conducted in a
spirit of creative ananda.72 Unsurprisingly, the professionalized
scholars of his day did not look favorably on the experiment. As
Jadunath Sarkar, then India’s leading academic historian, crisply
commented in a letter of 1922, a proper university education has to
be about “intellectual discipline and exact knowledge.”73
Making a career, let alone a living, as a creative critic writing for
literary magazines as Blanchot did is clearly not a realistic prospect
in today’s media environment, though it is encouraging that
ventures like n+1 are able to survive. There is also the increasingly
affordable, albeit unremunerative, blogosphere, which has created
other openings for writing outside the constraints of journalism
and the university. Equally, not having Tagore’s vision or resources,
there are no doubt few who would be willing or able to found
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 101

an alternative Institute for Creative Criticism and Intercultural

Studies—less encouragingly, Visva-Bharati still exists but in a
form now very far from its founder’s ideals; more encouragingly,
Columbia University’s new Paris-based Institute for Ideas and
Imagination, launched in 2018, may provide an opportunity for
their revival. Realistically, then, it looks like the most workable
option might be to make space for creative criticism within the
contemporary university itself. At a time when various forms of
“post-critique” in Felski’s sense appear to be on the ascendency,
when the category of “World Literature” is being resuscitated, and
when a forum like the Columbia Institute is opening up the debate
about how knowledge is defined, created, and taught, this may not
be as utopian as it sounds. But what would this kind of creative
criticism, at once inside and outside the university, within and
beyond the profession, look like?
Taking bearings from Tagore and Blanchot, I would single out
three broad aspirations. First, it should locate literature not only
within the formal academic discipline of literary studies, or, for
that matter, only within literary history, but in the spaces between
disciplines—extra- rather than interdisciplinary—and within the
history of thought in all its manifestations. Second, creative criticism
should make alliances with world literary studies, although taking
its cue from Tagore, rather than David Damrosch, in part because,
for the former, worldliness is inseparable from the larger project
of decolonizing and desectarianizing knowledge. Anticipating the
forms of alienation Blanchot highlighted in 1968—being imprisoned
in one time, one history, one language, one culture, one religion,
and one state—Tagore conceives of the “world” in his landmark
essay “World Literature” (1907) neither as a globalized circulatory
system nor as a determinate set of universal values but as an effort
toward an ever greater understanding of interconnectedness,
outside rationalistic, absolutist, colonial, and sectarian forms of
knowledge, always in the making and never complete. Finally, it
should recognize that when it comes to writing about literature
amateurism can never be optional, or understood as an impulse (or
a virtue), since it constitutes one of creative criticism’s conditions of
possibility, reflecting its dependency on innovative literary writing
and vice versa. This same interdependency, which entails a perpetual
process of learning and unlearning, as well as a constant unmaking
and remaking of critical language, means that any particular
102 The Critic as Amateur

method of “post-critique,” say Best and Marcus’s “surface reading”

or even Sontag’s earlier “erotics of art,” can have only provisional
or polemical value.74
If this still sounds implausibly utopian, especially given the
pressures universities currently face, it is at least a utopia with
prospects. For one thing, despite the vagaries of the publishing
industry, the rise of alternative media, and the many threats to
intellectual literary culture and the freedom of expression more
generally, innovative literary writing shows no sign of dying out,
and, for another, the task of freeing thought from absolutisms of
all kinds remains as difficult and important today as it was for
Tagore in the 1920s and Blanchot in the 1960s. True, there are no
easy ways of measuring the impact creative criticism understood in
these terms might have on journalism and the university, let alone
society and the economy, but at least its practitioners will never find
themselves at a loss when they or anyone else asks David Willetts’s
“most challenging of questions—what is it all for?”75

Notes
1 Charles Bernstein, “95 Theses,” Profession, October 4, 2016.
2 David Willetts, A University Education (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 106.
3 George Steiner, Errata (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997),
118.
4 N. Katherine Hayles, “Universities at the Crossroads: Directing
Cultural Transformations,” March 7, 2018.
5 Willetts, University Education, 106.
6 Steiner, Errata, 118.
7 Ibid., 42.
8 Hayles, “Crossroads.”
9 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (London: Zero Books, 2009).
10 Willetts, University Education, 3 and passim.
11 Hayles, “Crossroads” and Bernstein, “Theses.”
12 Steiner, Errata, 44, 117.
13 Ibid., 121.
14 Fisher, Capitalist, 17.
15 I. A. Richards, 1924. Principles of Literary Criticism (London:
Routledge, 1995), 26; Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London:
Macmillan, 1922), 145–146.
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 103

16 Rabindranath Tagore, “Children’s Rhymes” (1894), in Selected

Writings on Literature and Language, ed. S. K. Das and S. Chaudhuri
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100.
17 Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations (London: Verso, 1993), 14 and 64.
18 Robbins, Secular, 60 and 110.
19 Ibid., 25.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Rónán McDonald, The Death of the Critic (London: Continuum,
2007), ix.
23 McDonald, Death, ix.
24 Ibid., vii.
25 Ibid., 134.
26 Ibid., 149.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 148.
29 Ibid.
30 Maurice Blanchot, “The Task of Criticism Today,” trans. L. Hill,
Oxford Literary Review 22, no. 1 (2000): 19. I have slightly modified
some of Hill’s translations. All subsequent references in the text.
31 Maurice Blanchot, “Qu’en est-il de la critique?” Arguments 3,
nos. 12–13 (1959): 34.
32 Katharine Viner, “A mission for journalism in a time of crisis,”
Guardian, November 18, 2017: 32.
33 Michael Ignatieff, “The role of universities in an era of
authoritarianism,” University World News Global Edition, April 13,
2018.
34 Ignatieff, “Universities.”
35 See Amit Chaudhuri, ed., Literary Activism: A Symposium (Norwich:
Boiler House Press, 2016), 11.
36 Blanchot, “Task,” 19.
37 Ibid.
38 Wandia Njoya, “French racism, anxiety and love for
postcolonialism,” Aljazeera, February 7, 2018.
39 McDonald, Death, ix.
40 Blanchot, “Task,” 19.
41 Michael Jubb, Academic Books and Their Futures: A Report to the
AHRC and the British Library (London: 2017), 143–145.
42 Blanchot, “Task,” 19.
43 Ibid., 23.
44 Ibid., 22–23.
45 Ibid., 21–22.
46 Ibid., 23.
47 Ibid.
104 The Critic as Amateur

48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 24.
51 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 4 and passim.
52 Blanchot, “Task,” 19.
53 Maurice Blanchot, “The Disappearance of Literature” (1953), in The
Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),
141; Tagore, “Literature” (1889), in Selected Writings, 49.
54 Tagore, Selected Writings, 50.
55 Ibid., 49.
56 Ibid., 50.
57 See, for instance, Woolf’s “Professions for Women” (1931), in The
Crowded Dance of Modern Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993),
104–105; and Coetzee’s “A Note on Writing” (1984), in Doubling
the Point, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 94–95.
58 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 27.
59 Tagore, Selected Writings, 100.
60 Rabindranath Tagore, “Bishwasahitya” (1907, “World Literature”),
Rabindra Rachanabali, 13 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal,
1961), 771. I am grateful to Rosinka Chaudhuri for translating the
parts of the original essay I have quoted. For an earlier translation,
see Tagore, Selected Writings.
61 Tagore, “Bishwasahitya,” 769.
62 Tagore, Selected Writings, 49.
63 Tagore, “Literature” (1924), in Selected Writings, 264.
64 Tagore, Selected Writings, 264.
65 Ibid., 101.
66 Rabindranath Tagore, “Bharatbarshe Itihaser Dhara” (1912, “The
Flow of History in India”), Rabindra Rachanabali, 13 (Calcutta:
Government of West Bengal, 1961), 165. I am grateful to Rosinka
Chaudhuri for translating the parts of the original essay I have
quoted. For an earlier translation, see Rabindranath Tagore, “My
Interpretation of Indian History,” trans. Jadunath Sarkar, The
Modern Review, August–September 1913.
67 Rabindranath Tagore, I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems, trans.
K. Kushari Dyson (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 150.
68 Blanchot, “Disorderly Words” (1968), in Blanchot Reader, 202.
69 Blanchot, “Disorderly Words,” 202.
70 Ibid., 204.
71 Rabindranath Tagore, The Centre of Indian Culture (Calcutta: Visva-
Bharati Bookshop, 1951), 33–34.
 The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism 105

72 For more on Visva-Bharati, see Peter D. McDonald, Artefacts

of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from
Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), 16–26, 72–74 and passim; also www.artefactsofwriting.com,
especially webnote b.
73 Rosinka Chaudhuri, “‘Only what does not fit in can be true’:
Deprofessionalization and Academia in relation to Adorno and Tagore,”
Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 43 (October 22, 2016): 51.
74 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An
Introduction,” Representations 109, no. 1 (2009): 1–21; Susan
Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994), 14. The title
essay, from which the quotation comes, first appeared in 1964.
75 Willetts, University Education, 106.

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Deprofessionalization and Academia in relation to Adorno and Tagore.”
Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 43 (October 22, 2016): 46–52.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books, 2009.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Universities at the Crossroads: Directing Cultural
Transformations.” March 7, 2018. Available online: https://www.dur.
ac.uk/university.college/events/?eventno=38049; for the full lecture
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufHCN9a0xY4 (accessed
May 15, 2018).
106 The Critic as Amateur

Ignatieff, Michael. “The role of universities in an era of authoritarianism.”

University World News Global Edition, April 13, 2018.
Available online: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.
php?story=20180413093717351 (accessed May 15, 2018).
Jubb, Michael. Academic Books and Their Futures: A Report to the
AHRC and the British Library. London: 2017. Available online:
https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/academic-
books-and-their-futures_jubb1.pdf (accessed May 15, 2018).
McDonald, Peter D. Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and
Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017.
McDonald, Rónán. The Death of the Critic. London: Continuum, 2007.
Njoya, Wandia. “French racism, anxiety and love for postcolonialism.”
Aljazeera. February 7, 2018. Available online: https://www.
aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/french-racism-anxiety-love-
postcolonialism-180207061506901.html (accessed May 15, 2018).
Richards, I. A. 1924. Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Routledge,
1995.
Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations. London: Verso, 1993.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. London: Vintage, 1994.
Steiner, George. Errata. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1919. The Centre of Indian Culture. Calcutta:
Visva-Bharati Bookshop, 1951.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Creative Unity. London: Macmillan, 1922.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Rabindra Rachanabali, 13. Calcutta: Government
of West Bengal, 1961.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Writings on Literature and Language,
ed. S. K. Das and S. Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2001.
Tagore, Rabindranath. I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems, trans.
K. Kushari Dyson. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010.
Viner, Katharine. “A mission for journalism in a time of crisis.” Guardian,
November 18, 2017: 30–32.
Willetts, David. A University Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017.
Woolf, Virginia. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993.
 PART TWO

The Amateur in
the Age of
Professionalization
108
 5
Leavis, Richards, and the
Duplicators

Christopher Hilliard

The professionalization of criticism meant more amateurs doing

it. As literary criticism became institutionalized in universities and
schools, critical procedures were taught to thousands of people
for whom criticism would never become a profession. The most
important figure in this process as it played out in Britain was the
Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis. To mention this name is to suggest
further ironies or cruxes in the relationship between the amateur
and the professional, authority and democracy, exclusivity and
inclusivity.
Leavis is famous for narrowing the canon and pronouncing that
many conventionally esteemed books were not worth a reader’s
time.1 Leavis’s position was more complex, and more playful, than
is usually recognized, but no one could describe him as egalitarian
or pluralist.2 Similarly, Leavis’s idea of “minority culture” was not
straightforward snobbery, but as a considered elitism it did not allow
much room for positive cultural contributions from those without
the most rigorous training in criticism. “In any period,” Leavis wrote
in his pamphlet Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), “it
is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of
art and literature depends: it is … only a few who are capable of
unprompted, first-hand judgment. They are still a small minority,
110 The Critic as Amateur

though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand

judgment by genuine personal response.”3 Beyond that, there was
(in the 1930s) the “public” that sought guidance from reviews in
the Sunday newspapers, and so on radiating outward.4 In a healthy
culture, each of these larger publics would be connected, at some
remove, to the “critically adult public.” In this way, the judgments
of a “very small minority” would be transmuted into “standards”
governing a wider community of taste. Leavis invoked Samuel
Johnson’s “common reader,” who was not an “ordinary” reader but
an unusually “competent” and “cultivated” one.5
By the early twentieth century, according to Leavis and his wife
Q. D. Leavis, whose book Fiction and the Reading Public provided
most of the empirical support for her husband’s historical claims,
the minority was embattled, and communications between it and
a mass readership had been blocked. Twentieth-century reviewers
pandered to anti-intellectualism and book-of-the-month clubs
played on readers’ fears that they might not be smart enough to
enjoy Virginia Woolf or other “highbrows,” a word that became
common in the 1920s and whose currency was, the Leavises
believed, a sign of the further fragmentation of the reading public.6
In F. R. Leavis’s just-so history, eighteenth-century culture was
sufficiently unified, its various publics sufficiently articulated, that
an elite figure could also represent and shape the collective, the
“common.” Here he was seeking to mark out a cultural authority
that was neither professional nor amateur: professional in the sense
of scholastic and pedantic, like the Anglo-Saxonists he wanted to
wrench dominance of university English from; and “amateur” with
the upper-class associations that term had in Britain in the first
half of the twentieth century—a belletristic knowledge of literature
and art as a cultural attainment akin to knowing about wine.
Amateurs in another sense, interested but not strenuously “trained”
readers, barely registered in Leavis’s model of cultural standards
and influencers. Those other “amateurs” were several atmospheric
layers further out beyond the Sunday newspaper public. Yet Leavis’s
practice directly and indirectly set the agendas of many English
teachers in universities, high schools, and adult education between
the 1930s and the 1960s. A criticism whose rationale rested on a
small “minority” was brokered to a great many.
The central pedagogical instrument was “practical criticism.”
Leavis quickly became its most energetic proponent, but its
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 111

progenitor was his sometime senior colleague I. A. Richards. In

his practical criticism course at Cambridge in the 1920s, Richards
distributed anonymized copies of poems and asked the students,
colleagues, and hangers-on to write critical evaluations of them.
Richards would then evaluate the evaluations: the lectures were
an examination of readers’ responses and the practice of criticism
more than a direct modeling of literary analysis. In time, the phrase
“practical criticism” came to refer to close reading generally.
My focus here is on practical criticism in this original sense as
a pedagogical technique for learning to read difficult texts and
improving the reader’s capacity to discriminate. Later evangelists
for practical criticism as a teaching method took their cues from
Leavis rather than Richards himself. Through Leavis and his
followers, practical criticism became embedded, and appropriated,
in high schools, adult education, and a writers’ workshop between
the 1930s and the 1960s. A poetics and a set of criteria for literary
value were disseminated as well as a critical procedure.

***

I. A. Richards was not so much a votary of literature as someone

interested in the psychological and semiotic questions that reading
entailed. Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) was an attempt to
establish the psychological basis of responses to literary texts and to
clarify the nature of aesthetic value. Despite the title, the book was
more an exploration of the underlying bases of literary judgment
than a set of principles to be applied in interpretation. Criticism
was “the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to
evaluate them.” That endeavor was not possible “without some
understanding of the nature of experience, or without theories of
valuation and communication.”7 Richards suggested that literature
was a kind of language use that synthesized differing, opposing
responses. His conception of the text as a force field of impulses
enabled him to read for patterns and movement in poetry that was
still new and difficult: “the central process in Mr Eliot’s best poems
is the same; the conjunction of feelings, which, though superficially
opposed,—as squalor, for example, is opposed to grandeur,—yet
tend as they develop to change places and even to unite.” For
Richards, the extent to which a text reconciled its conflicting
impulses was an index of its quality, or “efficiency,” as he put it.8
112 The Critic as Amateur

In the mid-1930s, Leavis would break with Richards as a

“Benthamite” who was not really committed to literature.9
Nevertheless, the idea of literary texts as efficiently reconciling
impulses had some affinity with Leavis’s approving emphasis on
“fully realized” works of literature. In his early programmatic
essays, which had a greater impact on the practice of criticism
than some of the better-known pieces dating from when he was
an eminence but less involved in college teaching, Leavis would
sometimes describe literary effects and literary accomplishments
in terms akin to Richards’s. Leavis’s prose has none of Richards’s
scientific bearings nor the playful mathematics of William
Empson’s reference to the permutations of the different senses of
each element in a poem: but like theirs, Leavis’s interpretations of
poetry focus on relational networks of meanings and sensations.
Thus in 1932’s How to Teach Reading, which riffs on Ezra Pound’s
How to Read, Leavis discusses a short exchange between Banquo
and Duncan early in Macbeth (“This castle hath a pleasant seat;
the air | Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself | Unto our gentle
senses”) as an example of “Shakespeare’s marvellous power of
using words to compel on the reader or listener a precise complex
response, to evoke the combination of emotions and associations
appropriate to the context.” An adjective “co-operates with” two
nouns to “evoke” “associations.” An adverb represents a “set of
associations.” Banquo points out a martlet on the wing, and the
bird’s vitality and delicacy “represents a combination analogous to
‘nimbly and sweetly’.” “All these suggestions, uniting again with
those of ‘temple’ and ‘heaven,’ evoke the contrast to ‘foul murder.’”
Combine, evoke, cooperate with, unite, precise: for all Leavis’s
rejection of utilitarianism, his attention to textual patterns and their
effects was indebted to Richards’s conception of the mechanics of
poems.10 Concentrating on short poems and excerpts in a classroom
could introduce students to these kinds of patterns and effects.
In Leavis’s teaching, the analysis of the poems and prose passages
in the handouts was not self-contained in the way it had been in
Richards’s lectures, and it did not assume an autonomous work
of art the context of which was immaterial. Leavis’s classroom
performance of close reading was directed toward an encompassing
understanding of literature and culture. One of his students recalled:
“He talked us through, in effect, a chronological history of English
poetic styles based on ‘dating’ poems on … roneo’d sheets … and
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 113

through literary history both social and critical.”11 “History” would

emerge from literary texts. Leavis was never very impressed by
academic historians and didn’t revise his early position even after
social and cultural history increased the discipline’s ambit and
brought it closer to literary studies. In the mid-1960s, when he
was teaching in semi-retirement at the new University of York, he
prepared a seminar series on “‘Judgment and Analysis’ (Criticism
in Practice)” based on “Passages for assignment to period (etc), and
for intelligent comment.” He explained to the chair of department:
“This is Literary History, Cultural History, Background, as much as
it is ‘Practical Criticism.’”12

***

As a kind of disciplined sight-reading, practical criticism proved

a model that could be deployed in high school English teaching
and adult education classes. Both were pedagogical settings where
the default expectations tended toward passive appreciation and
rote contextualization in which “background” about the author’s
times or philosophy and “message” threatened to marginalize the
workings of texts. Being forced to read a text without the crutches
of context or conventional valuations opened up opportunities for
genuine critical analysis and serious personal engagement with
poetry or prose.
Adult education tutors in the late 1940s and the 1950s—the
heyday of literature courses in adult education, now catering to
middle-class people, especially women, as well as the working
class—were sometimes explicit about this. Raymond Williams, who
at this time was strongly influenced by Leavis’s pedagogy, remarked
in an adult education journal that people who collected “marginal
facts” about literary works were often “unable to read intelligently
an unnamed piece of verse or prose that might be set before
them.”13 Those who signed on for multiyear “tutorial classes” in
English literature seldom came without preconceptions or prior
self-directed learning. Practical criticism was a means of jolting
them out of what they thought they knew and directing them to
the words on the page. In that respect it was a kind of intellectual
empowerment that was directed against the greatest manifestation
of the amateur principle in British intellectual life: the autodidact
tradition.14
114 The Critic as Amateur

In 1950 Williams published a book, Reading and Criticism,

that brokered Leavisian criticism to adult education tutors. Like
Leavis, Williams insisted on the importance of value judgments
and deplored lazy reviewing. Among the exercises included in the
book were comparisons of passages from good novels paired with
bad best sellers. Reviewing Williams’s book in the journal Adult
Education, T. W. Thomas remarked that Reading and Criticism
reflected several decades of critical efforts “to discourage us talking
‘about’ literature and to get us to read the text as our sole source
and authority.” This might now be a commonplace in university
English departments, Thomas wrote, but “one can still find in
the adult education movement surprising reluctance to approach
literature through the critical reading of texts”: Williams’s book
was an attempt to overcome that reluctance, “a case for practical
criticism in the extra-mural class.”
Thomas professed enthusiasm for Williams’s argument, but
his praise was vague while his reservations were specific. “We
all know how easy it is to dissect a poem and leave it a heap of
dismembered parts.” The method was especially weak for making
sense of novels. Williams was aware of the problem and moved
on from juxtaposition exercises to incorporating textual analysis
into the reading of set texts. Given the time constraints of the
tutorial class, sessions would be based on one or two short poems,
for instance, or “one crucial chapter, or two or three crucial
paragraphs, from a novel.” Thomas wondered whether this was so
different from sight-reading paired passages on duplicated sheets.
“Reading extracts, however intensively, is not reading the novel,”
said Thomas, “and as a method of class study I have not found
it satisfactory since it obliges the student to rely on the tutor’s
interpretation which determined the selection.”15
Another adult education tutor—and another progenitor of
cultural studies—remained an adherent of impromptu evaluations of
contrasting poems and excerpts, especially as a way of learning how
advertising and other mass-cultural forms worked to manipulate
readers. Richard Hoggart, unlike Williams, had never been in a
classroom with Leavis: he had learned from Leavis’s books and from
the journal he edited, Scrutiny.16 Hoggart’s classroom practice is
better documented than that of most adult education tutors because
he had his students keep a class log. Each week a different student
would act as secretary, summarizing the discussion. The log for his
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 115

evening class in Scarborough in 1948 shows Hoggart introducing

the students to practical criticism through a homework assignment
comparing Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me
when I am dead”) with Christina Rossetti’s sonnet “Remember me
when I am gone away.”17 (One of the sessions in Richards’s practical
criticism course had used another poem by Rossetti as the bad poem
in a pair.)18 After returning their work, Hoggart gave his students
some general feedback. “[We] were interested,” wrote the secretary,
“in the point that the difference between these sonnets is that of
one age opposed to another”: an example of practical criticism as
“Literary History,” the necessary cultural context already there in
the text. With some prodding from Hoggart, the students were now
able to produce Leavisian valuations of the two sonnets. Rosetti
stood for “Victorian sentiment” and the Shakespeare of the sonnets
for “Elizabethan robustness.” “Robustness” was a favored Leavisian
term for the products of Elizabethan English; it was the main thing
Thomas Nash had going for him. Some of the younger women in
the class had fallen for Rossetti’s Victorian sentimentalism because
they were not equipped to resist “her gentle, conventionally poetic
euphemisms and her narcotic rhythms.”19 The “narcotic” power
of second-rate literature was a recurrent theme of the interwar
critiques of mass culture to which Hoggart was indebted.20
Hoggart then introduced the class to “a new scheme in criticism,
writing down our considered opinions on two passages of prose
which dealt with the liberty of the individual. Mr Hoggart
summarised for us, after which we tried to look pleased or silently
crumpled our pages.”21 One passage in the first pair came from D.
H. Lawrence’s letters, which F. R. Leavis regarded as exemplary
instances of the spontaneous, receptive intelligence he prized.22 The
phrases Hoggart or his students or both used to praise Lawrence’s
letters could have come from Leavis himself (“taut and nervous
in its style”).23 The evening concluded with a comparison of two
descriptions of gardens—a match-up between L. H. Myers and
John Galsworthy. Myers was a novelist championed by some in
Leavis’s circle; Galsworthy’s reputation was among the collateral
damage from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The students
duly pronounced the Galsworthy passage “a crude and blatant
‘build up’ for a love scene, using sickening alliteration—e.g. ‘tiny
tremors,’ foolish adjectives, e.g. ‘warm, sweet night’ and the pathetic
fallacy that a flower can look wistfully at a human being.” With
116 The Critic as Amateur

Myers, by contrast, “we knew well enough that this writer was not
anticipating a reader with a dulled critical faculty.”24
Though “Leavisites” had a lot invested in distinguishing great
literature from the second-rate, a developed concept of the literary
was not fundamental to their critical practice. They were confident
that reading skills honed on Donne or Eliot could reveal the workings
of other kinds of language use, including mass culture. As he taught
adult education classes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hoggart
was beginning to think about the questions of culture and agency
that he would explore in The Uses of Literacy (1957). (The book’s
subtitle was: “Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References
to Publications and Entertainments.”) He assigned his students texts
of mass culture (advertisements, pep talks) as well as “bad” poems
and novels so that they could grapple with the culture industry. Like
a number of early Scrutiny contributors, Hoggart was interested in
the ways the culture industry sought to manipulate emotion and saw
practical criticism as consciousness raising. One evening Hoggart’s
Scarborough class read an advertisement “appealing to the emotion
of mother-love. It was written in a style reminiscent of a sensational
Hollywood film, flashing from scene to scene in a dynamic fashion.
We concluded that this style of psychological advertisement meets
with the desired response as shown by the enormous sums charged
for newspaper and magazine space.” Hoggart then delivered a firmly
Leavisian case against the corrupting tendencies of mass culture. His
class analyzed a lurid newspaper report of a crime. It was

a badly-written, crude piece of work. Such a writer could have

no real values in life or he would not misuse images to gain
his effect. It was evidently written to stir up crude emotions …
Mr Hoggart stressed the point that the reading of crude and
sensational literature, as published by some of the press, may
make people incapable of appreciating real literature.25

These ideas about writing and emotional well-being were part of

the currency of “left-Leavisism.” In Reading and Criticism, Williams
had quoted Eliot’s dictum that “every vital development of language
is also a development of feeling” and said that the converse also
seemed true: “The crude or vague language, the pompous and
mechanical rhythms, which we have discerned in these extracts,
subsist—there is no other explanation—on crudity and imprecision
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 117

of feeling.”26 Hoggart was perhaps at his most Leavisian in the

final comment recorded by the student on duty that night: if people
become habituated to the manipulations of the press and unable to
appreciate real literature, “the management of their own lives might
be affected.”27 Hoggart was succeeding in getting his students to
respond of their own volition in the way he wanted. The layperson,
or the amateur, was learning to wield the cultural judgments of
the professional but was not being encouraged to evolve new and
potentially heterodox ones of their own. Leavisian criticism’s record
in high schools was less reliably directive.

***

No one did more to bring F. R. Leavis’s approach to literature

into British high schools—especially the academically selective
grammar schools—than Denys Thompson. One of Leavis’s earliest
undergraduate supervisees, Thompson was Scrutiny’s main writer
on mass culture, especially advertising.28 He became a schoolteacher
and prominent educationalist. Thompson was, in Leavis’s phrase,
a “magnificent propagandist.”29 He was capable of translating
Leavis’s methods—and his urgent sense of mission—into forms that
teachers who had not “been there” could apply in their classrooms.
Thompson wrote an instruction manual in evaluative practical
criticism, Reading and Discrimination, that did for schoolteachers
what Williams’s Reading and Criticism did for adult education
tutors. Thompson’s book sold in large numbers in the 1940s and
1950s.30 Thompson also edited the teachers’ journal English in
Schools and its successor Use of English.
For most of the 1950s, Use of English served as the hub of a
program of practical criticism for high school students. The journal
issued sheets with prose passages and whole poems for class use.
The accompanying section of each issue of the journal bore the title
“Criticism in Practice,” the phrase Leavis had come to prefer to
“practical criticism” (perhaps to indicate the difference between his
training program and Richards’s more diagnostic one, or perhaps
to stress that he dealt in activity). The section was curated at first
by Thompson and Raymond O’Malley, another of Leavis’s earliest
students and now a teacher at a conspicuously progressive school.
The format of the exercises—two thematically or superficially
similar texts juxtaposed for evaluation—was familiar from
118 The Critic as Amateur

Richards’s Practical Criticism, from Thompson’s Reading and

Discrimination, and Leavis’s own teaching materials, notably the
entrance examinations he set for prospective students at his college.
Students in the final years of high school, the lower and upper sixth
forms, would be asked to compare anonymized lines by Donne with
lines by Shelley or a passage from the English nature writer Richard
Jefferies (a favorite of Thompson and O’Malley, both of them
proto-environmentalists) with an advertisement for cornflakes.31
It was taken as a given that this was an exercise with right and
wrong answers, though these could be happy or unhappy in their
own ways. The strengths and weaknesses of the passages presented
were not treated as self-evident, and the framers of the exercise
provided pointers and suggestions for teachers. Moreover, teachers
were encouraged to report on their experiences using the exercises
in the classroom, and Use of English commented on the various
reports. In this way the “Criticism in Practice” section became an
educational and critical collaboration. Readers were reminded
that the series’ ongoing success “depend[ed] to a great extent
upon the continuance of a ‘two-way traffic’ in ideas and classroom
experience.”32 The responses that teachers reported back to the
journal offer a glimpse of this pedagogy in action.
When asked to compare Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning” with Lord Lytton’s “Absent Yet Present,” identified only
as poem A and poem B, grammar school sixth-formers provided
evidence of “genuine and discerning appreciation of the Donne …
but, on the whole, unfavourable reactions to the Victorian poem
found more coherent and quotable expression.” A number of
pupils commented on the Lytton poem’s emotional shallowness
and “unchanging rhythm.” Others faulted it for stringing images
together without a “unifying principle.” One student wrote: “There
is no development of the main idea; the poet simply meanders round
the main subject. The ideas have no connexion with each other
and when the ideas are taken together the poem does not make
sense.”33 Another offered a contrasting assessment in the Victorian-
romantic tradition of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
anthology: “The first poem [Donne] is much too calculated and
clever … The flow of ideas and images in B [Lytton] is typical of
the rush of emotions in young people.”34 Such responses, said Frank
Whitehead, the coordinator of “Criticism in Practice” for that issue,
should be allowed to run free in classroom discussion, “since for
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 119

many adolescents they represent a necessary phase of growth.” If

it was gratifying that a number of the respondents were receptive
to Donne’s poetics, their responses also revealed the limitations of
their understanding of imagery—that its function was illustrative or
mimetic. Whitehead’s assignment for the next month was designed
to prompt them to consider a poem in which the imagery did not
depend altogether upon “the resemblance of the things compared.”35
The goal of “Criticism in Practice” was thus not simply to
promote particular kinds of poetry at the expense of others but to
foster an understanding of the poetics on which those valuations
rested. That tastes tended to align themselves with implicit theories
of poetry was suggested by a teacher reporting on his pupils’
comparison of Donne’s description of the whale in The Progress
of the Soul and Shelley’s “To a Skylark”: in the responses of two
“able pupils” who preferred the Shelley he saw in references to
“caesuras and other technical preoccupations the effect of old-type
academic-conventional training; he says that discussion left them
unconvinced, though uncomfortable that cherished unconscious
prejudices had been challenged.”36
Worth quoting at length is the response of a young woman in her
final year of school to a pair of poems that bore on the Leavisian
concern with unity—with the demanding relationship between
formal order and the open exploration of experience:

Has the writer of B(i) [Donne], by his apparent complete

preoccupation with the whale, in any way limited the range of
his interests and the subtler possibilities of poetry? Has the poet
of B(ii) [Shelley], by allowing his imagination to wander without
control, succeeded in giving a more complex impression of the
experience which he wishes to encompass? … [Donne’s poem]
incorporates in the verse structure a series of images which
are extremely well adapted to show the nature of the whale,
especially its size and the nature of its power.

At every stroke his brazen fins do take,

More circles in the broken sea they make
Than cannons’ voices when the air they tear.

It is important to notice the verse movement here: the heavy

rhythm which is accentuated by both the sound and the meaning
120 The Critic as Amateur

of the metallic images: “brazen” and “cannon,” which suggest

not only the colour and strength of the whale but also something
of its unnaturalness—it is outside living nature in the remote,
insensitive, inanimate world of metal.

Here we can see a high school student learning the ropes of

modern literary criticism. The passage from imagery to “verse
movement” as the locus of a poem’s more profound operations
was a characteristically Leavisian move. Like Richards, and the
early Leavis, this sixth-former saw poetry as working through
coordination, by drawing in and orchestrating different effects:
“The shifting of metaphor in these first lines is remarkable—a large
number of separate sensuous effects are called into play: movement,
colour and substance, definition of the movement … Now two
elements are called into the metaphor.”37
Leavis expected contradictory things from practical criticism. It
was supposed to elicit authentic, vital responses, as an alternative
to the passive learning of conventional valuations, but Leavis’s
standards were uncompromising and the range of acceptable
judgments correspondingly narrow. In his own teaching, a “wrong”
answer from a student derailed a discussion, and a monologue from
the teacher would begin.38 The people he taught as undergraduates
who then became schoolteachers had, by virtue of their situation,
to be more accepting of inferior readings as part of the process
of becoming educated. Whitehead later described his approach to
teaching as an effort to combine “a concern with those standards
of discrimination which Scrutiny had upheld so valiantly in the
face of the vulgarity of the modern publishing and entertainment
industry” with a “fostering of the young person’s innate creativity.”39
Whitehead faulted Leavis for never “put[ting] on record any concern
for the education of the less able and less privileged pupils in our
school system.” This was not out of callousness, Whitehead thought,
but because Leavis’s priorities lay elsewhere—with those “publics”
more able to enforce standards on contemporary writers.40 One
of Leavis’s students, David Holbrook, devoted his teaching career
to those less privileged and less “academic” students, pioneering
creative writing in British high schools.41 Holbrook thought of
this work as extending Leavis’s project of renewing culture in the
machine age. Leavis did not recognize his own values and ambitions
in Holbrook’s initiatives, but the tension between empowerment
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 121

and conformity in Leavis’s critical and educational program was

such that it tended to split and transform as it was appropriated
by others.

***

Practical criticism was often an exercise in salutary destruction:

learning not to be able to enjoy Victorian poems or be taken in by
copywriters’ sentimentality. It is thus more surprising that Leavisian
classroom practice was an inspiration for a writers’ workshop, a
setting where the identification of the bad and the not-fully-realized
could not be the final step in the process. Leavis himself was not an
active sponsor of new writing after the early 1930s, and the conduct
of his lieutenant Harold Mason at a college literary society meeting
in the mid-1950s provides an illustration of the inhibiting effects
that this concern with “standards” could have. With the editor
of the Cambridge literary magazine Delta present, Mason “asked
whether an editor should include weaker poems in order to make
the magazine sufficiently large. Mr Mason further proposed that
the meeting vote on the motion, that it was not worth the editor’s
going into print if he had not a better collection than that in the
present number of ‘Delta.’”42
Despite encouragement like this, Delta was edited by a succession
of undergraduates reading English under Leavis at Downing
College. The editor on the receiving end of Mason’s disapproval
was Philip Hobsbaum, who went on to adapt practical criticism
for use in a writers’ group. Together with Peter Redgrove, Peter
Porter, Martin Bell, and Edward Lucie-Smith, Hobsbaum was a
core member of the Group in London in the 1950s. Hobsbaum
took over the stewardship of a London poetry group that had met
at G. S. Fraser’s flat until Fraser moved to Leicester University.
The gatherings at Fraser’s had been boisterous. Under Hobsbaum,
another member recalled, alcohol was replaced by coffee and the
circle became “the sort of concerned critical group which he had
had at Downing College, Cambridge, and the evenings were much
more formally organized.”43
Hobsbaum thought of his Group as “an experiment in practical
criticism,” “an activity derived ultimately from the practical
criticism classes of Richards and Leavis.” The poems, stories, and
chapters to be read were stenciled and duplicated and circulated to
122 The Critic as Amateur

participants a week before the meeting. “The provision of scripts

meant that there was a built in aid towards relevance in discussion.
Divergent opinions could always be referred back to the words
on the page, and this prevented discussion from straying into the
realms of metaphysics and conjecture.”44 Lucie-Smith quipped
that the Group’s biggest debts were to Cambridge English and
the duplicating machine: the approaches of the former could not
have been put to work without the provision for making multiple
copies.45 Lucie-Smith elaborated in an unpublished memoir:

Philip’s plan was very simple. He planned to base himself on Dr

Leavis’s teaching methods, but to apply these to the work of his
own contemporaries. A text would be put in front of us, and we
would be asked to react to it, and to discuss it as candidly as we
liked. In addition to the fact that the work would be new, with
nothing known about it from previous report or experience, there
would be another significant deviation from university practice.
The discussion would be a complete democracy. The moderator
would undertake a purely technical function—that of keeping
the discussion going on reasonably coherent lines—but there
would be no question of him putting himself above the rest.46

This was Leavisian in procedure, but unlike Williams’s or

Hoggart’s adult education classes, it does not seem to have enforced
Leavisian notions of good poetry, insofar as one can tell from
the few surviving duplicated sheets with annotations by multiple
participants in an evening’s meeting. The several comments on a
poem by Anne Dyke read: “collapses into adjectivalism”; “KEY”;
“Good detail but not quite fitting with the right tone of the poem”;
and “Crude”: none of them distinctively Leavisian.47 Of course,
Lucie-Smith was wrong when he said that responding to poems
about which one had no “previous report or experience” was a
deviation from university practice: depriving readers of contextual
cues had always been part of the exercise, a guarantor of its rigor.
That experience could not be replicated in a writers’ group: not
only was anonymity out of the question, the poems discussed were
the work of acquaintances if not friends, and the group heard the
author read them as well as having access to the duplicated “song
sheets.” Nevertheless, Hobsbaum’s insistence on the words on the
page went some way toward estranging the poems on the duplicated
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 123

sheets from the author in the room. His conduct of the meetings
compounded the emphasis the Group poets placed on “clarity of
intention as well as clarity of expression.”48
There was another limit on the capacity of practical criticism to
force disinterested and disciplined scrutiny of the text. “After some
years of regular meetings,” Lucie-Smith recalled, “it was possible
to anticipate nearly all the arguments which would be produced
for or against a particular poem, and sometimes, even, the very
phrases which would be uttered in the course of the discussion.”49
The duplicating machine could distance you from the text, but you
could get to know your fellow readers too well.

***

Lucie-Smith described the Group’s discussion practice as “a

complete democracy.” Another member of the Group in the 1950s,
Peter Redgrove, recalled that individual personalities became
sublimated in “the general concern for what we were all interested
in—the possibility of accurate expression that could be shared
between all of us.”50 This Rousseauian democracy of the general
will recalls Leavis’s idea of a small “critically adult public” able
to agree on standards. Yet in Leavis’s own teaching, the teacher
was an authority, and in practice there was a tension between the
independent judgment Leavis valued and the standards he insisted
upon, as we have seen in Hoggart’s initiation of his adult students
into Leavisian ideas and high school teachers’ acceptance, with
varying degrees of happiness, that young people’s “innate creativity”
would not always yield critical valuations of the sort their teachers
subscribed to. The Group’s replacement of the authoritative teacher
with a moderator went further in defusing the tensions in the
mission of Leavis’s criticism.
If the Group empowered amateurs, or, more accurately, aspirants,
by importing Leavisian protocols of criticism into a creative writers’
workshop, the Group was also a step toward a professionalization
of a different sort. When the Group began, university-based creative
writing courses were unknown in Britain, and there were no
ready-made models for writers’ groups of comparable focus and
discipline.51 As members of the Group became established, they
took up visiting positions teaching creative writing at American
universities. Redgrove taught at Buffalo and at Colgate and in
124 The Critic as Amateur

the early 1970s submitted a report to the Arts Council of Great

Britain that led to the funding of writer-in-residence slots at
British universities. At the time Redgrove himself was teaching in a
further-education college in Cornwall. He told an acquaintance he
had been able to

swing this [course] towards creative writing … with the result

that we have had two very fine young writers brought along to
their degrees … This having been accomplished in one art school,
others are now following suit … Far from being “death for poets”
at least in our situation we promise fair to get a better deal for
young writers (for why should young painters and sculptors get
three years on grant-aid and not young writers, so that they can
do their work with helpful instruction from practitioners and
such freedom as they require) and a better deal for older writers
also, who ought to be employed, if they wish it, in teaching the
“use of the imagination.”52

Notes
1 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad (1948; London, 1960), 1–3.
2 Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation: The “Scrutiny”
Movement (Oxford, 2012), 252.
3 F. R. Leavis, “Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture” (1930) in
Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge, 1933), 14.
4 F. R. Leavis, “‘This Poetical Renascence,’” Scrutiny 2, no. 1 (June
1933): 65–76, 69.
5 F. R. Leavis, How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound
(Cambridge, 1932), 3–4; Leavis, “What’s Wrong with Criticism?”
Scrutiny 1, no. 2 (September 1932): 132–146, 145–146.
6 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), 22–26,
158–159; Leavis, “Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture,” 38.
On the language of “brows” in the interwar decades, see Stefan
Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006),
110–119; John Baxendale, “Popular Fiction and the Critique of Mass
Culture,” in Patrick Parrinder, gen. ed., The Oxford History of the
Novel, vol. 4, The Reinvention of the British Novel, 1880–1940, ed.
Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek (Oxford, 2011), 555–570.
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 125

7 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; repr., London,

1926), 2.
8 Ibid., 194–195.
9 F. R. Leavis, “Dr Richards, Bentham, and Coleridge,” Scrutiny 3,
no. 4 (March 1935): 382–402, 388–389, 400, 402.
10 Leavis, How to Teach Reading, 30–31. While he lectured, Richards
would turn to the blackboard to draw “cross-sections of a reader’s
mind, full of springs, pulleys, and arrows indicating emotions, images
and incipient impulses to act.” Basil Willey, Cambridge and Other
Memories, 1920–1953 (London, 1970), 21.
11 Tony Inglis, Untitled Essay, Cambridge Quarterly 25, no. 4
(1996): 353.
12 Leavis to Philip Brockbank, May 12, 1965, F. R. Leavis Papers,
University of York Library.
13 Raymond Williams, “Some Experiments in Literature Teaching
(1948–1949),” in Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult
Education, ed. John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood (Leicester,
1993), 148.
14 On which see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British
Working Classes (New Haven, 2001); David Vincent, Bread,
Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working
Class Autobiography (London, 1981).
15 T. W. Thomas, “Practical Criticism and the Literature Class,” Adult
Education 24, no. 2 (1951): 20, 23–24, 25.
16 Richard Hoggart to F. R. Leavis, May 4, 1953, Richard Hoggart
Papers, 3/9/10, University of Sheffield Library.
17 “Scarborough W.E.A.: Literature Class Log” (notes for January 29,
1948 and February 26, 1948), Hoggart Papers, 4/1/3, University of
Sheffield Library (hereafter “Scarborough log”).
18 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
(London, 1929), 32–41.
19 Scarborough log, February 26, 1948.
20 See Christopher Hilliard, “Popular Reading and Social Investigation
in Britain, 1850s–1940s,” Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (March 2014):
247–271, 269, 270–271.
21 Scarborough log, February 26, 1948.
22 Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London, 1995),
183–184; F. R. Leavis, “D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving
Babbitt,” Scrutiny 1, no. 3 (December 1932): 273–279.
23 Scarborough log, February 26, 1948.
24 Ibid., January 29, 1948, and February 26, 1948.
25 Ibid., January 29, 1948.
26 Williams, Reading and Criticism, 17.
126 The Critic as Amateur

27 Scarborough log, January 29, 1948.

28 Denys Thompson, “Advertising God,” Scrutiny 1, no. 3 (December
1932): 241–246.
29 Leavis to Ian Parsons, November 5, 1932, Chatto & Windus Archive,
CW 53/2, University of Reading Library.
30 Chatto & Windus ledgers, 9/634, 10/268, 10/712, 11/148, 11/382,
11/578, 12/247, University of Reading Library.
31 “Criticism in Practice: II … Report by Raymond O’Malley,” Use of
English 1, no. 2 (1949): 93; “Criticism in Practice: XIII … Further
Work by Denys Thompson,” Use of English 4, no. 1 (1952): 48–49;
“Criticism in Practice: II … Further Work Set by Denys Thompson,”
Use of English 1, no. 2 (1949): 97.
32 “Criticism in Practice: V: Part ‘A’ by Frank Whitehead,” Use of
English 2, no. 1 (1950): 29.
33 Ibid., 29–30 (ellipsis in original).
34 For Palgrave’s poetic, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political
Thought and Intellectual Life in England, 1850–1930 (Oxford,
1991), 357; Christopher Clausen, “The Palgrave Version,” Georgia
Review 34 (1980): 273–289.
35 “Criticism in Practice: V: Part ‘A’ by Frank Whitehead,” 30, 32.
36 “Criticism in Practice: II: Report by Raymond O’Malley,” 95.
37 Ibid., 95–96.
38 Frank Whitehead, “F. R. Leavis and the Schools,” in The Leavises:
Recollections and Impressions, ed. Denys Thompson (Cambridge,
1984), 144.
39 Ibid., 145.
40 Ibid., 148–149.
41 David Holbrook, English for the Rejected: Training Literacy in the
Lower Streams of the Secondary School (1964; repr., Cambridge,
1968).
42 Doughty Society Minute Book, November 23, 1954, DCCS/4/4/1/1,
Downing College, Cambridge.
43 Alan Brownjohn, untitled typescript, n.d., Group Papers, MS
4557/1360, University of Reading Library.
44 Philip Hobsbaum, untitled typescript, n.d., Group Papers, MS
4557/1358, University of Reading Library.
45 Edward Lucie-Smith, “Uses and Abuses of the Literary Group,”
Critical Survey 1, no. 2 (Spring 1963): 78.
46 Edward Lucie-Smith, “Abridged from a forthcoming book,” n.d.,
Group Papers, MS4557/1359, University of Reading Library.
47 Group Papers, MS 4457/2026, University of Reading Library.
48 Lucie-Smith, “Abridged from a forthcoming book.”
49 Ibid.
 Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators 127

50 Redgrove to Fletcher, March 28, 1974, Group Papers, box 2,

University of Reading Library.
51 See Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The
Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006), esp.
chapter 8.
52 Peter Redgrove to Ian Fletcher, March 28, 1974, Group Papers, box
2, University of Reading Library.

Bibliography
Unpublished Manuscripts
Chatto & Windus Archive. University of Reading Library.
Doughty Society. Minute Book. Downing College, Cambridge.
Group, The. Papers. University of Reading Library.
Hoggart, Richard. Papers. University of Sheffield Library.
Leavis, F. R. Papers. University of York Library.

Published Works
Baxendale, John. “Popular Fiction and the Critique of Mass Culture.” In
Patrick Parrinder, gen. ed., The Oxford History of the Novel, vol. 4,
The Reinvention of the British Novel, 1880–1940, edited by Parrinder
and Andrzej Gasiorek, 555–570. Oxford, 2011.
Clausen, Christopher. “The Palgrave Version.” Georgia Review 34 (1980):
273–289.
Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in
England, 1850–1930. Oxford, 1991.
Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford, 2006.
Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of
Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA, 2006.
Hilliard, Christopher. English as a Vocation: The “Scrutiny” Movement.
Oxford, 2012.
Hilliard, Christopher. “Popular Reading and Social Investigation in
Britain, 1850s–1940s.” Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (March 2014):
247–271.
Holbrook, David. English for the Rejected: Training Literacy in the Lower
Streams of the Secondary School. 1964; repr., Cambridge, 1968.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with
Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London, 1957.
128 The Critic as Amateur

Inglis, Tony. Untitled Essay. Cambridge Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1996): 353.
Leavis, F. R. “D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbitt.” Scrutiny 1,
no. 3 (December 1932): 273–279.
Leavis, F. R. How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound.
Cambridge, 1932.
Leavis, F. R. “What’s Wrong with Criticism?” Scrutiny 1, no. 2 (September
1932): 132–146.
Leavis, F. R. For Continuity. Cambridge, 1933.
Leavis, F. R. “This Poetical Renascence.” Scrutiny 2, no. 1 (June 1933):
65–76.
Leavis, F. R. “Dr Richards, Bentham, and Coleridge.” Scrutiny 3, no. 4
(March 1935): 382–402.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad. 1948; London, 1960.
Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London, 1932.
McIlroy, John, and Sallie Westwood, eds. Border Country: Raymond
Williams in Adult Education. Leicester, 1993.
MacKillop, Ian. F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. London, 1995.
O’Malley, Raymond. “Criticism in Practice: II … Report by Raymond
O’Malley.” Use of English 1, no. 2 (1949): 93.
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1926 (first pub.
1924).
Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. London,
1929.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working-Classes. New
Haven, 2001.
Thomas, T. W. “Practical Criticism and the Literature Class.” Adult
Education 24, no. 2 (1951): 20, 23–24, 25.
Thompson, Denys. “Advertising God.” Scrutiny 1, no. 3 (December 1932):
241–246.
Thompson, Denys. Reading and Discrimination. London, 1934.
Thompson, Denys. “Criticism in Practice: II … Further Work Set by
Denys Thompson.” Use of English 1, no. 2 (1949): 97.
Thompson, Denys. “Criticism in Practice: XIII … Further Work by Denys
Thompson.” Use of English 4, no. 1 (1952): 48–49.
Thompson, Denys, ed. The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions.
Cambridge, 1984.
Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of
Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography. London, 1981.
Whitehead, Frank. “Criticism in Practice: V: Part ‘A’ by Frank Whitehead.”
Use of English 2, no. 1 (1950): 29.
Willey, Basil. Cambridge and Other Memories, 1920–1953. London,
1970.
Williams, Raymond. Reading and Criticism. London, 1950.
 6
The Critic as Rasik: Pramatha
Chaudhuri, Tagore, and
the New Language of
Literary Writing

Rosinka Chaudhuri

Writing in 1948, a year after the declaration of Indian independence,

the Bengali writer Buddhadeva Bose (the most important critic
of his generation) described the most eminent surviving Bengali
critic of the previous generation in an essay titled “A Review of
Modern Bengali Literature” written in the English language—not
the language of his primary works—in a memorable passage:

Pramatha Chaudhuri, in his seventies, said goodbye to Mayfair

and all that, and a visitor to Santiniketan, while straying in the
Uttarayan grounds, could have caught a glimpse of him in one
of the lovely little houses designed and built for Rabindranath.
If the visitor was intrepid, or curious, or a lover of literature, he
would perhaps have walked in and for a few moments sat face
to face with one of the master artificers of Bengali prose. Sharp
eyes, a dagger-like nose, a clean-shaven handsome face wreathed
with wrinkles, a splendid body of a man shattered by illness,
looking for all the world like a great mountain eagle, wounded
130 The Critic as Amateur

in combat, wings broken, alone. As the long trembling fingers

reached out for the golden cigarette-case lying on a little table
amid books and cups and things, the bright eyes, pouncing on
the visitor, lingering, questioning, would so unnerve him that
he would forget to strike a light for the cigarette and begin to
think of taking his leave. If he was lucky, however, Indira Devi
Chaudhurani would appear at the right moment and immediately
start the right sort of conversation. A niece of Rabindranath’s,
herself gifted in music and belles-lettres, tall, ivory-complexioned,
splendid in an old-world way, she was the lesser known half, and
is now the only half, of Bengal’s most distinguished couple. The
eagle, if alone in his last days, was not companionless.1

Several details in this descriptive account may need an explanation

for the uninformed reader. When Bose writes, right at the start, that
Pramatha Chaudhuri, in his seventies, said goodbye “to Mayfair
and all that,” he means the street in Calcutta named Mayfair Road
in the Ballygunge area in the southern part of the city where some
of the city’s prominent families and the professional classes had
increasingly settled from the early twentieth century onward.
Meanwhile, the visitor to Santiniketan would obviously have been
there because it was where the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore,
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, had established
first his school and then the university he named Visva-Bharati. An
insufficiently acknowledged innovator of architectural forms and
interior design, Tagore built a number of interesting homes within
the space of a small compound housed in the university and school
premises, the chief among which was named Uttarayan by him.2
Tagore died in 1941, so “the visitor” would have seen Pramatha
Chaudhuri in this house at any time between 1941 and 1948. His
wife, Indira Devi, very much the Q. D. to his F. R. (Leavis), was
an equal partner and contributor to their life-long enterprise of an
intense engagement with literature and with life. Rabindranath’s
favorite niece, to whom, as a young man, he wrote (addressing
her as “Bob”) a series of letters that were later immortalized in a
publication called the Chinnapatrabali in Bengali, Indira Devi was
an intelligent and astute commentator, scholar, and writer in her
own right.3 But perhaps the most important part of the description
is contained in the words: “one of the master artificers of Bengali
prose.” For Pramatha Chaudhuri was acknowledged not just as a
critic and a writer and an intellectual, but as an essentially urban
 The Critic as Rasik 131

and urbane man of sharp wit and “courtly” prose—a word used
deliberately and repeatedly by many after him to gesture at the
sophistication and excellence of the craft he practiced.
Unlike Professor Leavis, though, the figure of Pramatha
Chaudhuri (1868–1946) was as far removed from a professional
career or a professorial position in an established university campus
as humanly possible. Incontestably enacting the primary role
of the critic as amateur in the field of Bengali letters, Chaudhuri
was an independent spirit with independent means and never
actually became a professional in any of the possible careers he
might have taken up. It may be worth recalling here the notion
of de-professionalization and its implications in relation to the
critic as amateur. De-professionalization, interpreted as the
experience of a person finding that both temperamentally as well
as practically—that is, on the level of personal impulse as well as
with regard to professional/academic requirements, one doesn’t fit
into the demands of the profession—seems to reside at two levels
in this context.4 The first is the inability to find a place for your
subject matter within the straitjackets of current academic or
writerly publishing imperatives that have been put in place by these
professions. The second is a relatively rare condition: to find that
that inability may be a direct consequence not just of content but of
the form and style in which the text is written, which makes it unfit
for inclusion or wider dissemination within the parameters that
the profession demands. In the case of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,
what Hullot-Kentor calls his “paratactical style” makes his writing
there “difficult” or “obscure”; the result was that this work seemed
“obliquely remote,” at the time, to the national literary spheres of
both Germany and the United States, where it was not “received”
well. “And this remoteness,” the translator says, “is requisite to any
plausible value it may have. For as Adorno wrote in constantly
varied formulations, only what does not fit in can be true.”5
De-professionalization, for Adorno, was of course the norm:
even a rudimentary acquaintance with his life’s work reveals he
wrote on subjects ranging from musicology to metaphysics and that
his writing span included such things as philosophical analyses of
Hegelian metaphysics, a critical study of the astrology column of
the Los Angeles Times, and the music of, among others, Beethoven
and Schoenberg, not to mention jazz. “In terms of both style
and content, Adorno’s writings defy convention” seems to be the
leitmotif of commentators on his work. In this refusal to fit into
132 The Critic as Amateur

any one sphere of specialization, of course, he embodies the notion

of the “amateur” as a de-professionalized intellectual—“the urge,
as a creative practitioner, or, indeed, a practitioner of any kind,
not to be identified with one genre or activity,” but rather than
say he was “in general, a critic of specialisation and a champion of
dabbling,” it might be more accurate to acknowledge that he may
have demanded specialization in dabbling instead.6
Pramatha Chaudhuri’s writing style could be called paratactical
as well; “obliquely remote,” it was perceived to be the creation of
a “master artificer”—he was a writer’s writer and did not sell well,
something Buddhadeva Bose lauded in the essay he wrote on him. His
skill at his craft and assortment of interests seem no less vertiginous
than Adorno’s, ranging from classical and modern literature in
India and the world to philosophy, science, linguistics, sociology,
economics, history, archaeology, and world and Indian politics.
He was passionate about music and wrote Hindu Music on the
indigenous traditions of song, Prachin Hindustan on ancient India,
and Rāyater Kathā (The Peasant’s Story), published a year after the
infamous Bengal Famine of 1943.7 These were slim books, more in
the nature of extended essays, as he was, in the end, always first and
foremost an essayist. His essays spanned political subjects, as in Tel-
Nun-Lakri (Oil-Salt-Wood) (1905), to essays on translation, on the
crisis in our language, on education, on Hindu–Muslim relations, on
Marx’s dialectics, on book covers, wine, and what the rains said. But
as a critic he made the deepest impact in his analysis of literature and
literary writing, writing on early modern poets such as Jayadeva, Sri
Chaitanya, and Bharatchandra, on the sonnet form (“Sonnet Keno”
[Why the Sonnet?]), the new age in Bengali literature (“Banga Sahitye
Nabajug”), the real in realism (“Bastutantrata Bastu Ki”), Buddhism
and literature, reading, contemporary Bengali prose, children’s
literature, literature and politics, new fairy tales, translation, as
well as several articles on Sanskrit, French, and English literature
including individual essays on Maupassant and Salomé. He also
wrote on Rabindranath—eighteen essays in all—from an enviable
vantage point of intimacy and evaluation, though with most of these
essays being written after Rabindranath’s death in 1941.8
What, after all, is an amateur? An amateur is not a professional,
first of all, by which is meant that his/hers is not a paid job but a
vocation followed. The origins of the word are traced to the late
eighteenth century: from the French, from the Italian amore “to love,”
 The Critic as Rasik 133

from the Latin amator/amatoris meaning enthusiastic admirer or

pursuer, friend, devotee, lover. The word “amateur,” today, generally
denotes inexperience or insufficiency; an amateur golfer is one not
good enough for the professional circuit; an amateur physicist or
economist is unheard of. Nonetheless, around the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the sense in which the word was used,
curiously, was the inverse of its current usage, when applied, for
instance, to the term detective. An amateur detective is not part of
the police force but gifted with knowledge, curiosity, and a desire
for justice—in this sense, both Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes,
as amateurs, actually excel and exceed the job requirement. This
excellence resides in the love (“amore”) he or she brings to the work
but also, crucially, in the distance from the professional field—in the
world of the amateur, location is all—not to be part of a group, not
to be a colleague or a co-worker, but to work brilliantly in isolation.
The amateur detective, therefore, is in essence alone, talented, aloof,
and creative, full of passion but remote. Above all, the amateur,
ironically, is in this case the opposite of inexpert; rather he or she
is the expert, more skilled, more talented, and more of a virtuoso
than the paid employee. Strangely all of this is true not just of the
amateur detective but also of the critic as amateur.
The critic, in fact, is an amateur by definition—there is no
profession labeled “Critic” in any college, university, or print and
publication department—and more often than not, those designated
as such are those whose skills go beyond the occasional book review
or classroom pedagogy. If you are an academic who reviews books
or publishes essays in journals, you remain primarily an academic—
it is only after a certain reputation has been made and consolidated
by critical books that you may be called a critic as Frank Kermode
or Terry Eagleton are in the present day. On the other hand, if you
are on the staff of the New York Times or the New Yorker, you
will, once again, attain the status of a critic only if you are Michiko
Kakutani or James Wood and have built up a reputation over time
for incisive literary analysis. Writers too, sometimes, attain the
status of critics, but only if they have published critical essays in
some form or the other. A certain aura seems to be demanded before
the label “critic” may be applied even in this age of post-mechanical
reproduction. Otherwise you are simply a reviewer or professor
or author; interestingly, in no instance is any critic designated an
amateur when engaged in the task of criticism itself.
134 The Critic as Amateur

The crucial factor in the attainment of the status of critic seems

to be the essay form. Critics inhabit the essay format in relation to
the literary field, and the essayist is one who practices “the highest
level of prose,” as Buddhadeva Bose said in an essay titled “Modern
Bengali Prose”—paragraph by paragraph the writings of a great
critic and essayist weave a spell dependent not on content but upon
the thought process:

It is advisable to go to the essayists (sometimes they are poets or

poet-novelists at the same time) for the highest levels of prose
… In other words, to those who write not primarily to impart
instruction or convey information, but as practitioners of an
art whose validity, apart from the value of the content, they
recognize.9

Barthes says in Criticism and Truth, “The critic separates meanings,

he causes a second language—that is to say, a coherence of signs—
to float above the first language of the work … what controls the
critic is not the meaning of the work, it is the meaning of what he
says about it.”10 In this sense, all critics are essayists, and in their
being essayists—in that instant of the inhabitation of the essay
form—they occupy, whatever their actual profession, the status of
the amateur (in the sense of an amateur detective/expert analyst of
the literary).
It makes sense then that the word “amateur” originated in the
late eighteenth century at a time when institutions had begun to
dominate social life—once institutions had filled all empty spaces
in social and political life, a demand for distance from institutions
seemed preordained. There is no equivalent for the word in
Bengali—the word apeśādār simply means one outside of a regular
business or job—here the implication of distance from money
inherent in the term “amateur” comes more sharply into focus. If the
word was used of an amateur detective such that Bengali literature
abounds and revels in, from Kiriti to Byomkesh to Feluda, it would
necessarily imply a man (always a man) without a regular income
who relies for his livelihood instead on skill, expert knowledge, and
formidable talent. Pramatha Chaudhuri encapsulated every one of
the qualities, as evidenced in the individual style of his prose, which
was rare and bright and lean, militating against sentimentality,
generality, exaggeration, and standardization. Appreciated by a
 The Critic as Rasik 135

few for these qualities, he was not a popular writer and did not
sell well, yet his criticism has endured. Like Michael Madhusudan
Datta half a century before him, he too could have chosen as an
epigraph for his career the line Michael used from Horace for his
first book of verse: “Neque te ut turba miretur, labores, / Contentus
paucis lectoribus.”11
Scion of landed gentry rooted in the Pabna district of East Bengal
(later Bangladesh), Chaudhuri’s father was Deputy Magistrate of
Jessore district when he was born, traveling to West Bengal when he
was five. Remarkably, he never identified himself as a Calcutta man
despite spending much of his life in that city. He graduated from
Hare school and then Presidency College and was a resident at a
succession of genteel middle-class locations almost all his life, yet
he maintained: “Kintu tāi bale āmi Kolkātāi haye uthini.” (“But I
didn’t become a Calcuttan as a result of that.”)12 He left for England
in 1893, spending a year in Oxford before moving to London
(although, typically of him, not as a student at the university), and
though he returned to India as a barrister, he did not practice at
the Calcutta High Court for very long. Never at home within the
constraints of professional life, he taught Roman law at Calcutta
University for a while and then also managed the Tagore estates for
some time. Fluent in English and French and conversant with Italian
literature, he was a great aficionado of both music and writing,
spending the rest of his life established first and foremost as a critic
and rasik in the true Indian sense of a word that denotes one who
delights in and appreciates art from the premises of real knowledge
of the art form. Without going into the semantics and nuances
of Sanskrit terminology, and treating the word as it is ordinarily
understood by Indians to this day, one could maintain that the critic
is always a rasik—like amateurism, demonstrable appreciation and
real knowledge are foundational characteristics of any true critic.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (no relative) had referred to Pramatha
Chaudhuri as a rasik in an essay, also quoting him as having said of
himself: “As a writer I have been identified as a rasik; as a result I
have had to let go of many subjects.”13 By this he might have meant
the identification of his métier by the literary and general reading
public as belonging to the realm of aesthetics—consequently, a sharp
interest in politics and society, as expressed in some exceptional
publications, seems to have taken a back seat in the course of his
career as critic. Although the reference here was not made in praise,
136 The Critic as Amateur

as the two belonged to opposing camps of writers (as I explain

below), the tension inherent in the comment points toward the
identification of the rasik with the aesthete, as the core element of
the ancient Indian term lay in an informed appreciation of the arts.
In no instance was the rasik ever understood as an amateur in the
sense of someone not fully trained but rather as always the opposite,
as critic and connoisseur in times when professionalization never
pertained to the world of letters or arts in the sense it does now.
Critics, of course, never function in isolation. To read and
reevaluate an important critic such as Pramatha Chaudhuri should
also involve an appreciation of the galaxy of other writers, critics,
and poets surrounding him, without whom the critical enterprise
would not have been what it was at the time. The circle surrounding
him and his famous Bengali journal, Sabujpatra (Green Leaves),
which he started in 1914 primarily to inaugurate a new unstuffy,
youthful, and modern Bengali prose, was of a legendary character,
though such groups were not anomalous in early twentieth-century
Calcutta. Calling themselves the sabujsabhā (the green gathering),
this amorphous group were like a mandala with Chaudhuri as its
center point—an intricate diagram of connections and networks
arranged around a central locus. They would meet at Pramatha
Chaudhuri’s residence, then at 1 Bright Street, Calcutta, and
among the constituents of this group were Atulchandra Gupta,
Dhurjatiprasad Mukhopadhyay, Bimalaprasad Mukhopadhyay,
Baradacharan Gupta, Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay, Satyendranath
Bose and others, including, of course, above all and as often as
his schedule would permit, Rabindranath himself. Not unlike
the situation in French literary history, argument and visceral
disagreement animated the Bengali public sphere then and now. The
opposing side—that is, those opposed to all that Sabujpatra stood
for—published a journal titled Sanibārer Cithi (Saturday Letter),
which made fun of, satirized, and mocked the endeavors of the
other group relentlessly, edited, among others, most famously by
Sajanikanta Das and Nirad C Chaudhuri.
If Chaudhuri resembled Adorno in some aspects, then a parallel
may also be found with Barthes—both resisted the academy and
functioned creatively outside of it for most of their careers, and
both were embroiled in some of the bitterest literary quarrels of
their time. The roots of Criticism and Truth, as we know, were in a
dispute between the French critic Raymond Picard and Barthes over
 The Critic as Rasik 137

interpreting Racine—here, Barthes replied to Picard’s objections by

writing a book on what he thought criticism ought to be, arguing
about the language of criticism, attempting to change the style in
which artistic and literary issues could be discussed. Going against
accepted convention regarding the language to be used for literary
writing was also Pramatha Chaudhuri’s mission, in and outside the
journal Sabujpatra, and he was advocating a language for literary
composition that would have seemed just as strange to the Bengali
public sphere as Barthes’s, for Barthes’s reply in Critique et vérité is
accompanied by a cultural as well as an intellectual and linguistic
challenge. For both, the argument was between university critics or
pundits and themselves on the outside, about critical idiom as much
as about institutional/cultural locations. This is what amateurism
entailed for both writers—a location outside of institutional
positions, creating an independent space to forge an independent
idiom with little recognition and almost no remuneration at the
time.
Sabujpatra’s first issue carried an editorial by Pramatha
Chaudhuri under the heading “Om Prāṇāy Swāhā”—the Sanskrit
translating roughly to mean the infusion of new life. It began by
quoting Dwijendralal Ray’s advice to the Bengalis: “Do something
new!” followed by a disclaimer that they were not trying to follow
that advice entirely. In its critical stance, it had an ally in another
famous progressive writers’ journal, Kallol (1923), of which
Buddhadeva Bose was an integral part while still a young man
in Dhaka. While the modernist Kallol exhibited some impatience
with what they perceived to be Rabindranath’s transcendentalism,
Sabujpatra was of the opinion that Rabindranath was essentially
modern, always at the vanguard of the new, and the very emblem
of renewal—someone who reinvented himself again and again in
response to the call of innovation, never succumbing to the forces of
conservatism or traditionalism, never looking backward at any time.
While the Kallol group—joined later by others of this generation in
periodical publications such as Kalikalam (1926), Pragati (1927),
Parichay (1931), and Kavita (1935)—rebelled openly against the
long shadow cast by Rabindranath’s great presence in their midst,
they nevertheless remained indebted to his writing in a myriad
ways. Dipesh Chakrabarty cites Buddhadeva Bose, who wrote of
his own initial hostility to Rabindranath: “I know at least of one
young man who every night in bed recited [the poems of] ‘Purabi’
138 The Critic as Amateur

like crazy, and spent the daytime denouncing Tagore in writing.”14

Pramatha Chaudhuri, on the other hand, perhaps due to his personal
relationship with Rabindranath, or perhaps because he was astute
enough as a critic to see through the immaturity of most of these
attacks, never wasted any time trying to disavow his own and his
generation’s involvement with and investment in Rabindranath. He
summed up his own career’s indebtedness to various impetuses by
saying: “If my writing is obdurate, that is because I am from East
Bengal; if it is clever with words that is because I am a citizen of
Krishnanagar; and if it has life then that is because I have been
animated by the touch of Rabindranath’s great life from my youth
onward.”15
Pramatha Chaudhuri will be best remembered in Bengali letters
for his unflagging and successful advocacy of the use of everyday
language in the writing of Bengali literature, winning the war for
calit bhāshā or the spoken tongue against those who would rather
have sādhu bhāshā or the elevated style in writing. He shaped not
just Bengali literary history but the future of Bengali writing as
the publisher of Sabujpatra by publishing Rabindranath Tagore’s
new writings regularly and serially in this journal in this period.
Following the Nobel Prize in 1913 Rabindranath is recorded as
having expressed the desire to stop writing altogether to his two
companions—Manilal Gangopadhyay and Pramatha Chaudhuri—
on the houseboat on the river Padma from which he managed his
family’s estates in East Bengal; he felt he had said all that he had to
say and had no more to give. In the argument that followed—the two
had, expectedly, protested furiously—he is said to have smiled and
made a concession: “All right—if you publish a periodical I will write
for it, but I will not write anywhere else.”16 Pramatha Chaudhuri
named the resultant journal Sabujpatra—and Rabindranath’s next
novel, Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), next play, Phalguni
(Of Spring), and his next, most radical, book of poetry, Balaka
(Wild Geese) all appeared within its pages incrementally, portion
by portion, over the next two or three years. Following the editor’s
proclamation that this new venture was in the service of literature
alone and would have no truck with business—thus it carried no
advertisements or images—the periodical folded up within four
years of its inception, having achieved a great measure of success in
that brief period. Above all else, it was responsible for Rabindranath
adopting a new literary language and style, validating the enormous
 The Critic as Rasik 139

importance of Pramatha Chaudhuri’s role of critic as facilitator,

interlocutor, and shaper of the future of Bengali writing—the better
craftsman (il miglior fabrio) helping to birth a seminal change in the
language of literature by nudging a master poet toward innovation
and change.
The argument for or against the use of everyday Bengali for
literary pursuits was an old one. The first novel in the language,
published in 1854, was written in colloquial speech, but the most
famous poet of the time is repeatedly quoted arguing against it.
This was a time when Bengali was still in the process of being self-
consciously fashioned into a modern and usable thing, and Peary
Chand Mittra, whose novel, Ālāler Ghare Dulāl, was being serially
published under the name of Tekchand Thakur, had embarked on a
mission to initiate the practice of using spoken Bengali for literary
composition. An argument between Michael Madhusudan Datta
and Peary Chand ensued when, referring to his efforts, Madhusudan
had suddenly exclaimed:

What on earth are you trying to write?—People wear everyday

clothes at home and mingle with their close relatives; but you
cannot go outside in that apparel. For that you need formal wear.
It appears that you seem to be advocating the disuse of formal
clothes and the use of informal attire in the house and outside it,
in society and at functions, in short, everywhere. How can that
be possible?

In response, Pearychand had retorted, “What do you know

about the Bengali language? But mark my words, it is my style
of composition that the Bengali language will adopt and this
will become permanent.” In reply, Madhusudan, in his usual easy
humorous way remarked: “It is the language of Fishermen, unless
you import largely from Sanskrit. You call that a language! You
will see it is the language I create that will be permanent.”17 The
discussion about what an authentic literary Bengali would or should
be continued in the latter half of the century in a more polemical
and vigorous manner through the works of Vidyasagar and the
contestations between Rabindranath and Bankimchandra; it is an
argument, which was then decisively settled at the intervention
of Pramatha Chaudhuri, who, as we have seen above, turned
Rabindranath Tagore toward one of the most important decisions
140 The Critic as Amateur

of his life, ensuring that Tagore never went back, subsequent to the
Sabujpatra years, to the elevated literary style of convention.
Pramatha Chaudhuri was also instrumental in shaping the future
of Bengali prose through his own writings, critical and otherwise. He
was an inspired writer of essays—political, sociological, historical,
but most of all, satirical. This last type was written pseudonymously
as Birbal, the legendary Hindu minister in the court of the Mughal
emperor Akbar, around whose fabled presence accrues a series of
tales of wit and wisdom popular in India to this day. Acknowledged
as one of the most successful satirist essay writers in Bengali, he
was famous for the refinement of his language and the sharpness of
his intellect, the wide range of his reading no less than the uses to
which he put that reading in his writings. Critic and essayist above
all, he also wrote poetry and stories, his first book of poetry being
Sonnet Pancāśat (Fifty Sonnets) in 1913, the second Padacāraṇ (To
Walk/To Recite) appearing in 1919. In the latter book, he set down
his philosophy of life, love, and poetry in a short poem addressed to
Manilal Gangopadhyay, “Premer Kheyāl” (Love Song) in which he
said the scent of flowers is not found in language the poet artificially
arranges, and the gift from the heart is not there in the poet’s
premeditated move of the pawn, but if you drink deep of the wine
of the flowering sky, of the never-ending mistake, only then will you
sing the song that is the origin of life, the song of rasa. “Thāke nā
kabir sājāno bhāshāy / Phuler ghrāṇ / Paṛe nā kabir sājāno pāśāy
maner dān / Kara jadi tumi ākāś-phuler / kara jadi tumi ananta
bhuler / madirā pān / Tāhole gāhibe prāṇer mūler / raser gān”18
It is not as a poet, however, that Pramatha Chaudhuri is
remembered—his verse was occasional at best—but as a critic, lover
of literature, and essayist on a diverse range of topics. Commenting
on the publication of a collection of Pramatha Chaudhuri’s essays
on contemporary social and political life at home and abroad in
a collection whose title replicated Rabindranath Tagore’s famous
novel of the same name, Ghare Baire (Home and the World),
another well-known intellectual and critic at large, Dhurjatiprasad
Mukhopadhyay, said: “It is a real feat to have been able to transform
independent paragraphs into the larger structure of the essay form.
In this sense, the entire book is like a Chinese scroll, continuous
and full of movement.”19 Dhurjatiprasad’s understanding of “the
independent paragraphs” having an existence of their own (apart
from the “structure of the essay form”) gestures here at the craft
 The Critic as Rasik 141

of prose, while the comparison with a Chinese scroll is fortuitous:

one is reminded of David Hockney’s interpretation in Day on the
Grand Canal with the Emperor of China (or Surface Is Illusion but
so Is Depth), where a 70-foot seventeenth-century Chinese scroll is
unrolled continuously in a fluid movement while the camera focuses
on moments captured individually—independent paragraphs—full
of detail and craft.
As I have said elsewhere, almost exactly at the same time as
developments in the Western hemisphere, at around the same time
that Barthes said (in Writing Degree Zero) that literature with a
capital L was coming into place in French letters in 1850, two
adjacent developments—literary criticism and literary history—
were inaugurated in their modern form in colonial India.20 Literary
criticism, written in English or the regional languages, was quite
often produced by writers themselves but also by men in the literary
sphere (rarely women, although exceptions like Toru Dutt sparkled
in the early 1870s), taking the form of book reviews and extended
articles in the periodical press.21 From the late nineteenth century
onward, there developed the hugely important domain of the
creative writer turned literary critic engaging with the contemporary
and traditional production of literature in the varied languages of
India. In the Bengali literary sphere, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s
essays on the “uttar ramcharit” or “giti kabya” or Rabindranath
Tagore’s “sahitye swarup” or “chhele bhulano chhora” were
radical reassessments, quickly becoming essential reading for an
understanding of the various positions that defined the literary
past. Thus, many eminent writer-critics in Bengali have consistently
defined the literary culture of their time and of their pasts, through
essays that mean less and less in a culture little concerned today
with its literary heritage and its relationship to history.
At the start, literary criticism and literary history in Bengali were
often conflated, wherein Macherey’s distinction, in A Theory of
Literary Production, of literary criticism as an “art” and literary
history as a “science” had not yet become operational. Located
as he is within the domain of the French public sphere, Macherey
acknowledges, of course, right at the start while talking of “the
meanings and usages of the word ‘criticism’—which has been
used ever more exclusively since the seventeenth century to denote
the study of literary works”—that “it was soon felt necessary to
distinguish between literary history and literary criticism.”22 The
142 The Critic as Amateur

career of criticism in India in the context of the classical languages is

different from its career in the context of modern Bengali. Sanskrit
poetics goes back thousands of years—and many provinces in
India used Sanskrit or Persian as a literary language right up to the
modern period, including in Bengal. The career and characteristics
of literary criticism in the classical languages need not concern us
here; if we look at the modern Bengali literary sphere, which comes
into existence around 1852, we see that the state of criticism in the
so-called West developed at the same time and in quite similar ways
in Bengal as well. Barthes realized, for example, that:

in the bourgeois periods (classical and romantic), literary form

could not be divided because consciousness was not; whereas,
as soon as the writer ceased to be a witness to the universal,
to become the incarnation of a tragic awareness (around 1850),
his first gesture was to choose the commitment of his form,
either by adopting or rejecting the writing of his past. Classical
writing therefore disintegrated, and the whole of Literature,
from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of
language.
This was precisely the time when Literature (the word having
come into being shortly before) was finally established as an
object.23

The word “sahitya”—used in many Indian languages to denote

“Literature”—too had assumed its modern form in India a little
before the time around 1860 when it is “finally established as
an object.” A comparison here with the situation in Bengal is
intriguing, all the more so because the process of “adopting or
rejecting the writing of his past” had been contaminated, in the
context of the Indian writer, by the advent of colonialism. Moving
away from the language of “impact” and “influence,” it is time
now to read the efflorescence of modern Bengali literature as
existing in relation to colonialism in some instances quite directly,
when it concerned a cultural or nationalist or reactionary or
nativist stance taken by particular critics and writers, but also, in
many other instances, working its own path quite independently
of colonial rule in practitioners who took from the best of world
literature much as Borges did in Argentina or, indeed, Pound did
for English poetry.
 The Critic as Rasik 143

It was with the publication of Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s

literary manifestos in 1852 and 1858 that this movement toward
the establishment of Bengali “Literature” as craft, as an object,
and as a process of history was tentatively inaugurated. After
this, Bengali Literature was then set spectacularly on its modern
path by his peer, Michael Madhusudan Datta. The “West” was
not more advanced or more professionalized in this respect than
Bengal—in book production alone Calcutta was second only to
London in the nineteenth century—with literary journals, literary
editors, book reviews, and criticism flourishing here in both the
English and Bengali languages parallel to similar developments in
the Western hemisphere. The tradition of writing about Bengali
literature in English, for instance, had been inaugurated by a poet
in the English language, Kasiprasad Ghosh, in the pages of the
India Gazette in 1831 in a piece called “On Bengali Writers”;
roughly forty years later, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s two
influential English essays (“A Popular Literature for Bengal,”
1870; “Bengali Literature,” 1871) were landmarks of this
particular convention.
This is the lineage to which Pramatha Chaudhuri belongs—
of writers writing in either the English or the Bengali language
while taking from the French (Toru Dutt), the Italian (Michael
Madhusudan Datta), the Greek (Rangalal Bandyopadhyay), and
the Latin (Michael, the Dutt family), with Sanskrit and sometimes
Persian mediating always in the practice of each of these writers in
significant ways.24 The career of English and the other cosmopolitan
European languages in the early literary modernity of Bengal provides
material for an exploration of the new notion of the individual
as it emerged, not in the sense of post-Enlightenment rationality
being replicated in various provincial outposts but as evidence of
the new symbolic and ideological constructs that made up distinct
evolving modernities in the non-Western world. The discourse of
literary writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Bengal
is not seamless and internally consistent but rather suffers from
various tensions, disjunctions, and contradictions that opened up
creative possibilities and fashioned new syntheses from constituent
elements of this discourse.
Reading the history of Bengali modernity as a type of
epistemological “bricolage,” it is possible to see in an English essay
such as Pramatha Chaudhuri’s “The Story of Bengali Literature”
144 The Critic as Amateur

(written in 1917 at the request of Rabindranath) an embodiment of

the search for a new idiom with which to articulate both modernity
and experience. An appreciation of the achievement of a critic such
as Chaudhuri should then lead, it is hoped, to an understanding of
how the literary acted upon the cultural formulation of the modern
in India. Written in English, “The Story of Bengali Literature” brings
to us a reading of the past in relation to the moment of its writing
if we can read that moment not in the content of the discussion but
in its voice—in the tone, tenor, language, and élan of the critic’s
interpretation of the literary turn of modernity. Commenting here
on the fact that “the whole of our poetic literature was intimately
connected with religion” in the premodern period and therefore
assumed “almost a sectarian character,” Pramatha Chaudhuri wrote
of the eighteenth-century poet Bharatchandra:

But there is one striking exception to this rule. There is a unique

book, the Vidya Sundar of Bharat Chandra—unique both in its
merits and faults—which marks the birth of secular spirit in our
literature … The Vidya Sundar is a love story, a novel in verse.
And the love he treats of has nothing spiritual or ideal about
it, but is of the common mundane passion which lends itself to
humorous and even indelicate treatment. … In his hands the
sacred drama of the Hindu pantheon degenerates into secular
comedy … Gay and frivolous, cultured and cynical, witty and
perverse, Bharat Chandra represents the utterly secular spirit of
18th century poetry …
Bharat Chandra’s reputation is under a cloud now … A
subtle and persistent odour of decaying morals and dying faith
pervades the whole poem, which makes the modern reader feel
uncomfortably squeamish. I have no hesitation in admitting that
Bharat Chandra’s masterpiece is a fleur de mal, but it is a flower
all the same, many petalled and of perfect form.25

Pramatha Chaudhuri was writing a few years in advance of

Benjamin’s reclamation of Baudelaire for the modern world,
but with this reappraisal of Bharatchandra for what he calls the
“modern mind,” Chaudhuri locates him as a formative influence
in a period of flux that was subsequently to witness the first phase
of British imperialism in India.26 Bharatchandra, the preeminent
poet of premodern Bengal, was, and still is, read as emblematic
 The Critic as Rasik 145

of the indigenous inheritance of traditional poetic practices, a

strain of which came to be stigmatized by charges of immorality
and licentiousness made chiefly in Bengal’s Victorian age, which
categorized him as unworthy of inclusion in the national project
of a modern literature for Bengal. Such a reading as Pramatha
Chaudhuri’s challenges accepted convention and creates a changed
signification in the already available conventional practices of
reading Bengali literature, practices that had created a binary
understanding of native and foreign, moral and immoral, and
leads to a realization instead that the production of modernity
involved various members of a historical situation acting together
and upon each other in unexpected ways. If we are to find, in the
constitutive arenas of the Indian modern, some notion of creativity
and specificity independently of the argument of Western influences,
then this cross-sectional reading by Pramatha Chaudhuri becomes
significant for the self-created identity of Indian modernity. It
attempts to fashion a vocabulary that encompasses the significance
of the “rude” in Bengali literature, its creative foundations, and its
slippery relationship to nationalism.
Pramatha Chaudhuri’s practice of criticism offers fresh
avenues of thought for crafting a new geography of modernism
for India and the world. The circuits of reciprocal influence and
transformation that take place within his range of references
and creative use of sources from every direction—apart from his
formal innovativeness—show up in the shape of an amateurism
that involves the recognition that this modernity was, in
essence, a world modernity as understood in Rabindranath’s
conceptualization of world literature or visva sahitya in 1907.
Rabindranath had memorably maintained there that literature
(which, in Tagorean terminology, sometimes seems a metaphor
for, and interchangeable with, play) needs to exist in a domain
“without self-interest” (swartha sekhan hoite dure) and of the
superfluous (prayajan chhara).27 The notion of excess is returned
to more than once: he points out that “beauty is extravagance, it is
excessive and wasteful expenditure” (behishabi baje kharach), that
literature “exceeds need”; it expresses man’s excess (prachurya) and
his wealth (aisharya). This preoccupation with all that is not born
of necessity in the practical sense and with pleasure in the sense
of amore takes us back then to the domain of the amateur, of the
critic as amateur, as both the world of literature and the distance
146 The Critic as Amateur

from professionalization are crystallized here in a viewpoint that

belonged to both Rabindranath and Pramatha Chaudhuri in their
respective outlooks.
The predominant endeavor nowadays in relation to literature—
to understand the place of literature in history, largely through an
analysis of the textual production of cultural meanings and the
sociopolitical conditions of creating texts—takes us very far from
this early twentieth-century understanding of the pleasure in excess
that exists outside of necessity, with professional expertise and
professorial preoccupations turning literary criticism and history
today largely into a branch of the social sciences. To rediscover
a lost dimension of literature by returning to the act of literary
criticism cannot of course be done by jettisoning the challenging and
important aspects of both field and text but by making allowance
for a timely change in the perspective with which we view both.
Pramatha Chaudhuri’s career as critic and amateur might be well
worth revisiting in that context.

Notes
1 Buddhadeva Bose, An Acre of Green Grass (first published 1948) in
Rosinka Chaudhuri, ed. An Acre of Green Grass and Other English
Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018),
15.
2 For Tagore’s impact on modern Indian décor, see Rosinka Chaudhuri,
“Modernity at Home: A Genealogy of the Indian Drawing Room,” in
Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Delhi: Orient
Blackswan, 2012).
3 See Rabindranath Tagore, Letters from a Young Poet (1887–1895),
trans. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Delhi: Penguin Modern Classics, 2014).
4 See Rosinka Chaudhuri, “‘Only What Does Not Fit in Can Be
True’: De-professionalization and Academia in Adorno and Tagore,”
Economic & Political Weekly, October 22, 2016.
5 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Newly translated and edited
with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014), xix. All subsequent citations are from this
volume.
6 Amit Chaudhuri, Concept note for symposium on “De-professionalization”
organized by the University of East Anglia at India International Centre,
Delhi, January 7–8, 2016.
 The Critic as Rasik 147

7 Pramatha Chaudhuri, Hindu Sangīt (with Indiradebi Chaudhurani)

(Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Library, 1945); Prāchīn Hindustān
(Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Library, 1941); Rāyater Kathā (Calcutta:
Visva-Bharati Library, 1944).
8 It is Bengali literary convention to refer to a writer by his first name,
which is the convention followed here too in most instances.
9 Buddhadeva Bose, “Modern Bengali Prose,” in An Acre of Green
Grass, xix.
10 Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher
Keuneman (London: Continuum, 2007), 32–33.
11 Horace, Satires (1.10.73f) as it appeared misprinted on the title page
of Michael Madhusudan Datta’s Tilottamāsambhab kābya (Calcutta,
1860). Horace wrote: Neque te ut turba labores, / Contentus paucis
lectoribus: labor not for the admiration of the crowd but be content
with a few choice readers.
12 Pramatha Chaudhuri, Bīrbaler Ātma-paricay in Sajanikanta Das, ed.
Śanibārer Cithi (Agrahāyan 1348BE [November–December 1941]),
177–182.
13 See Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Nirbācita Prabandha (Selected Essays)
(Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1997), 130.
14 Cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 162.
15 Cited in Aryakumar Sen, Bīrbaler Ātma-paricay (Birbal’s Life) first
published in Sajanikanta Das, ed. Śanibārer Cithi (Agrahāyan 1348
BE/ November–December 1941) reprinted in Sandipan Mitra, ed.
Ekuśer Caryā (Year 2, Vol. II) (Kolkata, 2013).
16 Ibid.
17 Nagendranath Som, Madhū-smriti (Memories of Madhu / Sweet
Memories), 1st ed. 1921 (Calcutta: Vidyodaya, 1989), 97–98. My
translation; italicized portions are originally in English. For an
extended discussion, see Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Literary Thing:
History, Poetry, and the Making of the Modern Cultural Sphere (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2013). It is worth remarking here, though,
that Madhusudan was not speaking literally, as he also declared:
“It is my intention to throw off the fetters forged for us by a servile
admiration of everything Sanskrit.”
18 Pramatha Chauduri, Padacāraṇ (Calcutta: Sri Gauranga Press, 1919).
19 Dhurjatiprasad Mukhopadhyay, Ghare Bāire: Pustak ālocanā (Home
and the World: Book Review) in Paricay, Fālgun 1343 (February–
March 1936).
20 See The Literary Thing, ibid.
21 Toru Dutt’s “An Eurasian Poet” (1874) about Leconte de Lisle, a
Mauritian Creole poet who wrote in French, is one such outstanding
piece of criticism from the pen of a woman in nineteenth-century
148 The Critic as Amateur

Bengal, though largely forgotten and unread in later years. Dutt

published regularly in the Bengal Magazine.
22 Ibid., 3.
23 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 3.
24 “For a century now, every mode of writing has thus been an
exercise in reconciliation with, or aversion from, that objectified
Form inevitably met by the writer on his way, and which he must
scrutinize, challenge and accept with all its consequences …. Form
hovers before his gaze like an object; whatever he does, it is a
scandal.” Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 4.
25 Cited in Shankari Prasad Basu, Kabi Bhāratchandra (Calcutta: Dey’s
Publishing, 2001), 94–95.
26 Bhāratchandra Ray (1712–1760) was court poet of Raja
Krishnachandra of Nadia in an age when the English were already
a troublesome presence in Bengal; his best-known work, the
Annadāmangal, was written five years before the fateful Battle at
Palashi that Sirajuddaula lost to Clive in 1757, thereby losing Bengal,
and so India.
27 Visva-Sāhitya or “World Literature” was presented at the National
Council of Education, Bengal, on February 9, 1907, and published
immediately in the January–February 1907 number of the revived
journal Bangadarsan that Rabindranath was editing at the time
with Srishchandra Majumdar. It appeared again in the collection of
five essays titled “Sāhitya” (Literature) published by Visva-Bharati
Press on October 11, 1907. A translation by Swapan Chakravorty
is available in the Oxford Tagore Translations series, and it has
been collected by David Damrosch for his 2014 anthology, World
Literature in Theory.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated with a new
introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Barthes, Roland. Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman.
London: Continuum, 2007.
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Basu, Shankari Prasad. Kabi Bhāratchandra (The Poet Bharatchandra).
Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2001.
 The Critic as Rasik 149

Bose, Buddhadeva. “An Acre of Green Grass and ‘Comparative Literature

in India.’” In An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of
Buddhadeva Bose, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2018.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Nirbācita Prabandha (Selected Essays). Calcutta:
Ananda Publishers, 1997.
Chaudhuri, Pramatha. Bīrbaler Ātma-paricay (Birbal’s Life Story).
Śanibārer Cithi (Agrahāyan 1348BE [November–December 1941]).
Chaudhuri, Pramatha. Rāyater Kathā (The Peasant’s Story). Calcutta:
Visva-Bhārati Library, 1944.
Chaudhuri, Pramatha. Tel-Nun-Lakri (Oil-Salt-Wood). Bharati (1905).
Chaudhuri, Pramatha. Padacāraṇ (To Walk/To Recite). Calcutta: Sri
Gauranga Press, 1919.
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. “‘Only What Does Not Fit in Can Be True’: De-
professionalization and Academia in Adorno and Tagore.” Economic
& Political Weekly, October 22, 2016.
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making
of the Modern Cultural Sphere. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Datta, Michael Madhusudan. Tilottamāsambhav kābya (The Story of
Tilottama). Calcutta: 1860.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Oxon: Routledge
Classics, 2006.
Mukhopadhyay, Dhurjatiprasad. “Ghare Bāire: Pustak ālocanā (Home
and the World: Book Review).” Paricay (Fālgun 1343 [February–
March 1936]).
Sen, Aryakumar. “Bīrbaler Ātma-paricay (Birbal’s Life).” Ekuśer Caryā,
no. 2 (2013): 41–48.
Som, Nagendranath. Madhū-smriti (Memories of Madhu). Calcutta:
Vidyodaya, 1989.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Letters from a Young Poet, 1887–1895, trans.
Rosinka Chaudhuri. Delhi: Penguin Modern Classics, 2014.
Tagore, Rabindranath. “Visva Sāhitya (World Literature).” In Sāhitya
(Literature). Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Press, 1907.
150
 7
The Sophisticated
Amateur: Vernon Lee
versus the Vital Liars

Mimi Winick

The first decade of the twentieth century in Britain saw the rise of
the professional academic scholar and his foil, the amateur scholar;
with this oppositional pairing came the longing to synthesize their
qualities into some superior form, generally conceived of as the
critic or the intellectual.1 Professional scholars aimed especially to
co-opt supposedly amateur qualities to vitalize their work. Vernon
Lee (b. Violet Paget, 1856–1935) saw peril in this ambition. She
particularly feared a willingness among professional scholars to
treat whatever was most emotionally satisfying as “truth” and
saw this ersatz amateur standard as shaping a range of popular
scholarly writing on religion and politics that she called “Vital
Lies.”2 Lee regarded this writing as sophistical, antidemocratic, and
as a contributing factor in the Great War, wherein “countries [are]
at present destroying each other on behalf of their various Vital
Lies.”3
Rather than merely denouncing these early twentieth-century
“Vital Lies,” Lee offered an alternative to them and, more broadly,
to the modes of authority she saw taking shape around her. She
152 The Critic as Amateur

practiced this alternative across a wide-ranging career as a writer of

novels, short stories, essays, and “studies,” cultivating a responsible
and methodologically self-aware approach that would compete with
the appeal of vital lies, while avoiding their perilous political effects.
Across her varied oeuvre, I argue, Lee models a style of authority
that reconciles practices of affection with detachment, standards of
objective truth with emotional honesty, and literary style with the
specialist vocabularies of scholarship. I call this model of scholarly
authority, latent within Lee’s long, diverse career, the “sophisticated
amateur.” Its sophistication consists in its knowing play with
conventions: while amateurism is generally associated with naïveté,
Lee depicts an amateurism emphatically informed regarding
the conventions of professional and amateur scholarship. The
sophisticated amateur knows not only the conventions of amateur
practice and the criticisms of them by professionals but is master
too of the purportedly superior professional practices. By turning
to amateurism despite “knowing better,” the sophisticated amateur
enacts the kind of “sophisticated naiveté” Joseph Litvak describes
as invested in “prov[ing] the interpretative advantages of dilatory,
anachronistic attachment over” a more linear professionalism.4 In
this way, Litvak’s sophisticated naïveté —which he finds not only
in novelists such as Proust but also in critics such as Adorno and
Barthes—manifests a similar queer temporality to what Carolyn
Dinshaw finds in amateur scholars of medievalism who flourished
in the same years as Lee.5 Litvak’s sophisticated naïveté and
Dinshaw’s queer amateur scholarship are both characterized by
the backwardness associated, in the wake of nineteenth-century
evolutionary sexology, with women and homosexual men.
Lee embodied and embraced many of the queer practices
illuminated in these studies of sophistication and amateur
scholarship. More broadly, as a woman who had love affairs with
other women, an Englishwoman living in Italy, and a woman
scholar, Lee wrote aslant mainstream British literary culture
at a queer, cosmopolitan angle. As a writer, she was prolific and
promiscuous, publishing across prose genres, from essays to dramas
to novels, her works circulating in England and in Europe from the
1880s to her death in 1935. Today, Lee has been recovered as an
aesthete who promoted a socially responsible “art for life’s sake”
and as a writer of ghost stories.6 To a lesser degree, she is gaining
recognition as a literary critic who anticipated various major
 The Sophisticated Amateur 153

twentieth-century critical methods.7 Outside of literary studies,

historians of other disciplines including art history and psychology
have begun to identify Lee as a foundational figure.8 While she is
increasingly acknowledged as a shaper of modern disciplines, Lee
is not easily recognizable in familiar roles in intellectual history.
From the beginning of her career, she had a fraught relationship to
categorical identifications such as the amateur scholar, the academic
specialist, and the public intellectual.
The sophisticated amateur constitutes Lee’s alternative to
these roles. It differs not only from professional scholars but
also from old-fashioned amateurs (whether the Victorian man
of letters or the female enthusiast) who were understood to lack
the discipline and specialist expertise that were coming to define
modern knowledge practices. Sophisticated amateurism celebrates
artificiality, idiosyncrasy, and emotional attachment, and its style
features purposefully rough edges. It partakes of some of the
markers of Victorian sophistication, such as self-awareness of
codes and conventions and “the ability to cope with—indeed, revel
in—paradox and contradiction,” as well as of twentieth-century
sophistication, such as connoting an “advanced” and “cutting-edge”
relation to the mainstream.9 This latter quality manifests in Lee’s
writing in an aesthetic of “edginess”: despite its reputation for a
certain kind of urbane smoothness, sophistication, in exceeding
and commenting on what it marks as less sophisticated, also pushes
out into unfinished edges. For Lee, her writing’s roughness was not
only a sign of scholarly sophistication but what John Kucich calls
“moral sophistication.”10 Participating in what Kucich refers to as a
struggle “among competing middle class elites” over who can claim
“an ‘exceptional’ moral authority, whose flexibility and freedom
signifies its anti-bourgeois moral progressiveness,” Lee asserted the
superiority of her work over the scholarship she called “Vital Lies,”
which, she argued, signaled their sophistry in their smoothness.11
This chapter traces Lee’s sophisticated amateur as it emerges as
an authorial position in her nonfiction and as a character in her
fiction, from the 1890s through the early twentieth century. In close
readings of Lee’s texts, I show how her sophisticated amateurism
played not only with conventions of writing from fin de siècle
aestheticism to university scholarship but with the Victorian
conventions of gender with which these literary conventions were
closely intertwined.
154 The Critic as Amateur

I conclude by considering the implications of Lee’s sophisticated

amateur scholarship for addressing sophistry in public discourse
around the academy today. In accusing “vital liars” of using the
style of modern science to construct coherent but false arguments,
which they present as bravely unconventional, Lee furnishes
strategies for contending with twenty-first-century sophists who
claim to be speaking truth to power. Readers today will recognize a
new generation of vital lies in contemporary discourses that use the
style of modern science to legitimate conspiracy and the language of
liberalism to advocate free speech from illiberal positions.

Lady amateurs, academics,

aesthetes, and “Man-of-Letters-Kind”
In late Victorian Britain, as Bonnie G. Smith has shown, conventions
of amateur and professional scholarship emerged in distinctly
gendered terms.12 By the 1870s, professional scholarship had
become identified with the so-called scientific method pursued
in the almost exclusively male faculties of the emerging research
university, while amateur scholarship was increasingly associated
with the nonscientific writing practices of women. Amor, the Latin
root of “amateur,” looms over these distinctions: effeminate amateur
scholarship featured passionate attachments to the objects of study,
while masculine academic scholarship was defined by detachment
in allegiance to the increasingly prominent standard of objectivity.
Women’s passion was seen as a sign of their mental and physical
inferiority. Arbiters of scholarly practice regarded women as mentally
weak and thus incapable of objectivity; they similarly regarded
women as physically weak and thus unfit for rigorous scholarly
work because it would be dangerous to their health, risking physical
as well as mental breakdown. Such judges of scholarly standards
found not only the impassioned but also the sometimes ornate style
of women’s amateur scholarship morally suspect. As Smith notes,
stylish writing was associated with prostitution, as in the criticism
of the “‘tawdry trappings’ of more literary works” of history.13 By
contrast, professional academic scholarship, differentiating itself
from belles lettres, laid claim to objectivity, models of experimental
science, careful documentary citation, and a plain style. While most
 The Sophisticated Amateur 155

late Victorians regarded women as necessarily amateurs, some

granted them a supplementary, second-rate role in professional
scholarship as a sort of helpmeet doing clerical tasks in support of
original work by men.14
At the same time as women were seen as less capable of original
work in scholarship, their scholarly efforts were associated with
apparently subordinate imaginative work: they were known for
writing poetry and fiction on the same topics as their scholarly
writing. The woman amateur scholar could thus be seen as akin
to both the mid-Victorian man of letters, who wrote fiction or
poetry as well as history or criticism of art and society, and the
late Victorian aesthete, who combined fiction, history, and criticism
in new genres such as “aesthetic criticism.”15 Tellingly, both the
man of letters and the aesthete became increasingly feminized and
associated with amateurism in the late nineteenth century.
Aestheticism offered a model for Lee’s sophisticated amateurism
as a practice that both embraced feminized qualities of scholarship
and claimed superiority over the professional scholar. For Lee (as for
other women) aestheticism provided access to expertise in support
of her desire to “write serious works on literature and art.”16 By
focusing on deeply felt observations of art objects, rather than
philological or archival expertise, aestheticism not only embraced
amateur practices but also claimed superiority to academic
scholarship of which it was alternately appreciative and critical.
It presented itself not as preprofessional but rather as something
more than professional scholarship. Out of these repertoires of
the effeminate amateur, the masculine academic, the second-rate
professional woman scholar, and the aesthete, Lee created a new
scholarly authority.
By reworking the scholarly practices and gendered behaviors
associated with amateurs and academics, Lee took advantage of a
remarkable paradox inherent in the increasing prominence of and
access to scholarly institutions in Britain. As Smith has argued, while
gendered ideas of scholarship had become more rigid in discourse,
they had also become more fluid in practice: women, working-class
men, colonial subjects, and other feminized subjects of the British
Empire were entering colleges, taking university extension courses,
and even publishing in university presses and teaching in universities.
The new standards of “scientific” academic scholarship appeared in
particular to offer a way to change stereotypes of gender. Science
156 The Critic as Amateur

was seen as both unnatural for women and non-Westerners but also
“as universal, as available to all, as unmarked, and ungendered;
scholarship was thus the conduit away from a degraded femininity
toward the higher universal.”17 If women and non-Westerners
could practice science, then they could access a universal humanity.
At the same time, women’s and non-Westerners’ identities as
marked subjects undermined the idea of an exclusively masculine
and Western universal. Thus, while some saw scholarship as an
identifiable route to transform themselves and achieve a privileged
Western, masculine status, others instead aimed to transform the
standards of scholarship and with them conventional standards of
masculinity and femininity, even to the point of imagining a “third
sex.”18 Lee’s sophisticated amateurism effects such double-edged
change: with it, Lee introduced an authority grounded in
stereotypes of feminine emotion and embodiment, while at the
same time valorizing such feminine attributes as essential to the
future of scholarship. Ultimately, she depicted these qualities in an
androgynous scholarly ideal.

An androgynous “intellectual prestige”

Lee’s sophisticated amateur first emerges as an authorial position
in her early fiction and develops into a character in her last novel
Louis Norbert (1914). Lee’s story collection Hauntings (1890)
is the best-known site of her play with conventions of masculine
professional scholarship and effeminate, naive amateurism, and
helps us see how her sophisticated amateur differs from these
categories. Here, professionalism is linked with academic training
and amateurism with the preprofessional aims and practices of
those who have not experienced such training—the naïve. While
most critics see Hauntings as critiquing professionalism in favor of
such naive amateurism, such a critique is not the end but the starting
point of the book. Ultimately, the stories suggest how both models
of inquiry are fatally flawed—either deadly dull or murderously
thrilling. The male scholars of Hauntings begin with a sense of
the inadequacies of their professional practices and seek a more
satisfying encounter with the past than their professional practices
offer. The desire for an emotionally rewarding encounter with the
 The Sophisticated Amateur 157

past was itself a sign of naive amateurism: as Smith notes, “pre-

professional scholarship” was less directed at knowing the past as it
was than encountering it and making a bridge between the past and
future.19 Dinshaw too argues that desires “for connections” with
the past have long been specifically marked as amateur.20
In Hauntings, Lee’s scholars ultimately eschew their professional
methods in favor of naïve practices associated with amateur
scholars who have not been taught better skills. Ultimately, each
story provides the protagonist with the encounter he desires
through an uncanny femme fatale (or in one case, an effeminate
young man). We see this most vividly in Haunting’s “Amour Dure”
in which the male scholar-narrator, straying from his usual dry
historical practices, passionately summons a historical figure from
the Renaissance through composing a poem that “call[s] on her”—
only to be stabbed in the heart by her.21 His amateur desire for
direct connection with the past and the amateur means through
which he pursues it lead to his violent death. These stories move
beyond showing the limits of professional scholarship to show not
only the thrills but also the dangers of naïve amateur desires and
methods in pursuit of a more intimate encounter with history than
professional practice allows.
In contrast to these flawed approaches of professionalism and
naive amateurism, Lee models a sophisticated amateurism in the
preface to Hauntings. There, Lee claims she knows better than either
the professionals or amateurs whose misadventures the stories
chronicle. She dismisses male professional scholars by associating
them with female enthusiasts, mocking the authorities of the Society
for Psychical Research (SPR), who included prominent university
professors such as William James, for their flawed thinking and
dull ghosts. According to Lee, those “highly reasoning men of
semi-science” share a reductive view of ghosts with the same deluded
Spiritualists that the SPR sometimes investigated for fraud.22 For
Lee, the investigators and the Spiritualists are equally fraudulent:
both claim scientific authority and operate in a scientific style
marked by an apparently legitimizing dullness, while in actuality
they make unprovable claims grounded in wishful thinking. In their
embrace of scientific style and unscientific substance, the objects of
Lee’s criticism claim the authority of science to bolster unprovable
or even disproven ideas. Such strategies are far from unfamiliar
today: think of Jordan Peterson’s use of evolutionary psychology to
158 The Critic as Amateur

support Jungian concepts of transhistorical human characteristics

or Flat-Earthers’ celebration of empirical observation as providing
proof for their discredited theory.23
Rejecting the fin de siècle version of sophistical science and
its putatively real but unimaginative spirits, Lee offers instead
“spurious” but superior ghosts, grounded in a literary rather than
a professional scientific or an enthusiastic Spiritualist tradition.24
Invoking Shakespeare, she sets herself firmly in a lineage of first-rate
literary treatments of the supernatural. Importantly, by positioning
herself both in relation to literary writers and to the professional
scholars of the SPR, Lee has literary and scientific authority contest
the same ground. And by criticizing the scientific position on its
own terms—for being merely “semi-science”—she suggests not
that her literary approach is categorically better than their scientific
approach but that her literary approach is sound while their science
is flawed. Lee thus embraces the authority of good literature, while
disavowing bad science on its own terms.
At this point in her career, Lee had a recognizable literary
authority but could not yet claim the newer, specialized authority
of the scientist. In this 1890 preface, she was leaning on the nearly
outmoded Victorian novelist’s authority to proclaim broadly about
knowledge and morality; more specifically, she was writing in an
aesthetic tradition of skepticism regarding the totalizing claims of
the scientific method.25 While in the 1880s she had begun reading
and engaging with modern psychology and the science of aesthetics,
it was only in the decade following the publication of Hauntings
that she became a proven, if controversial, authority in these fields,
publishing review articles and even her own unusual experiments.
Lee drew on both literary and scientific authority in her later
writings, especially her novel, Louis Norbert (1914), to more fully
formulate the sophisticated amateur as a first-rate literary writer
who is also a judge of scientific scholarship.
Louis Norbert is an epistolary double romance anticipating A.
S. Byatt’s 1990 novel, Possession, chronicling two contemporary
researchers investigating two historical figures. The researchers are
the “Young Archeologist,” a male academic, and a woman amateur,
Lady Venetia Hammond. The Archaeologist and Lady Venetia
reconstruct the marvelous history of the eighteenth-century figure
Louis Norbert and his contemporary Artemesia through letters
and transcribed documents, while playfully but earnestly debating
 The Sophisticated Amateur 159

various methods of historiography. Most critics regard the novel as

an allegory in which the characters stand in for their initial methods.
In this view, Lady Venetia represents feminine amateur practices,
marked by emotion and enthusiasm, and the Archaeologist the
masculine practices of the academic specialist. Some readers have
found an “ideal balance” in their combined methods; others, “an
impasse.”26 I argue that the novel offers neither such synthesis nor
abdication; rather, it depicts the triumph of Lady Venetia over the
Archaeologist by virtue of the sophisticated amateurism I have
begun tracing in Hauntings.
Lady Venetia, while introduced initially as the typical woman
amateur historian, comes to embody this new sophisticated
amateur—the amateur who knows the conventions of amateurism
and of academic, scientific scholarship. Indeed, both she and the
Archaeologist complicate the apparent allegory of the novel by
acknowledging and exceeding the familiar categories of academic
and old-fashioned amateur. Lady Venetia and the Archaeologist
(who is called only by his roles—e.g., “Professor”—and never by
a personal name) reflect on their roles and tease each other about
them. The Archaeologist aligns himself with “us professional
critics” and identifies as a “poor plodding historian,” only to
have the narrator reveal early on that he “after all, was secretly a
poet.”27 Lady Venetia, in turn, manifests all the signs of the amateur,
from being susceptible to historical “impressions” to penning
exclamation-ridden historical narratives to having “visions” that
the Archaeologist associates with “occultism.”28 But she turns out
also to be a diligent archival researcher.
The novel emphatically mocks the gendered roles of amateur and
professional scholar. The Archaeologist’s male gaze is prominent
from the first page, when he displays erotic delight in Lady Venetia’s
attention to his account of archaeological sites and then “chill”
disappointment when she turns her attention elsewhere.29 Later,
Lady Venetia explicitly connects amateur historians and femininity
when she accuses the Archaeologist of seeing her only “as a foolish
woman with a hopeless tendency to romancing about everything,
what you call a born poet or novelist.”30 The novel even mocks the
idea that a better method comes from the union of these gendered
methods by setting up a romance plot between the protagonists only
to have it fail. The flirtation fizzles out when Lady Venetia writes to
the Archaeologist of her impending marriage to an older man.
160 The Critic as Amateur

At a crucial juncture, the novel offers a sharp comment on the

constructed nature of these gendered roles and introduces a role
gendered in new ways. Late in the novel, Lady Venetia accuses the
Archaeologist of creating a fictional version of herself. She writes
to him that he has been corresponding not with her but with an
imaginary character: “And all the time it is you, my dear young
learned friend, who have been inventing, inventing a me utterly
unlike the reality.”31 The Archaeologist agrees: “He became aware
that he had made her up during the past seven or eight months.”32
Lady Venetia turns the tables and shows the professional scholar
that his critical acumen is subject to incursions of fantasy, suggesting
more broadly how the figure of the amateur might be a fantasy of
the professional.
The specifically erotic character of that fantasy is highlighted in
its collapse. When the researchers meet again after this exchange,
the Archaeologist perceives a different version of Lady Venetia, one
who embodies both a different form of femininity and of intellect.
Importantly, in both cases, these forms are superior to his former
delusions: she is at once “much more beautiful” than his invented
version and possesses “an intellectual prestige he had never
before guessed.”33 In a departure from Hauntings, where the male
professional’s desire leads to death or disappointment via a femme
fatale, in Louis Norbert the male expert’s ideal female creation
simply evanesces when a real woman points out the fantasy.
While she is even “more beautiful,” this version of Lady Venetia
manifests a more complicated femininity than the Archaeologist’s
imagined version. Her appearance now has androgynous qualities:
the Archaeologist notices her masculine hands, which appear
“almost like very exquisite man’s hands.”34 There is also a shift
from the former erotic desire the Archaeologist had felt regarding
Lady Venetia, which initially framed their relationship narrowly in
sexualized and gendered terms. By contrast, in the moment when
the Archaeologist believed himself to be encountering the real Lady
Venetia rather than his earlier construction of her, he experiences
their interaction as emotionally but not erotically charged. In this
later encounter, he perceives Lady Venetia to have “smiled … so
simply, humorously, maternally, divinely, friendly.”35
This Lady Venetia is unrecognizable as the typical woman
amateur scholar or even the typical female protagonist of a novel.
She is neither love interest nor comic spinster; she is neither erotically
 The Sophisticated Amateur 161

desirable nor laughably undesirable or undesiring. Rather, she recalls

the alternative femininity of Jane Harrison’s archaic goddesses, who
are maternal, divine, and companionate, in contrast to the narrowly
sexualized roles of the later Olympian goddesses. In this way,
Lee draws on the work of a contemporary woman scholar (and
acquaintance) who herself had famously mastered the conventions
of professional and amateur scholarship. Harrison (1850–1928),
a classicist at Newnham College, Cambridge, introduced a new
feminine archetype in her account of Greek myth: the independent
mother goddess. Harrison argued that religion originated in a
matriarchal stage of society in which women were “dominant and
central.”36 Goddesses might have consorts, but male deities were not
their husbands or masters. Thus, for instance, Harrison argues, the
Olympian Hera bears traces of an earlier “matrilinear system” in
which she “reigned alone” until she was “coerced, but never really
subdued, by an alien conqueror.”37 Harrison had thus introduced in
a prestigious scholarly context a model for a femininity marked by
independence, even singleness, and compatible with a maternal and
companionate but not a connubial role. Arguably, this is the role of
Lady Venetia at the end of Louis Norbert: she has been revised, in
the perspective of the Archaeologist, from an eroticized love interest
to someone “maternal …, divine …, friendly.”38
With this shift, Louis Norbert participates in two discourses
with roots in the nineteenth century: the depiction of scholars—
especially amateur scholars—as having queer relations to gender
and sexuality,39 and the valorization of friendship as a queer
relationship that enables, in Heather Love’s words, “think[ing]
intimacy beyond the family and the couple.”40 Dinshaw has
shown how amateur scholarship, as it had been practiced since the
nineteenth century, is aligned with “some form of sexual or gender
queerness” through shared temporalities: both amateurism and
homosexuality “are ‘belated’ or ‘underdeveloped’ in relation not
only to the professional but also to the reproductive family.”41 In
Louis Norbert, Lady Venetia exemplifies a gender queerness that
is analogically connected to her status as a scholar. Her androgyny
as well as her sophisticated amateur practice both exceed the
conventions of the binaries that inform them and, in exceeding
them, appear to supersede them. In this, they depart from a queer
temporality in favor of a squarely evolutionary timeline in which
types evolve and advance. Specifically, the depiction of Lady
162 The Critic as Amateur

Venetia as androgynous invokes a fin de siècle idea that androgynes

(a category that included homosexuals) were “a possible species
of the future” and were more highly evolved than conventionally
heterosexual men and women.42 Similarly, Lady Venetia’s newly
apparent “intellectual prestige” exceeds the Archaeologist’s own
academic prestige, not to mention the naïve amateurism he had
originally ascribed to her, suggesting a similarly advanced state.
As the more advanced androgyne and scholar, Lady Venetia
formulates a practice of sophisticated amateur scholarship
constituted around “friendly” love. Arguing that the Archaeologist’s
earlier fantasy of her is symptomatic of his misunderstanding of
how to do historical research, Lady Venetia presents her superior
approach to historical inquiry. The Archaeologist had suggested
Lady Venetia ought to “invent” Louis Norbert, since “what is loving
except making [the beloved] up to please one’s heart’s desire?”43
But Lady Venetia is appalled at this conflation of love and “making
up.”44 She insists that scholars ought to encounter historical figures
as “friends” who “know and love each other when they meet.”45 In
this latter model, the scholar recognizes the subject of her research;
he does not invent it to please himself.
As part of this superior scholarly practice grounded in love
between friends, Lady Venetia shows the Archaeologist the value of
historical work based in affective authority more broadly. She refers
the Archaeologist to her childhood encounter with a portrait of
Louis Norbert, during which she had a specific emotional reaction;
and to her encounter, as an adult, with a letter attributed to Louis
Norbert, during which she felt the same unique feeling. In this
clinching episode, Lady Venetia combines authority grounded in the
feminized realm of emotion with a systemization—pattern finding
across time—that asserts an objectivity characteristic of academic
scholarship. This combination informs her new “intellectual
prestige.”
Lady Venetia’s focus on emotional responses to historical objects
illuminates affinities between the protagonist and her author, and
the centrality of queer love to both their practices. In Lee’s own
amateur scholarship, queer, friendly love fueled her conversational
writing, as in Belcaro (1887), dedicated to her lover A. Mary F.
Robinson, and her gallery experiments in the 1890s with another
lover, Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson.46 Further, Lee’s
scholarly practices feature love not only between herself and her
 The Sophisticated Amateur 163

collaborator but love and even collaboration between scholars

and objects. Lee’s scholarship focuses on the effect aesthetic and
historical objects have on perceiving subjects—the viewer in a
gallery, the reader before a book, the listener at a concert. This
effect is not passive; rather, the viewer, reader, or listener responds
to the object, even in a sense co-creates it. In this active engagement
with the object, the viewer, reader, or listener is necessarily acting
the amateur, forgoing critical distance in favor of intimacy.
Importantly, this intimacy is a means to accurate knowledge: it is
the queer love of “friends” who “know and love each other when
they meet” and not the delusive, heterosexual love of “making [the
beloved] up to please one’s heart’s desire.” Crucially, this knowing
through feeling does not define truth by what feels true, or what
one desires to be true, without reference to further proofs beyond
one’s own subjectivity; rather, it assumes a truth “out there,” beyond
individual subjectivity that can be recognized through engagement
with others’ feelings and with the reality of other subjectivities.
Thus, in Lee’s sophisticated amateur scholarship, knowledge is
not threatened by feminized categories such as love or emotional
response but is constituted through them—or, rather, is constituted
through the proper versions of them, which are not only feminized
but emphatically queer.

“Towards a rough philosophy”

Lee’s sophisticated amateur scholarship is exemplified in the
nonfiction she published around the same time as Louis Norbert.
There is meaningful continuity between the most pressing concerns
expressed by Lady Venetia and by Lee. Lady Venetia’s outrage over
the Archaeologist’s “making-up” is apparent in Lee’s own long
project—pursued with particular energy just before and during the
Great War—of exploring the interrelations of fiction and history
and the proper definition of truth. In this project, Lee expanded
her critique of Hauntings’ “highly reasoning men of semi-science”
into Vital Lies (1912). That book of essays focuses on a variety
of men writing with scholarly authority on religion, including
psychologists, anthropologists, and Catholic modernists. Prominent
among them is William James, author of what Lee pejoratively calls
164 The Critic as Amateur

“‘Will to Believe’ Pragmatism.”47 Lee categorizes these writers as

“obscurantists,” “myth-mongers,” “professional prophets,” and
“Man-of-Letters-kind” and accuses them of conflating history and
romance, truth and pleasure, in pernicious ways.48 Like Lee herself
in her earlier work, as she later admitted, they do not “distinguish
… between novelist’s plausibility and historic probability.”49
As a writer and, since the 1890s, as a researcher in the overlapping
fields of aesthetics, psychology, and religion, Lee finds fault with
the methods and standards of these putatively scientific writings on
religion and truth. Specifically, Lee objected to what she regarded
as James’s and his peers’ redefinition of “truth.” According to Lee,
James and his fellow travelers asserted that truth can never be
definitely known, and so should be redefined as what is most useful,
easy, or pleasant to believe. By contrast, Lee believed truth could
in theory be definitively established; indeed, she accepted another
account of pragmatism, which claims that truth, though it may
only emerge as a consensus after long investigation, is ultimately
discoverable and reflects reality. This, for Lee, is the proper “formula
for scientific thinking.”50 Essentially, she faults the “vital liars” for
embracing sophistry over science. In criticism that seems to locate a
“post-truth” era already in the 1910s, Lee accused the “vital liars”
of taking truth to be what works best rhetorically—what persuades
the most people.
Lee regarded the aesthetics of such writing as symptomatic of
its methodological flaws: featuring “the pleasant cogency of all
symmetrical things,” the writings that constitute “Vital Lies” are too
systematic, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing.51 Their investment
in persuasion makes them too smooth. This smooth sophistry,
moreover, had mystical qualities. Lee criticized the vital liars for
staking their authority not on conventional logic but on mysticism:
accepting their arguments involves not logical assent but a feeling
akin to “mystical revelation,” constituting an “overwhelming
satisfactory emotion.”52
As in Hauntings and Louis Norbert, Lee links the flawed
scholarly practices of the vital liars to gendered knowledge
practices. On the one hand, the vital liars exhibit a kind of macho
vanity, while on the other they are susceptible to the delusions of
Spiritualism usually attributed to women. In the first case, tough-
guy “professional prophets … like Nietzsche and Tolstoi” think
that “they are manfully facing the whole truth because they are
 The Sophisticated Amateur 165

pinning their attention to some aspect of Reality which inflicts

pain on themselves, and through them, on their neighbors.”53 But,
according to Lee, they are seduced by this heroic suffering into
self-aggrandizement at the expense of accuracy. In the second case,
Lee links “Vital Lies” to feminized delusions, especially what she
regarded as the wish-fulfilling fad of Spiritualism. When writing of
pragmatism in Vital Lies, Lee repeatedly uses similes and metaphors
of Spiritualism, noting its “Sludge-the-Medium gesture[s]” and its
methodological “sleight of hand.”54
Lee further points out that “Vital Lies” are not merely Spiritualist
in form but in content: she accuses James’s “‘Will-to-Believe’
pragmatism” of concerning itself with “the tenets of optimistic
theism and the hypotheses of mediumistic spiritualism” but not
with chemistry, physics, or biology.55 That is, vital liars only seem
to be interested in truth when it is “the truth of some variety of
theology; or … of some mediumistic kind of ‘spiritualism.’”56 Thus
such pragmatism dishonestly presents itself as a universal method,
while concerning itself only with certain subjects, for example,
religion. In this way, vital liars both delude themselves and others.
Ultimately, Lee connects this sophistical writing to elitist
political forms such as monarchism and fascism. She finds affinities
between “Vital Lies” and antidemocratic politics, decrying modern
anti-rationalism as “an intellectual tendency parallel to the neo-
monarchic and neo-aristocratic arraignments of the shams and
drawbacks of democracy.”57 She regards these vital liars as engaged
in a form of priestcraft, misleading the populace for the sake of an
elite, spectacular vision. In later notebooks, she asserts her aim to
provide, in her writing, “an example of avoiding the modern forms”
of such deluding practices, which she has come to link explicitly
with fascism.58
Lee’s answer to the flawed and pernicious practices of both
amateurish “Man-of-Letters-kind” and their equally mistaken
specialist colleagues is her sophisticated amateurism. A major fault
of the writers she discusses in Vital Lies is their conflation of art
and religion, and of novelistic and historical aesthetics. These errors
involve writing religiously about religion—writing to convert, to
foster unprovable belief, even to encourage mystical experiences.
Lee corrects this with what she calls a “spiritual” approach. For
her, the spiritual is linked to art and to art’s superiority to religion.
According to Lee, art is, or should be, proud of its artificiality. It
166 The Critic as Amateur

should embrace its “spurious” ghosts. For Lee, art seems more sacred
than religion itself: “I ask myself for the hundredth time whether
art is not itself a more wonder-working, nay, a more spiritual,
divinity than [religion].”59 By suggesting that art is “more spiritual”
than religion, Lee refers to its power to foster contemplation. For
Lee, contemplation is a “spiritual” activity, “as distinguished from
the utilitarian or merely personally emotional, essence of all high
religions,” and “does not imply belief.”60 Contemplation allows for
a sense of artificiality, whereas belief does not. While Lee mostly
applies this idea of the spiritual-as-contemplative to religion and
art, it also applies to her treatment of new ideas in science.
Lee’s “spiritual” realm maps onto what sociologist Mark A.
Schneider calls the “edifying” register in which claims are made
for heuristic but not ontological knowledge.61 Where scientific
“naturalism” aims to describe the world as it is, and deals in
observations, “edification” aims to describe the world as it might
be and deals in concepts.62 Edificatory claims might be productive
without being true, but, crucially, they do not conflate truth and
productivity as the vital liars’ claims do. This edificatory register is
recognizable as something like that of the Victorian sage or, later,
the public intellectual, who is invested more in prescription than
descriptive contributions to knowledge. Lee’s scholarly writing
operates mainly in this register. As Shafquat Towheed has shown, her
extensive engagement with turn-of-the-century science is marked
by creative applications of as yet unproven or even discredited
theories.63 This approach differs from the sophistical deployment of
scientific rhetoric to bolster such theories in that Lee emphasizes the
provisionality or even figurative value of her material.
Lee is explicit about this approach in the introduction to her
study, written with Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness
and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912). There she
explains that she and her coauthor are bringing to aesthetics two
fields of study that are just emerging as disciplines—on the one
hand, “psychology,” which “has only lately detached itself from
general philosophy,” and on the other, “the various sciences dealing
with the comparison, the origin and the evolution of artistic form,
and which are still dependent on ethnography and anthropology
…, on archaeology and what is called connoisseurship.”64 Thus,
Lee asserts that she is offering a work of contemplation rather
than of conviction: the ideas in the book will both “afford to more
 The Sophisticated Amateur 167

thorough scientific investigators real or imaginary facts for their

fruitful examination” as well as “give satisfaction to the legitimate
craving for philosophical speculation.”65 This is not only because
of the newness of the fields she is drawing on, but because of her
humanistic methods, which entail provisionality: “My aesthetics
will always be those of the gallery and the studio, not of the
laboratory. They will never achieve scientific certainty. They will
be based on observation rather than on experiment; and they will
remain, for that reason, conjectural and suggestive.”66
This lack of “scientific certainty” is not a weakness for Lee.
Rather, it maps onto her sense of what constitutes truth. In
contrast to her vital liars, Lee embraces caution and provisionality,
emphasizing the “rough[ness]” of her ideas, as opposed to the
too smooth systems of the vital liars. In out-sophisticating
these other writers, she deploys sophistication as edginess. She
offers not a complete system but “trains of thought converging
towards a rough philosophy of my own.”67 Lee’s philosophy is
purposefully fragmented in order to correspond to what she sees
as the fragmentary nature of reality as it appears to humans: it
is “discontinuous, discrete, because attention is intermittent, and
positions, points of view are various.”68 While some of Lee’s
approach resembles James’s pragmatism, Lee sees his project as
ultimately committed to a specious standard of “satisfying,”
coherent truths, while her methods do not involve such resolution.
This resistance to coherence can also be understood as connected
to unorthodox gender practices: Hilary Fraser has argued that
Lee’s writing presents a “third sex authorial identity” linked to
a “becoming identity that she fashions for herself that is not
conceived as originary and fixed, but forever in process.”69
Lee’s fragmentary scholarly aesthetics are aligned with the
scientific method of professional scholarship in their commitment to
rationality and empiricism and positioned against the sophistry she
finds in “Vital Lies” by rejecting too much coherence. These affinities
and divergences are apparent in the prose of Vital Lies as well as of
Beauty and Ugliness. This aesthetics is not always beautiful: Beauty
and Ugliness’s own coauthor objected to its jargon.70 Both books
feature operational definitions, italicized key terms, and frequent
quotations from sources. They earnestly perform the conventions
of ambitious professional scholarship as a superior alternative both
to the falsehood of “Vital Lies” and to pedantic scholarship that,
168 The Critic as Amateur

while sound, had abdicated engagement with the big questions of

the nature of life and its implications for ethical practice.
But, alongside its jargon, there are thrills and even fantastic
imagery that connect Lee’s scholarly writing back to her vivid
early fiction. In particular, Beauty and Ugliness highlights its
provisionality through figures of the fantastic, to pleasurable effect.
Lee and Anstruther-Thomson evoke the uncertainty of their study
using an archeological metaphor: “we two have noticed odd,
enigmatic, half-hidden vestiges, which might be (and might also not
be!) walls, terraces, and roadways.”71 In this depiction of their study
as a strange cityscape uncovered on an archaeological dig, Lee links
their scholarly writing to the realm of the fantastic, where the past
resurfaces, oddities and enigmas abound, and things “might be (and
might also not be!).”72 Importantly, unlike her detested vital liars,
Lee does not claim to have uncovered definitive meanings of history
or art. Instead, her approach offers glimpses of exciting ideas that
may or may not prove valid, presented through vivid figures of
speech. Committed to a responsible provisionality in her scholarly
writing, Lee depicts encounters with uncertainty as offering their
own satisfactions.

The sophisticated amateur

versus the sophists
Lee’s sophisticated amateur responded to a pervasive sense of
the narrowing of legitimate modes of inquiry during academic
professionalization and specialization. It expanded the repertoire
of scholarly practices by reworking conventionally amateur, and
feminized, practices that embraced emotion and embodiment. At
the advent of the modern research university, Lee thus pursued a
project akin to Rita Felski’s “postcritical” endeavor to encourage
more wide-ranging affects, methods, and forms of professional
scholarly practice, particularly those featuring “attachment” in
contrast to suspicion, detachment, distance.73 In this way, Lee and
Felski each engage in a prominent tradition of using amateurism to
critique and revitalize academic scholarship.
Lee’s sophisticated amateur not only helps us better understand
the critical force of amateurism but may also offer a resource
 The Sophisticated Amateur 169

for exploring postcritique’s capacity for political engagement.

One objection to postcritical methodologies has been a charge of
quietism.74 Lee, by contrast, deploys her sophisticated amateurism
explicitly to political ends. Her criticism concerns the political
implications of scholarship that proffers coherent narratives, which
yield emotional rewards, even if those narratives are not empirically
true. As we have seen, Lee links such approaches to emerging fascist
politics. In this way, Lee’s sophisticated amateurism offers a timely
perspective on the interconnections of scholarly style and political
events in our own era, when a new set of vital lies, of too-coherent
accounts of history and current events, are promulgated in close
connection with anti-democratic politics.
By attending particularly to the aesthetics of scholarly practice,
and the feelings one might have in response to those aesthetics,
Lee’s sophisticated amateurism may help us better recognize
sophistry today, and even persuade its fans of its illegitimacy, in
ways critique does not. In Andrew Marantz’s recent account in The
New Yorker of UC Berkeley’s 2017/2018 “free speech year,” we see
critique operating in proximity to, and sometimes against, extreme
right-wing “sophist[s]”—famous for conspiracy-mongering and
bigotry—invited to lecture on campus.75 Such sophists include Milo
Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Pamela Geller, and Mike Cernovich.
After considering Marantz’s account of critical engagement
with such contemporary sophistry, I will consider how bringing
sophisticated amateurism to bear might strengthen approaches that
oppose these figures’ rhetoric.
Covering a response to the “free speech year” programming,
Marantz reports on a scene of public literary analysis, describing
undergraduates annotating a poster printed with the text of a
lecture recently delivered on campus by Shapiro, then the host of the
top right-wing podcast in the United States.76 Marking “fallacies”
in the lecture, the students engage in a familiar form of critique.77
Lee’s sophisticated amateurism offers additional resources for
engaging this material. Sophisticated amateurism’s attention to the
aesthetics of scholarship enables it to highlight not only fallacies
but also the styles of these speeches, introducing an area where the
critic and the fan of these speeches might share a recognition of
their style and emotional effects. These stylistic elements consist, in
the case of Shapiro, of “indignant syllogisms [spit out] in a rapid
nasal delivery,” and in the case of Yiannopoulos, a performance
170 The Critic as Amateur

of queer sophistication signaled by “combative one-liners and

protean, peroxide-blond hair” and prominent reference to his
homosexuality.78 (This description suggests how Yiannopoulos’s
campus speeches might fit in a lineage with Oscar Wilde’s
epigrammatic and aesthetic late Victorian American lectures.)
By attending to these stylistic elements, in addition to the substance
of the fallacies imparted through them, today’s sophisticated amateur
would note how the particular aesthetic qualities suggest or reinforce
substantive flaws in the content of the talks: for example, a rapidity
that makes syllogisms sound like confident logic but obscures
their content. Moreover, in attending to the emotions signaled by
the style of these speeches, the sophisticated amateur might be
able to imagine the satisfaction some people find in them—in the
one-liners with their suggestion of superior wit or the emotionally
satisfying performance of logic in “indignant syllogisms.” To focus
on the emotion performed and fostered through the style of these
speeches is to go beyond disproving false content on the level of
argument. This focus enables the critic to acknowledge the appeal
of the style of these speeches for their fans and to recognize these
fans’ attachments to the speakers; this recognition, then, may enable
another kind of engagement. With reference to style even before
substance, the critic may discredit the speech by pointing out how
certain smooth styles indicate the presence of false content. In this
exchange of impressions and ideas, today’s sophisticated amateur is
attuned not only to the faults of sophistry but to its appeal—both
of which are crucial to its anti-democratic effects.

Notes
1 See Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
2 Vernon Lee, Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent
Obscurantism, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1912).
3 Vernon Lee, “Harrison Unanimisim Lecture: War, Group=Emotion
and Art,” Handwritten MS (June 3, 1915): 24 small notebook
pages and 132 pages, Vernon Lee Collection, Colby College Special
Collections, Waterville, Maine, 91.
4 Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the
Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 19.
 The Sophisticated Amateur 171

5 How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the

Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
6 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in
Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2000).
7 For reader response, see Christina Zorn, “The Handling of Words:
Reader Response Victorian Style,” in Vernon Lee: Decadence,
Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (New
York: Palgrave, 2006); for cultural studies, see Shaffer, Forgotten
Female Aesthetes, 62; for New Criticism, see Benjamin Morgan,
The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
8 Meghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella, “Women’s Expertise and the
Culture of Connoisseurship,” Visual Resources 33, nos. 1–2 (2017):
1–10; Susan Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery:
Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy,” Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 4 (2009): 330–354.
9 Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 71, 8.
10 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 4.
11 Ibid. With this suspicion of rhetorical smoothness, Lee was working
in a Victorian tradition of what Adelene Buckland calls “anti-
coherence,” which rejected “a fictionalizing arrangement of parts into
suspiciously plausible wholes.” Adelene Buckland, Novel Science:
Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-century Geology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), 27, 62.
12 Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and
Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998).
13 Ibid., 139. Smith is quoting from an English periodical of 1877.
14 Gill Perry, Anne Laurence, and Joan Bellamy, “Introduction,” in
Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge, 1790–
1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence, and Gill Perry (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 8.
15 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald
L. Hill (1873; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xix.
16 Lee to Henrietta Jenkin, October 2, 1874, in Selected Letters of
Vernon Lee, 1856–1935: Volume I, 1865–1884, ed. Amanda Gagel
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 176.
17 Smith, Gender of History, 197.
18 Ibid., 185.
19 Ibid., 21.
20 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 29.
172 The Critic as Amateur

21 Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (1890;

Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 63.
22 Ibid., 38.
23 See, for example, Kelefa Sanneh, “Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of
Masculinity,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2018, and Alan Burdick,
“Looking for Life on a Flat Earth,” The New Yorker, May 30, 2018.
Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/
jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity (accessed January 4, 2019)
and https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-on-
a-flat-earth (accessed January 4, 2019).
24 Ibid., 40.
25 As Stefano Evangelista notes, Lee “follows a Victorian tradition of
sage and prophetic writing that runs from Ruskin to Pater, in which
vision is believed to give access to a higher epistemology.” Stefano
Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism,
Reception, Gods in Exile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
64. For more on shifts in these kinds of authority, see Anne DeWitt,
Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
26 Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2003), 93–94; Kristy Martin, Modernism
and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H.
Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59.
27 Vernon Lee, Louis Norbert: A Two-fold Romance (London: John
Lane, 1914), 58, 154, 22.
28 Ibid., 10, 145, 154.
29 Ibid., 9.
30 Ibid., 168.
31 Ibid., 169.
32 Ibid., 182.
33 Ibid., 182, 190, 191.
34 Ibid., 198.
35 Ibid., 196.
36 Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek
Religion (1912; 2nd edn. 1927; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 494.
37 Ibid., 491.
38 This divine, friendly femininity can also be seen as connected to the
“saintly” sexuality Dennis Dennisoff finds in Lee’s Miss Brown, which
is associated with a Joan-of-Arc-like androgyny or in Lee’s own terms,
a “sexless[ness]” that is associated with a desire to serve humanity
rather than to be wife to a particular man. Dennisoff, Aestheticism
and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 54. This gender practice can also be seen as linked
 The Sophisticated Amateur 173

with the early twentieth-century “humanist” rather than “feminist”

political identity that Lee embraced. Patricia Pulham, “A Transatlantic
Alliance: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vernon Lee,” in Feminist
Forerunners: (New) Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth
Century, ed. Ann Heilmann (London: Pandora Press, 2003), 38.
39 These depictions often involved a lack of putatively normal, active
heterosexuality, as in Browning’s grammarian who is “dead from
the waist down,” or the presence of links between scholarship and
homosexuality, as in the queer circle of men investigating the identity
of Shakespeare’s addressee in Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”
40 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 74. As
Leela Gandhi has shown, the late Victorian sexologist and activist
Edward Carpenter—who once observed that Lee and her lover
Kit Anstruther-Thomson would make an admirable addition to
his study of “inverts”—theorized friendship as a perfected love
without sex and as a foundation for radical political alliances.
Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought,
Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Benjamin Hudson’s discussion
of Edward Fitzgerald points to an even earlier site of the union of
these traditions: building on Dinshaw, Hudson suggests certain
practitioners of amateur scholarship may also practice a queer
“amateur sexuality” that pursues “flirtation for its own sake”
alongside friendship, rather than sex and marriage. Benjamin
Hudson, “The Exquisite Amateur: FitzGerald, the Rubaiyat, and
Queer Dilettantism,” Victorian Poetry 54, no. 2 (2016): 161, 168.
41 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 31.
42 Gandhi, Affective Communities, 58.
43 Lee, Louis Norbert, 102.
44 Ibid., 103.
45 Ibid., 85.
46 Lee’s own language conflated friendship and romantic love in regard
to these women. For example, writing of Robinson to Anstruther-
Thomson, Lee recalled the former as “the first great friendship and
love of my life.” Lee to Anstruther-Thomson, August 18, 1904,
quoted in Phyllis F. Mannochi, “Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-
Thomson: A Study of Love and Collaboration between Romantic
Friends,” Women’s Studies 12 (1986): 129–148. For more on
Lee’s queer relationships, see Sally Newman, “The Archival Traces
of Desire: Vernon Lee’s Failed Sexuality and the History of the
Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History,” Journal of the History
of Sexuality 14, nos. 1–2 (2005): 51–75.
47 Lee, Vital Lies, 2:100.
174 The Critic as Amateur

48 Ibid., 1:iii, 2:100, 2:205, 2:152.

49 Vernon Lee, Studies in the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 2nd edn.
(1880; London: Fisher Unwin, 1907), xix.
50 Ibid., 1.15.
51 Ibid., 1.51. Lee is careful, in criticizing James and some aspects
of pragmatism, to praise other elements of James’s work and
pragmatism more broadly. As a polemical but sometimes appreciative
critic of pragmatism, Lee might be further recovered as a voice to
include in recent work on the broad history of pragmatism and its
value for literary studies today. See, for example, Nicholas Gaskill,
“What Difference Can Pragmatism Make for Literary Study?”
American Literary History 24, no. 2 (2012): 374–389.
52 Lee, Vital Lies, 1.208.
53 Ibid., 2:205.
54 Ibid., 1:165, 37.
55 Ibid., 1:35.
56 Ibid., 1:48.
57 Ibid., 1:201.
58 Vernon Lee, Notebook of March–April 1926, Notebooks (holograph
manuscripts, 1926–1935, 27 vol.), Vernon Lee Collection, Colby
College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine.
59 Vernon Lee, “Art and religion” (article, 1916, 3 p.): Lee’s review of
Apotheosis and Afterlife: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art
and Religion in the Roman Empire, by Mrs. Arthur Strong, The
Nation, April 1, 1916: 20 and 22, Vernon Lee Collection, Colby
College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine, 2.
60 Lee, Vital Lies, 1:244, 1:245.
61 Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 12.
62 Ibid., 203–204.
63 Shafquat Towheed, “The Creative Evolution of Scientific Paradigms:
Vernon Lee and the Debate over the Hereditary Transmission of
Acquired Characters,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 1 (2006): 33–61.
64 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and
Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London:
John Lane, 1912), 2.
65 Ibid., viii.
66 Ibid.
67 Lee, Vital Lies, 2:119.
68 Ibid., 2:176.
69 Hilary Fraser, “Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces In-
between,” in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative
Selves and Self-fashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 115, 121.
 The Sophisticated Amateur 175

70 Diana Maltz, “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’: From Working-class

Enculturation to Upper-class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee and
Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics,” in Women and
British Aestheticism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 220.
71 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, viii.
72 Ibid.
73 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 180.
74 A recent anthology exploring “postcritique” addresses these
criticisms, arguing both that “it is no longer feasible [… ] to assume
that critique is synonymous with leftist resistance or that rethinking
critique implies a retreat into aestheticism, quietism, belle-lettrism,
or other much maligned ‘isms’ of literary studies.” Elizabeth S. Anker
and Rita Felski, Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017), 15.
75 Andrew Marantz, “Fighting Words,” The New Yorker, July 2,
2018, 37.
76 Ibid., 39.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 39, 34, 36.

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NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
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2014.
Burdick, Alan. “Looking for Life on a Flat Earth.” The New Yorker,
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Culture of Connoisseurship.” Visual Resources 33, nos. 1–2 (2017):
1–10.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. New York: Oxford
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Dennisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940.
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DeWitt, Anne. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur
Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012.
Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism,
Reception, Gods in Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015.
Fraser, Hilary. “Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces In-
between.” In Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative
Selves and Self-fashioning, 1880–1930, edited by Marysa Demoor,
114–133. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Gagel, Amanda, ed. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–1935: Volume I,
1865–1884. London: Taylor and Francis, 2016.
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-
Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006.
Gaskill, Nicholas. “What Difference Can Pragmatism Make for Literary
Study?” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (2012): 374–389.
Hammill, Faye. Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek
Religion. 1912. 2nd edn. 1927. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
Hudson, Benjamin. “The Exquisite Amateur: FitzGerald, the Rubaiyat,
and Queer Dilettantism.” Victorian Poetry 54, no. 2 (2016): 155–177.
Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Lanzoni, Susan. “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s
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Lee, Vernon. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales. 1890. Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, 2006.
Lee, Vernon. Louis Norbert: A Two-fold Romance. London: John Lane,
1914.
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Lee, Vernon. Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent
Obscurantism. 2 vols. London: John Lane, 1912.
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Lee, Vernon, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness

and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane,
1912.
Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel.
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Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.
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Martin, Kristy. Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee,
Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence. New York: Oxford University Press,
2013.
Maltz, Diana. “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’: From Working-class
Enculturation to Upper-class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee and
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and British Aestheticism, edited by Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis
Psomiades, 211–229. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2000.
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34–43.
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Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-

Victorian England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
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Towheed, Shafquat. “The Creative Evolution of Scientific Paradigms:
Vernon Lee and the Debate over the Hereditary Transmission of
Acquired Characters.” Victorian Studies 49, no. 1 (2006): 33–61.
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Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, 174–192. New York:
Palgrave, 2006.
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Female Intellectual. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.
 PART THREE

The Critic as
Amateur in Old
and New Media
180
 8
Dorothy Richardson and
Close Up: Amateur and
Professional Exchanges in
Film Culture

Zlatina Nikolova and Chris

Townsend

In 1927 the novelist Dorothy Richardson joined the film journal

Close Up as a regular contributor, publishing over twenty essays
before publication ceased in December 1933. Best known as the
author of the serial novel Pilgrimage, written in thirteen volumes
between 1912 and 1946, Richardson was unfamiliar with the
technical language of filmmaking. Although rarely considered
as a film critic, she was nonetheless a crucial contributor to the
magazine. Richardson agreed to contribute following an invitation
from her friend, the author Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who
was also Close Up’s benefactor and coeditor.1 Initially amateur
critics themselves, Bryher and her husband, the Scottish artist
Kenneth Macpherson, along with their companion H.D., founded
Close Up under the aegis of their Swiss-based publishing project
POOL. The journal’s aim was to introduce new audiences to
182 The Critic as Amateur

film art and encourage their engagement with experimental film

practices, from diverse viewpoints; Close Up was also advertised
as encouraging amateurs. Such sponsorship apparently extended
to its own contributions: Marianne Moore would characterize
the first issue as founded in well-meaning amateurism.2 Yet, as we
show, Close Up was from a very early point a terrain of reciprocal
flow and circulation between amateur and professional critics
and practitioners that problematizes its categorization as typical,
modernist “little magazine.”
Close Up is often understood as dominated by literary modernists
who, even as they expanded the avant-garde’s ambitions into mass
culture, were hostile toward its formal conventions, and material
and institutional practices.3 H.D., Gertrude Stein and indeed
Richardson are frequently cited as typifying the kind of writer
the magazine attracted. However, analysis shows that Close Up’s
principal contributors were neither established modernist writers
nor amateur critics. Rather, exemplified by Robert Herring (a film
critic), Jean Lenauer (a critic based in Paris), and Oswell Blakeston
(a studio cinematographer), they were mostly professionals in the
nascent media industries.4
We argue that Close Up, and the POOL Group’s wider network,
might in fact be seen as a locus for different forms of amateurism,
where contributors from diverse fields exchanged or intercalated
roles. Thus, media industry professionals such as Herring and
Blakeston used the exchange with the avant-garde that Close Up
fostered to enter the literary domain as experimental writers and
as influencers. Extra-cinematic writing in Close Up—the critical
or promotional textual supplement to film—by both established
literary practitioners and industry professionals is paralleled
elsewhere in POOL’s activities by a body of para-cinematic
writing—the transposition of cinematic effects into text—produced
by the “professional” critics. Macpherson, Herring, and Blakeston
all published “cinematic” fiction under POOL’s aegis. Richardson,
as a professional novelist but “amateur” critic, acted differently:
she deployed the established technique of detailed, realistic social
observation typical of her novels in her film criticism. She manifests
her engagement with film through reception rather than production,
through “anthropology” rather than aesthetics. We therefore
challenge arguments made for the influence of film aesthetics on
Richardson’s writing and suggest that this dynamic may be inverted:
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 183

her “amateur” approach to film criticism is in fact defined by the

social commentary that emerges in her fiction writing.5
We further question what being an amateur film critic means in
a journal that hybridized the ideas of editors from the modernist
avant-garde with those of industry professionals. For, if Richardson
shares common positions and learning processes as a critic they
are, oddly, often located within popular culture and shared with
middlebrow professionals. We therefore establish parallels between
Richardson’s approach and those of her contemporaries who
simultaneously fashioned careers as professional critics in the mass
media and modernist literary stylists in avant-garde magazines. These
include Bryher, the Imagist poet Iris Barry at the Daily Mail and
Spectator, the novelist Olive Moore at the Daily Sketch, and Caroline
(“C.A.”) Lejeune at the Guardian and later the Observer, as well as
Herring, who replaced Lejeune at the Guardian. With the exception
of Herring, these early critics were women, writing out of and about
a gendered experience of spectatorship. Like Richardson, they lacked
any formal qualification beyond an enthusiasm for the movies.
However much of an amateur we might deem Richardson
to be, that status is less distinctive, and far less pejorative, than
seems at first to be the case. She publishes in a journal that fosters
exchanges between amateurs and professionals, between literary
and media practitioners, and blurs distinctions between them so
that professionals in one activity become tyros in the other. In the
early years of Close Up’s publication, Bryher and Macpherson
have enthusiasm but no experience of filmmaking or film criticism.
Their industry contacts are limited with German acquaintances
such as G. W. Pabst the principal entry to professional networks.
The early commissioning of material from professionals such as
Blakeston, Herring, and Eric Elliott, who had proven credentials as
freelance writers, was perhaps a conscious attempt to acquire both
technical competencies and a formal lexicon that the editors lacked.
It was also a way of gaining access to the promotional networks
of production companies. Paradoxically, this turn to the industry
meant that many of Close Up’s writers were amateurs, approaching
their material from a different direction—not as novelists and poets
writing about film but cinematographers and editors writing about
films rather than shooting or editing them.
The transformation of the British film industry after the
Cinematograph Act (Quota Act) of 1927 created new pathways
184 The Critic as Amateur

to enter an increasingly professionalized practice. The Quota Act

prompted a rapid increase in film production, witnessing a growth in
studio facilities and the registration of over two hundred production
companies, mostly in and around London. This stimulus provided
the basis of the new media industries on which Close Up’s editors
drew for formal and technical expertise.6 While those opportunities
were often in technical or production roles, there were openings
for writers, which increased once the introduction of sound
technologies demanded scripted dialogue rather than gesture as
the animating force of narratives. Furthermore, exhibition formats
changed, responding to demographic shifts and the more varied use
of leisure time. Cinemas ranged from large theaters in the West End
with full orchestras and cafés to small spaces with a single pianist
in poorer areas.7 Since her articles focus on the period immediately
following the introduction of the Cinematograph Act, Richardson
effectively acts as an anthropologist of film culture in 1920s Britain.
The promotion and reception of films also led to the development
of film criticism as a profession. As Haidee Wasson observes of the
early 1920s, “both in the United States and in the United Kingdom,
film struck an increasingly serious pose in periodicals and daily
newspapers; professionalised and dedicated ‘film critics’ became
regular contributors.”8 Yet this was a profession unaccompanied
by the necessity of qualification. That looseness of condition meant
that critical roles could be opened to those prepared to seize their
opportunity: this included individuals who were perhaps otherwise
marginalized from mainstream modernist activity—notably women.
C. A. Lejeune became a writer at the Guardian in 1921 through
family connections to C. P. Scott, the newspaper’s editor. Initially
a music critic, she would later reflect: “Why should I not turn
my pleasure into profit and earn my living by seeing films? The
profession of film criticism had not yet come into being.”9 Like her
peers, Lejeune established her craft by formulating an acceptable
critical discourse in the public sphere and negotiating a path between
endorsement and critique within the promotional apparatuses
of the production companies. Her language was grounded in the
experience of spectatorship and space, rather than in formal analysis.
When Lejeune moved in 1928 from the Guardian to the Observer,
her column “The Week on Screen” passed to Robert Herring. He
had begun as a critic in 1926–1927 with titles including the literary
magazine the London Mercury, Drawing and Design: The Magazine
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 185

of Taste, and indeed, Close Up, first publishing with Bryher and
Macpherson in November 1927. Although he was not an industry
professional, graduating from Cambridge in English in 1924, and
first working on J. C. Squire’s middlebrow literary magazine The
London Mercury, Herring’s writing quickly becomes more attentive
to the spatial organization, camera work, and lighting of films than
any of the other critics considered here.
While Herring negotiated a path into mainstream writing on
film from freelance contributions to a range of magazines, there
began, at this point, a productive exchange between middlebrow
titles such as the BBC’s The Listener and avant-garde journals such
as Close Up. Herring’s Guardian column would variously address
Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), the work of the vanguard film
composer Edmund Meisel, and Eisenstein’s October (1927). All of
this was material that might have been included in Close Up—and
sometimes was. Herring’s Guardian feature on “negro films” in
1928 would lead to his introduction to the actor Paul Robeson and,
eventually, Close Up’s seminal issue on the topic in August 1929.10
Olive Moore had a wider remit as a writer in the mass media than
Lejeune, Herring, or Iris Barry, writing broadly on the experience
of women in modern society. We include her firstly because within
this discourse she necessarily reflected on the ways in which film
depicted and affected women. That is, Moore occupied precisely the
thematic into which Richardson ventures as a novelist who engaged
with film culture. Secondly, Moore was associated with the Close
Up circle to the extent that in the 1930s her publication was aided
by Oswell Blakeston.11 Finally, and of particular interest given the
claims made for “cinematicity” in the work of British modernist
women writers, and for Richardson in particular, there is complete
incongruity between Moore’s writing in the public sphere and her
highly experimental literary technique. If, as Renée Dickinson
suggests, Moore is a novelist who reimagines the modernist text
in contingent response to changes in the lives and subjectivities
of women in interwar Britain, that formal experiment does not
extend to her widest contact with those women as readers, even
as her themes remain consistent.12 In contrast, Richardson’s formal
exploration of similar themes remains consistent across fiction and
public discourse.
Iris Barry typified an initial amateurism that turned to
professionalism. Denied Oxford entry by the accident of the First
186 The Critic as Amateur

World War she fashioned a career as a minor poet, publishing in

Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry.13
An ability to write clear and entertaining prose led to regular articles
in the Spectator from 1923 and film criticism in the Adelphi and
Vogue—a similar, if slightly more prestigious mix to Herring’s early
portfolio—before she was hired by the Daily Mail, then the highest
circulation national newspaper in Britain.14 As early as 1926 Barry
was being described as a “whole-time professional cinema critic.”15
Although this nomination came in one of the magazines for which
she was a reviewer, its distinction between amateur and professional
is notable precisely because it promotes critical authority. Yet
Barry did not address film in formal terms: rather, her concerns
were very like Richardson’s and Lejeune’s. Hankins observes of her
work at the Adelphi that it “anchors her analysis in her immediate
experience as a thoughtful spectator.”16 As Wasson points out, her
address was often to “an explicitly gendered subset” of the national
audience, talking to women about a shared experience of cinema-
going.17 That new audience was certainly important to newspapers,
as a target for their advertisers, and the critic’s approach was not
pedagogical but rather grounded in a mutual fascination with films
as fashionable topics of conversation and consumption. Richardson
and Barry have in common a background of marginalized literary
practice and no formal knowledge of filmmaking—meaning that
their subjects are fundamentally existential rather than aesthetic.
However, where Barry and indeed Lejeune and Herring differ
from Richardson is in their preparedness to engage directly with
the promotional apparatus of the industry. This was something
that Richardson eschewed, whereas other Close Up contributors
worked routinely with that apparatus and used their connections
with major studios to develop particular articles and supply the
magazine with promotional stills for illustration.
Laura Marcus argues that Richardson’s articles are characterized
by a defense of “the movies” and popular cinema, contrasting
this with other Close Up critics.18 While this contrast perhaps
oversimplifies positions that evolved through the magazine’s life,
we can recognize Richardson’s approach as interested in cinema as
popular culture, premised upon education and spectatorship rather
than aesthetics. Throughout her writing for Close Up, Richardson
takes the position of a spectator and a social commentator. She
discusses the audiences who frequent the cinema most often, the
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 187

films they are most likely to see, the spaces in which they watch,
and the medium’s effect on them. Characterized by a “universal
hospitality,” the cinema is a “refuge” for “weary women of all
classes,” “sensitives,” “elders,” and a “charming girl.”19 Alongside
these observations, Richardson gives opinions on inter-titles,
musical accompaniment, and sound technology. These reflections
on the experience of spectatorship and the audience’s engagement
with cinema’s evolving apparatus lead to a distinctive understanding
of film culture.
Richardson shows that film appeals to audiences from all social
classes. The cinema is a sanctuary from the troubles of daily life,
unifying spectators into a cohesive community. As she visited film
theaters across London, Richardson chronicled the formation of
this community of filmgoers and the changing attitudes to the new
art of the “photoplays” in England.20 Her first article describes the
“repulsive” cinema “whose plaster frontages and garish placards
broke a row of shops in a strident, north London street.”21 The “tired
women … and small children” is a stereotype that recurs in her
later essays on audiences, “The Increasing Congregation” and “The
Front Rows.”22 Her record of stereotypes continues in “There’s No
Place Like Home” where the seats of the garage-shaped hall of the
cinema are taken by “the leaning lady” and “the solitary, motionless
middle-aged man.”23 Each of these characters visits the cinema for
a different reason: either to find solace from their daily chores, like
the women and mothers Richardson notices in the audiences, or to
be entertained like the small children. “Cinema in Arcady” adds that
film spectatorship may be one’s “admission to a generalised social
life” or one’s only “escape from ceaseless association” of urban life.24
Richardson thus records the changing atmosphere of the cinema in
the arcade, the slums, the tenement, or the village, as well as the
experience of familiarity when one enters the cinema.25
Alongside these observations on cinema’s function as a space
of entertainment, social association, or even solitude, Richardson
chronicled changing attitudes toward spectatorship and perceptions
of film as art in Britain. At first, Richardson treated film as an
alternative to theater.26 Perceptions of lower cultural status were
manifest in her early articles. The public’s understanding of silent
cinema was dominated not by narrativity but by seeing films as
a continuous performance of moving images merged with musical
accompaniment that one could enter and leave at any time. This
188 The Critic as Amateur

conception of film discouraged serious critical engagement and led

to the popularity of genres that privileged set pieces rather than
progressively developing scenarios. Although “prime favourites”
with audiences, the melodrama and the “farcical comedy” were
understood to be of little artistic value, unlike the works largely
privileged by other Close Up critics.27 Yet the apparent stereotypes
of Richardson’s articles are sensitive records of audiences,
acknowledging film’s reflection of their taste.28 Larger theaters in
central London became venues for social exchange, as Richardson
shows in “The Cinema in Arcady” while smaller cinemas were
places of solitude and escape for the working classes.29
Richardson’s record of changing attitudes toward film continued
in her reflections on the emergence of sound technologies. Both Tim
Armstrong and James Donald have explored the question of sound
as one of the key discourses in Close Up.30 Donald explains the
journal’s concern with sound with its search for “pure cinema” and
the clear definition of film as a medium.31 H.D. claimed that sound
“welded” to the moving image underscored film’s artificiality and
hindered immersive experience.32 While the projection of voice and
image worked in perfect unison, they remained separate entities
that fulfilled “different mechanical requirements.”33 Several leading
correspondents for the journal wrote with concern of a return to
static theatricality as a consequence of sound technology.34 As the
technology developed, so these positions changed. Macpherson
reflected on the benefits of sound technology in October 1929,
pointing to Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) as a successful use of the
medium.35 Herring had already done this in a Manchester Guardian
piece in April (about The Doctor’s Secret) and a BBC talk in August;
Blakeston and Hugh Castle also took up the topic in the August and
September 1929 issues of Close Up. Macpherson sought an aesthetic
that incorporated the new technology and used it to experiment
with narrative.36 Lenauer’s “The Sound Film: Salvation of Cinema”
of April 1929 had already promulgated this idea, claiming that
having reached its zenith, silent film was about to die out and be
replaced by sound film.37 While Ian Christie describes Close Up
as a rear-guard defense of the aesthetics of silent art cinema the
journal was in actuality the site of heated debate and progressive
endorsement.38 It is clear from Herring’s and Blakeston’s writing in
particular that the positions on sound in Close Up evolved beyond
the reactionary shortly after spring 1929.39
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 189

Richardson entered this discussion by distinguishing between live

musical accompaniment and the new sound technology. In her first
article she remarked that “Music is essential,” arguing that while a
good orchestra can highlight specific moments and effects, “a piano
played by one able to improvise … is preferable.”40 Her article on
musical accompaniment described in detail the improvisations of
a pianist whose talent merged the picture and the music into one
continuous performance.41 Richardson clearly preferred screenings
in the poorer areas and the suburbs, where silent films were more
likely to be accompanied by a single pianist rather than an orchestra.
Recording the growing prosperity of metropolitan cinemas in the
immediate pre-sound era and before the economic depression of
the early 1930s, Richardson noted the pianist’s replacement with
a small orchestra, a practice that typified larger cinemas.42 She
concluded that live musical accompaniment was essential to film
spectatorship, regardless of the musicians’ talent. The unity of the
moving image and the musical accompaniment elicited the “stillness
and concentration” necessary for the audience’s immersion into the
experience of film spectatorship.43 The moving image on its own is
“obscene” and “makes no personal demand upon the onlooker.”44
Although “Almost Persuaded” suggests some enthusiasm for
sound film, “Dialogue in Dixie” only a few months later makes clear
Richardson’s reservations.45 The addition of synchronized sound to
the moving picture distorted the viewing experience with a demand
for concentration that distracted from film’s visual essence.46
Despite the “good to excellent” cinematography and the actors’
performances in Paul Sloane’s Hearts in Dixie (1929), its images
were obstructed by the slow speech and imperfections of sound
technology as sound and “dead” silence alternated throughout the
“film opera.”47 In “Film Gone Male” the binary of silent versus
sound film becomes a metaphor for the novelist’s observations
on society’s gender dynamics. Sound film’s mission of “becoming
audible and … a medium of propaganda” is a “masculine destiny.”48
By contrast, silent film’s “innocence” is “essentially feminine.”49
Women, whom “men call womanly … are silent as the grave.”50
Despite their incessant “chattering,” they use speech not as a form
of communication but as a “facade” that disguises their “spiritual
nakedness.”51 Along with their social commentary, the two articles
reveal that Richardson considered sound film superficial and
dangerous. While it possessed some limited artistic properties,
190 The Critic as Amateur

sound could be exploited to limit the audience’s imagination and

enforce a specific interpretation of the moving image.
Although she attended less to social and gender stereotypes,
Bryher shared Richardson’s concern for film’s effect on audiences,
specifically children. Following her reviews of cinematic
treatments of the First World War in the early numbers of Close
Up, she turned her attention to the pedagogical possibilities for
film in two articles: “Films in Education: The Complex of the
Machine” and “Films for Children.” “Films in Education,” listed
under the alternative title “Education and Cinema,” adumbrated
the public’s moral concerns with cinema: “Films teach crime, are
bad for the eyesight, cinemas breed germs, movies are responsible
for all the evils and the restlessness of the modern age.”52 Film’s
mechanical nature and entertainment appeal were products of
the frenetic pace and mechanization of the modern era. Many
people related the medium to the industrialization of labor and
the machines that had robbed an entire generation of “a sense
of power” over their employment and place in modern society.53
The Establishment’s control over films suitable for children and
various modes of film censorship were this generation’s attempt to
place young people “in a state equal with themselves” by limiting
film’s accessibility.54
However, Bryher consistently argued that film could nurture
intellect while functioning as entertainment.55 Children were aware
of film’s properties and effects so there was no need to shield them.56
Instead, film’s inherent realism could be employed within innovative
teaching methods, exploiting children’s interest in “any kind of
illustration or picture” and their ability to learn visually.57 Bryher
proposed lessons followed by film screenings and practical work
that could replace traditional teaching approaches.58 She further
outlined the benefits of spectatorship in “Films for Children” in
August 1928, presenting a list of films children should see contrary
to the censors’ recommendations.59 Apart from documentaries and
newsreels, the list included the short musical Power and Beauty
(1926) and the Soviet film Mother (1926). In addition, Bryher
mentioned Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925) and Room’s Bed and Sofa
(1927)—which were art films dealing with “adult” topics such as
prostitution and cohabitation. Bryher traced the public’s prejudice
against these films to state censorship and the critics’ inability
to form divergent opinions. Children, as well as mass audiences,
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 191

should be taught to discern a film’s importance by its application of

experimental practices or its narrative.
In contrast to Bryher’s polemic, Richardson’s reflections on film’s
effect on children map both the advantages of their exposure to
film and its negative consequences for their perception of the world.
“The Front Rows” focused on three boys sitting in the front row
of the cinema.60 Instead of spending their Saturday afternoon in the
streets, they choose to stay in the “coolness” of the film theater.61
Film is an ironic “black villainy” that has drawn the boys into the
stuffy cinema.62 These popularly promulgated negative effects were
balanced against film’s promise as an educational medium. The
children get the chance to see films that are not necessarily deemed
fit by adults for children’s viewing and as a result they are “learning
either less than nothing or more than was good.”63
Richardson continued in this vein in August 1928. Published
alongside Bryher’s “Films for Children,” Richardson’s article of
the same title claimed that film had the potential to entertain
children and educate them.64 The child’s relationship with film
was similar to her relationship to the picture book, a parallel that
Bryher also noticed.65 However, Richardson recognized a problem,
suggesting that film’s capacity to manipulate space and time posed
a challenge to its realistic representation of the world. Although
educative, “nature” films were produced with the aim to entertain
and astonish and, as a result, endowed “natural processes” with a
sense of “unnatural smooth swiftness and reality.”66 At this point,
unusually, Richardson made aesthetic rather than moral judgments
or anthropological observations, suggesting that editing created a
false impression of the reality of biological processes as the egg
and the chicken became nothing more than “a conjuring trick.”67
While Richardson challenged cultural skepticism toward the new
medium, she cautioned against misunderstandings latent in the
temporal-spatial malleability it promises. Bryher omitted such
considerations in her reflections on film’s potential. Although she
largely refrained from discussions of filmmaking practices, the
thematic scope of Richardson’s essays in Close Up demonstrates
her awareness of film’s cultural, artistic, and educational
potential. She comments on the flourishing culture of cinema-
going and film spectatorship but also chronicles the development
of British society’s understanding of the medium and its multiple
applications.
192 The Critic as Amateur

Eschewing the technicalities of film’s production and promotion,

Richardson examined the social routines and habits that film culture
encouraged. Such elision of the filmic apparatus marginalizes
her in the context of Close Up’s focus on international film
industries, filmmaking practices, and theories. While Richardson
shared concerns about film’s place in education, spectatorship,
and censorship with Bryher, Bryher became more knowledgeable
about filmmaking practices through her connections with European
filmmakers like Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein. That research fed into
her articles on Pabst’s films, as well as her exploration of the Soviet
industry in Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929).68 Richardson’s
commentary on film’s role in culture was instead fueled by her
observations and experiences as a spectator. Her analysis of the
viewing experience informs the subjectivity of the commentary in
Pilgrimage.
Although organized according to what she considered central
concepts of cinema-going culture, such as the cinema’s democratic
space and the diverse “congregation” of social types in its audiences,
Richardson’s articles also recorded her own experiences of film.
Richardson regularly described her personal impressions of entering
the film theater or watching the continuous performance of moving
images. This descriptive prose mirrors Miriam’s observations in
Pilgrimage and what McCracken and Pritchett describe as the
central protagonist’s “hyperaesthesia.”69 They see Pilgrimage’s self-
awareness of its own sociocultural context originating in Miriam’s
acute awareness of the “sensorium of the visual, the musical, and the
haptic” of the narrative world.70 This sensitivity to experience forges
a connection between Miriam and the reader.71 That is, Miriam
behaves very much like a “professional” critic, like an Iris Barry,
C. A. Lejeune, or Olive Moore establishing a rapport with their
largely female audience. Richardson’s focus on her protagonist’s
consciousness and the sensuous description of Miriam’s life has led
to comments on the “cinematic” nature of Pilgrimage—this despite
the fact that much of the series was written well before Richardson
wrote about film.
Jane Garrity draws parallels between Richardson’s fiction and
her Close Up articles: she compares Miriam’s “shifting perspective”
to “the roving eye of a camera.”72 Narrative subjectivity destabilizes
the readers’ position as it entwines them with the protagonist’s
personal sense of events and abolishes the interferences of other
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 193

consciousness. Garrity notes that Richardson considers the film-

viewing experience to be almost “alchemical” as it produces
another form of consciousness that engages the spectator.73 Film’s
“alien” consciousness and its relationship to its audience can be
related to the relationship between the reader and Miriam informed
by the subjectivity of Pilgrimage’s prose. Yet Richardson’s writing
in Pilgrimage does not employ the para-cinematic manipulation
of time and space that characterizes the experimental fiction of
Macpherson, Blakeston, or Herring—an editorial manipulation
that Richardson indeed critiques as a filmic practice.
Richardson’s articles were informed by the same approach
that structured the readers’ relationship to Miriam’s experiences
rather than the formalized position of a filmmaker. Although her
film writing appears “amateur” when compared to the technical
sophistication that underpins many other Close Up critics’ texts, it
established her as an anthropologist of early film culture in Britain.
Richardson aligns herself with the gendered cinematic audience just
as Miriam articulates the thoughts and problems of young women
in early twentieth-century society. She writes: “We go … We emerge,
glitter for a moment in the brilliant light of the new flamboyant
foyer, and disappear for the evening in the queer faintly indecent
gloom.”74 Richardson recorded her hopes for and disappointment
with the talkies in a similar collective voice: “We would make
allowances. We were about to see the crude, the newly-born. We grew
willing to abandon our demand for the frozen window-sill in favor
of a subscription for a comfortable cradle.”75 Her impressionistic
approach distanced her from the technically authoritative voices of
critics like Blakeston, Herring, Macpherson, and even Bryher and
rendered her texts more appealing to the audiences that Close Up
tried to educate about the new film art.
Richardson’s film criticism, the tone of her articles, and the
issues she discussed placed her in a unique position as intermediary
between professional filmmakers and film critics on the side and
spectators and laymen on the other. She acknowledged film’s
cultural and artistic potential, even if she had no technical expertise
with the medium, nor with the discourses and apparatuses of
the industry. Yet her articles remain important for mirroring
the spectator’s sensitivity to cinematic experience. Richardson
defined the relationship between the popular audience and film’s
technologies and forms. While other Close Up critics theorized the
194 The Critic as Amateur

effects of cinema, Richardson dwelled on those effects at first-hand

and, like the middlebrow critics of the mainstream press, turned
them into the central topic of her writing.

Notes
1 Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, 1927. Bryher Papers GEN MSS 97
Series I Correspondence Box 52, Folder 1915, Granted by permission
of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
on behalf of the Schaffner Family Foundation.
2 Advertisement for Close Up, Transition (July 1927): n.p., Marianne
Moore, “Comment,” The Dial 83 (November 1927): 449–450,
Kenneth Macpherson, “As Is,” Close Up I, no. 1 (July 1927): 15, and
“As Is,” Close Up I, no. 2 (August 1927): 6–13.
3 James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, Close Up, 1927–
1933. Cinema and Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998), vii.
4 Betsy van Schlun, The POOL Group and the Quest for
Anthropological Universality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Chris
Townsend, “A Deeper, Wider POOL: Reading Close Up through the
Archives of Its Contributors,” Papers on Language and Literature,
forthcoming, 2019.
5 Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists
and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003).
6 Steve Chibnail, Quota Quickies (London: BFI Publishing, 2007),
18–19.
7 Laraine Porter, “Temporary American Citizens: British Cinema in the
1920s,” in The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, ed.
I. Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith (London: Routledge:
2017), 42–43.
8 Haidee Wasson, “The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and
Iris Barry,” Film History 18, no. 2 (2006): 155.
9 C. A. Lejeune, Thank You for Having Me (London: Hutchinson,
1964), 69.
10 Robert Herring, “Negro Films,” Manchester Guardian (December
15, 1928): 11. Herring to Bryher, December 21, 1928. Bryher Papers
GEN MSS 97 Series I Bryher Correspondence, Box 18, Folder 703.
Granted by permission of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript
Library, Yale University on behalf of the Schaffner Family Foundation.
11 Oswell Blakeston, “Appointment with X,” undated typescript, Oswell
Blakeston Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 195

Austin. Series II. Works, 1927–1985. Box 4, Folder 1–2, 33. Having
used Close Up as a portal to the literary world, Blakeston established
his own networks of influence. In this manuscript he claims to have
helped place Silvia Dobson’s The Happy Philistine (Duckworth,
1937), Moore’s The Apple Is Bitten Again (Wishart, 1934) and
Dallas Bower’s Plan for Cinema (Dent, 1936).
12 Renée Dickinson, Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the
Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive
Moore (London: Routledge, 2009), 3.
13 Robert Sitton, Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
14 Leslie Hankins, “Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film
Culture in London 1924–1926: The Adelphi, the Spectator, the
Film Society and British Vogue,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 3
(September 2004): 488–515.
15 “The Metaphysic of the Movies,” review of Iris Barry, Let’s Go to
the Pictures (1926), Spectator, November 13, 1926: 84. Cited in
Hankins, “Iris Barry,” 490.
16 “Iris Barry,” 495.
17 “The Woman Film Critic,” 157.
18 Laura Marcus, “Continuous Performance: Dorothy Richardson,” in
Donald, Friedberg and Marcus, Close Up 1927–1933, 152.
19 Dorothy Richardson, “The Increasing Congregation,” Close Up I,
no. 6 (December 1927): 61–65.
20 “Continuous Performance,” (July 1927): 35.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.; “The Increasing Congregation,” 64; Dorothy Richardson, “The
Front Rows,” Close Up II, no. 1 (January 1928): 60.
23 Dorothy Richardson, “There’s No Place like Home,” Close Up I, no.
5 (November 1927): 45.
24 Dorothy Richardson, “The Cinema in Arcady,” Close Up III, no. 1
(July 1928): 52–57.
25 “There’s No Place like Home,” 44–47; Dorothy Richardson, “The
Cinema in the Slums,” Close Up II, no. 5 (May 1928): 58–62; “The
Cinema in Arcady,” 52–57.
26 “Continuous Performance,” 34–35.
27 “The Cinema in Arcady,” 56.
28 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and
Society from 1930 to the Present (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 1–4.
29 “The Cinema in Arcady,” 55.
30 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural
Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 231–233;
James Donald, “From Silence to Sound,” in Donald, Friedberg and
Marcus, Close Up 1927–1933, 80–82.
196 The Critic as Amateur

31 “From Silence to Sound,” 80.

32 H.D., “The Mask and the Movietone,” Close Up I, no. 5 (November
1927): 20.
33 Ibid., 21.
34 Oswell Blakeston, Daily Telegraph, July 5, 1928. Robert Herring,
“The Talkies,” The London Mercury XIX (November 1926): 110,
201.
35 Kenneth Macpherson, “As Is,” Close Up V, no. 4 (October 1929):
257–262.
36 Ibid., 262.
37 Jean Lenauer, “The Sound Film: Salvation of the Cinema,” Close Up
IV, no. 4 (April 1929): 18–21.
38 Ian Christie, “Introduction,” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet
Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939, ed. Ian Christie and Richard
Taylor (London: Routledge, 1994), 6.
39 Robert Herring, “Barrie on the Sound Film,” Manchester Guardian,
April 27, 1929; Robert Herring, “Film Criticism,” BBC 2LO, August
2, 1927, see Robert Herring to Bryher, Bryher Papers GEN MSS
97 Series II, Writings Box 19, Folder 706, “Sunday” (an internal
reference to a comment in the Manchester Guardian dates this
letter to August 4, 1927); Hugh Castle, “Elstree’s First ‘Talkie’,”
Close Up V, no. 2 (August 1929): 133; Oswell Blakeston, “Russia’s
New Pictures,” The Bioscope 1193 (August 14, 1929): 27; Oswell
Blakeston, “One Swallow,” Close Up V, no. 3 (September 1929):
244–245; Oswell Blakeston, “The Russian Film, part II,” The
Educational Screen VIII, no. 8 (October 1929): 232.
40 “Continuous Performance,” 37.
41 Dorothy Richardson, “Musical Accompaniment,” Close Up I, no. 2
(August 1927): 59.
42 Ibid., 59–60.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 61.
45 Dorothy Richardson, “Almost Persuaded,” Close Up IV, no. 6 (June
1929): 36; Dorothy Richardson, “Dialogue in Dixie,” Close Up V, no.
3 (September 1929): 211–218.
46 “Dialogue in Dixie,” 215.
47 Ibid., 213–214.
48 Dorothy Richardson, “Film Gone Male,” Close Up IX, no. 1 (March
1932): 38.
49 Ibid., 37.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 36.
52 Bryher, “‘Education and Cinema’/‘Film in Education: The Complex
of the Machine’,” Close Up I, no. 2 (August 1927): 51.
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 197

53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Bryher, “Dope or Stimulus,” Close Up III, no. 3 (September 1928):
60.
56 “‘Education and Cinema’/‘Film in Education’,” 51.
57 Ibid., 51, 53–54.
58 Ibid., 54.
59 Bryher, “Films for Children,” Close Up III, no. 2 (August 1928):
16–18.
60 “Front Rows,” 59–64.
61 Ibid., 60.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Dorothy Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up III, no. 2
(August 1928): 23.
65 Ibid., 24; “‘Education and Cinema’/‘Film in Education’,” 53.
66 Ibid., 25.
67 Ibid.
68 Bryher, “‘Education and Cinema’/‘Film in Education’”; Bryher, “Films
for Children”; “G.W. Pabst: A Survey,” Close Up I, no. 4 (December
1927); Bryher, Film Problems of Soviet Russia (Territet: POOL
Reflections, 1929).
69 Scott McCracken and Elizabeth Pritchett, “Plato’s Tank: Aestheticism,
Dorothy Richardson and the Idea of Democracy,” Pilgrimages: The
Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 6 (2013–2014): 94–99.
70 Ibid., 94.
71 Ibid.
72 Step-daughters of England, 91.
73 Ibid., 93.
74 “The Increasing Congregation,” 62.
75 “Dialogue in Dixie,” 212.

Bibliography
Aldgate, Anthony and Jeffrey Richards. Best of British: Cinema and
Society from 1930 to the Present. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.
Anonymous - “The Metaphysic of the Movies,” review of Iris Barry, Let’s
Go to the Pictures (1926), The Spectator, November 13, 1926: 84,
cited in Hankins, Leslie. “Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming
Film Culture in London 1924–1926: the Adelphi, the Spectator, the
Film Society and British Vogue.” Modernism/ Modernity, 11, no. 3,
(September 2004): 488–515.
198 The Critic as Amateur

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Blakeston, Oswell. “Appointment with X,” undated typescript, Oswell
Blakeston Collection, Series II: Works, 1927–1985, Box 4, Folder 1–2,
33. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Blakeston, Oswell. “Russia’s New Pictures.” The Bioscope, 1193, August
14, 1929.
Blakeston, Oswell. “The Russian Film, part II.” The Educational Screen
VIII, no. 8, October 1929.
Blakeston, Oswell. “Approach to Sound.” Kinematograph Weekly 158,
April 24, 1930.
Bryher. “‘Education and Cinema’/‘Film in Education: The Complex of the
Machine’.” Close Up I, no. 2 (August 1927): 49–54.
Bryher. “G.W. Pabst: A Survey.” Close Up I, no. 4 (December 1927):
56–61.
Bryher. “Films for Children.” Close Up III, no. 2 (August 1928): 16–20.
Bryher. “Dope or Stimulus.” Close Up III, no. 3 (September 1928):
59–61.
Bryher. Film Problems of Soviet Russia. Territet: POOL, 1929.
Chibnail, Steve. Quota Quickies. London: BFI Publishing, 2007.
Christie, Ian. “Introduction.” In The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet
Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939, edited by Ian Christie and Richard
Taylor. London: Routledge, 1994.
Dickinson, Renée. Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist
Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore. London:
Routledge, 2009.
Donald, James, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus. Close Up, 1927–
1933. Cinema and Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998.
Donald, James. “From Silence to Sound.” In Close Up 1927–1933,
Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and
Laura Marcus, 79–82. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998.
Garrity, Jane. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and
the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2003.
Hankins, Leslie. “Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film Culture in
London 1924–1926: the Adelphi, the Spectator, the Film Society and
British Vogue.” Modernism/ Modernity, 11, no. 3, (September 2004):
488–515.
H.D. “The Mask and the Movietone.” Close Up I, no. 5 (November
1927): 18–31.
Herring, Robert. “The Movies.” The London Mercury XV, November
1926.
 Dorothy Richardson and Close Up 199

Herring, Robert. “Negro Films.” Manchester Guardian, December 15, 1928.

Herring, Robert. Robert Herring to Bryher, December 21, 1928. Bryher
Papers GEN MSS 97, Series I, Bryher Correspondence, Box 18, Folder
703, Herring, Robert, 1927–1928. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript
Library, Yale University on behalf of the Schaffner Family Foundation.
Herring, Robert. “Barrie on the Sound Film.” Manchester Guardian, April
27, 1929.
Kraszna-Krausz, Andor. “The First Russian Sound Films.” Close Up VIII,
no. 4 (December 1931).
Lenauer, Jean. “The Sound Film: Salvation of the Cinema.” Close Up IV,
no. 4 (April 1929): 18–21.
Lejeune, C. A. Thank You for Having Me. London: Hutchinson, 1964.
Macpherson, Kenneth. “As Is.” Close Up I, no. 1 (July 1927): 5–15.
Macpherosn, Kenneth. “As Is.” Close Up I, no. 2 (August 1927): 5–17.
Macpherson, Kenneth. “As Is.” Close Up V, no. 4 (October 1929):
257–262.
Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse. Writing about Cinema in the Modernist
Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
McCracken, Scott and Elizabeth Pritchett. “Plato’s Tank: Aestheticism,
Dorothy Richardson and the idea of Democracy.” Pilgrimages: The
Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 6 (2013–2014): 84–106.
Marianne Moore. “Comment.” The Dial 83 (November 1927): 449–450.
Porter, Laraine. “Temporary American Citizens: British Cinema in the
1920s.” In The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History,
edited by I. Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith. London:
Routledge: 2017.
Richardson, Dorothy. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, 1927. Bryher Papers
GEN MSS 97 Series I Correspondence Box 52, Folder 1915. Granted
by permission of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library,
Yale University on behalf of the Schaffner Family Foundation.
Richardson, Dorothy. “Musical Accompaniment.” Close Up I, no. 2
(August 1927): 58–62.
Richardson, Dorothy. “There’s no Place like Home.” Close Up I, no. 5
(November 1927): 44–47.
Richardson, Dorothy. “The Increasing Congregation.” Close Up I, no. 6
(December 1927): 61–65.
Richardson, Dorothy. “The Front Rows.” Close Up II, no. 1 (January
1928): 59–64.
Richardson, Dorothy. “The Cinema in the Slums.” Close Up II, no. 5
(May 1928): 58–62.
Richardson, Dorothy. “The Cinema in Arcady.” Close Up III, no. 1 (July
1928): 52–57.
Richardson, Dorothy. “Films for Children.” Close Up III, no. 2 (August
1928): 21–27.
200 The Critic as Amateur

Richardson, Dorothy. “Almost Persuaded.” Close Up IV, no. 6 (June

1929): 31–37.
Richardson, Dorothy. “Dialogue in Dixie.” Close Up V, no. 3 (September
1929): 211–218.
Richardson, Dorothy. “The Censorship Petition.” Close Up VI, no. 7
(January 1930): 7–11.
Richardson, Dorothy. “Film Gone Male.” Close Up IX, no. 1 (March
1932): 36–37.
Schlun, Betsy van. The POOL Group and the Quest for Anthropological
Universality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
Sitton, Robert. Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Townsend, Chris. “A Deeper, Wider POOL: Reading Close Up through
the Archives of Its Contributors.” Papers on Language and Literature,
2019.
Wasson, Haidee. “The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris
Barry.” Film History 18, no. 2 (2006).
 9
New Judgments: Literary
Criticism on Air

Emily Bloom

The BBC producer Stephen Potter entered the world of broadcasting

as a refugee from academia. He spent his early career as a lecturer
in English at the University of London, writing books on Coleridge
and D. H. Lawrence. In 1937 he wrote a book titled The Muse in
Chains, which articulated his displeasure with the academic study
of English. His primary critique was with the growing disconnection
between the esotericism of academic criticism and the everyday
experience of readers outside of the ivory tower. In 1941 Potter
launched a radio series called “New Judgment” that attempted to
bridge this divide by offering accessible literary criticism to radio’s
mass publics.1 The program invited contemporary writers to create
innovative programs explicating the work of literary and cultural
figures from the past. Despite differences across the series, the “New
Judgment” formula involved a multi-generic blending of criticism,
biography, drama, and readings that were intended to make literary
criticism accessible and entertaining to the common reader or, in
this case, the common listener.
While it is an academic truism that mid-century critics
professionalized literary criticism as it is now practiced in
universities across the globe, the idea of a popular literary criticism
intended for mass audiences and performed through mass media
202 The Critic as Amateur

has largely faded from cultural memory. These broadcasts reveal

how writers during the Second World War adapted literary criticism
for mass publics through the hybrid style of the feature broadcast,
which was pioneered by Potter and his colleagues in the Features
Department. Potter’s series not only fulfilled his goal of wresting
literary criticism from the specialized vocabularies of experts, but
it also encouraged professional writers to learn radio writing,
diving in as amateurs to a new and unfamiliar medium. The
critic’s status as an amateur radio writer, however, was conferred
against the backdrop of radio’s increasing professionalization. As
the medium moved from its preprofessional era—when radio was
operated by amateur enthusiasts—to its mid-century “golden age”
of consolidation and professionalization, radio practitioners were
especially keen to assert their newfound expertise.2 In the case of
the “New Judgment” series, we see the fulcrum shifting as literary
critics embrace amateurism just as broadcasters were exerting their
newfound status as experts.
Focusing on the “New Judgment” series, this essay describes how
the exigencies of war and the opportunities of new media enabled
critics to experiment with unfamiliar techniques that popularized
literary criticism for vast listening audiences at a time when
paper restrictions on publishers and the existential threat of Blitz
bombings made literary traditions seem more fragile than ever. The
correspondence surrounding two programs by Stephen Spender on
Walt Whitman (1941) and Seán O’Faoláin on Oliver Goldsmith
(1942) reveal the fraught dynamics that emerged between the
respective roles of the producer, writer, and listener as critics; the
question of how to pitch of the programs in terms of intellectual
difficulty; and the role of audience appreciation in determining
value.
Before joining the BBC, Potter outlined his critique of the academic
study of English Literature in his book The Muse in Chains. Potter
uses the portmanteau “Inglit” to describe the established version
of English literary scholarship, whose practitioners he describes
as “anecdotalists, antiquarians, hero-worshippers, pedants, and
collectors.”3 He goes on to define three versions of the professional
Literary Man that he found most pernicious: the categorizer and
simplifier of literature into periods and movements; the critic
obsessed with authorial biography; and “the note-man or surface
creeper.”4 All these versions, he argued, separated literature from
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 203

the creative process and from critical thought and distanced the
literary past from the contemporary world of writers and readers.
He feared that this growing divide between the Inglit Man and
readers and writers would destroy literary appreciation, turning
it into either rote knowledge, a celebrity fixation on canonical
authors, or a merely pedantic activity that distanced readers from
the works themselves.
The Muse in Chains is part jeremiad and part satire; Potter’s
attacks on the Inglit Man, while broad and wide-ranging—covering
everyone from the university professor to the journalistic man of
letters—are consistent in their focus on the evils of specialization
and genius-worship. Potter writes:

The growing up of the impression among “book-lovers”—a

fairly good word for those who are subdued into trance-like
receptivity, rather than stimulated to activity, by the contact of
genius—that they are all of them perfectly competent critics, but
that real “creative” writing is impossible for them unless they
are flukily presented at birth with something vague, something
supernatural, called genius.5

Here Potter attacks abstract notions of literary genius as well as

the practice of literary appreciation as a passive activity. Instead,
he demands a readership that considers the text from creative and
critical points of view. He also implies that readers don’t deserve
to think of themselves as critics without earning the distinction by
being “stimulated to activity.” Written in the 1930s, on the verge
of war in Europe, the book suggests an immanent critique of
fascism in literary studies. Potter sees himself as standing against
both technocratic and “great man” approaches to literature that
either limit literary criticism to a small pool of experts speaking a
specialized vocabulary or that insist on the exceptionality of the
literary genius who stands apart from the common writer and
reader.
Potter’s intervention in literary studies was contemporary with
the emergence of New Criticism and shares some of its features,
including pushing back against the dominance of specialized
philological and literary-historical approaches to literature. In
Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Joseph North calls
for a reconsideration of the political value of New Criticism for the
204 The Critic as Amateur

intellectual Left. North argues that I. A. Richards, in his formulation

of practical criticism, sought to “cultivate the aesthetic capabilities
of readers” and that, unlike later New Critics such as F. R. Leavis,
he focused his criticism on the relationship between the work of
art and its audience rather than the formalist approach that was
later attributed to him.6 Later versions of New Criticism, according
to North, enshrined the critic as expert and perverted Richards’s
goal of making critics of all readers. However, Christopher Hilliard
notes that for F. R. Leavis, as well, “thinking about literature was
intimately connected with thinking about living.”7 This emphasis
on the practical value of criticism meant that Leavis was invested in
considering literary judgment from the perspective of the present; as
Leavis himself argued, “the crucial test of a knowledge of the past is
to be able to apply judgment in the present.”8 This language mirrors
Potter’s articulation of the aims of his “New Judgment” program.
What Richards, Leavis, and Potter reacted to in academic literary
scholarship was the divide that had emerged between literature and
life, and all sought, in different ways, to foster in literary criticism
forms of judgment that could be extended to everyday life.
The Muse in Chains shares with New Criticism a critique of
specialization, an attack on biographical fallacies, and an emphasis
on the need for readers to cultivate their own critical skills. Potter
wanted readers to feel empowered to make new judgments about
canonical texts but also to be receptive to contemporary literature
and capable of evaluating works in the present. Potter’s contributions
to New Criticism have been overlooked, in part, because of the
marginalization of the radio medium in which he put his ideas into
practice. Conversations about the rise of mid-century criticism have
tended to focus on literary journals such as Scrutiny, academic
institutions in the United States and UK, and adult education
initiatives, but rarely on mass media.9 And yet radio was a vibrant
medium for reconsidering the role of criticism in everyday life. The
BBC was, from its inception, committed to an Arnoldian version of
culture that aimed to disseminate “the best that has been thought
and said” and would therefore provide fertile ground for attempts
to bring literary criticism to broad listening publics.10
When Potter joined the BBC in 1936, he brought with him
an agenda to turn literary studies away from the Inglit Man. He
began in Schools Broadcasting with literature programs aimed at
schoolchildren on Chaucer, Johnson, Keats, Shakespeare, Spenser,
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 205

and William Morris. By 1941, in the early days of the Second World
War, he had moved to the Features Department where he pitched
an idea for a series of literary broadcasts that invited contemporary
writers to offer a “new judgment” on a writer from the literary
past. The programs aimed to foreground the relationship between
canonical literary works and the present moment. Using the lens
of the present, Potter also sought to democratize literary criticism,
making it more relevant and approachable for mass publics. If the
Inglit Man represented hierarchical reading practices—what we
might today call “the sage on the stage”—then the “New Judgment”
critics adopted a radically leveling approach, addressing canonical
literary figures on a human scale. Oliver Goldsmith, for instance,
became for Seán O’Faoláin a lover of low society and Walt Whitman,
for Stephen Spender, was not timeless but responded to the current
events of his time. The program was also polyphonic, interspersing
the voice of the critic and the canonical author with other voices,
including various personifications of the “common reader.” Listeners
were encouraged to adopt a democratizing, contemporary lens with
which to view literary history and were introduced to living writers
who showcased these critical approaches.
The “New Judgment” series moved criticism away from either
the professor or the man of letters and into the institutional
structures of the radio medium, which demanded collaboration
between the critic and the producer and called for new approaches
to the audience. At its most ambitious, the “New Judgment” series
positions radio as an essential medium for imagining mass publics
for literary criticism at mid-century. Theodor Adorno famously
argued that mass media such as radio produces passive consumers
and, by undermining the active reading practices of the print-era
public sphere, has a deleterious effect on contemporary democracy.
He singles out radio as especially prone to authoritarianism and
passive reception: “Above all on the radio the authority of society
standing behind every speaker immediately addresses its listeners
unchallenged.”11 My argument here, in contrast, adopts a less
deterministic understanding of the medium to show how a producer
such as Potter and the writers whom he commissioned approached
radio as a medium with critical potential. In other words, they
believed that radio could offer the space for a critical conversation
about literature and, in the process, create publics capable of not
only hearing but also making new judgments.
206 The Critic as Amateur

In the still-nascent field of radio modernism—which brings

together radio studies and modernist studies—attention has focused
on programs that borrow from journalistic genres of criticism such
as the book review. From its origin, the BBC had a difficult time
distinguishing radio programming from print journalism, which led
to conflicts with the press over rights. Debra Rae Cohen describes
radio’s “intermediality” and points to the BBC’s magazine the
Listener as an example of how radio needed print journalism to
engage audiences unfamiliar with the medium and to “assuage
anxieties about broadcasting.”12 Programs such as George Orwell’s
“Voice” or E. M. Forster’s “Some Books” brought writers to the
microphone to talk about contemporary literature but did not differ
much, in terms of genre, from traditional book reviews, lectures, or
critical essays other than their shorter length, more colloquial style,
and in some cases, use of dialogue between commentators.13 It is
notable that Virginia Woolf, as Randi Koppen observes, referred to
her radio talks as articles and complained about the radio-specific
“talks element.”14 The dialogue format that emerged in the BBC’s
Talks Department under Hilda Matheson tried to steer writers
away from literary prose and toward the intimacy of face-to-face
conversation. What we see in Potter’s programs, however, is an
attempt neither to replicate journalistic models nor to downplay
the interceding medium through an emphasis on intimate address;
rather, Potter brings the medium itself to the forefront in his attempt
to invent a radiogenic mode of literary criticism.
These programs brought together an eclectic combination of
talk, dramatic dialogue, reenactment, and readings and, in so doing,
formally reimagined literary criticism for a new medium. In a letter
to Seán O’Faoláin, Potter makes the distinction explicit: “Each
author is of course given complete freedom in his treatment of his
theme, with the one reservation, that it is a ‘feature’ and not a talk;
that is to say, a proportion—and rather the larger proportion—
of the half-hour is dramatic scenes.”15 Laurence Gilliam, Director
of the Features Department, defined the radio feature as distinct
from a film feature or a journalistic feature, but instead, a mode of
documentary radio-writing that merges actuality with imaginative
drama. Gilliam writes, “The significance of the feature programme
is, then, that it is the form of statement that broadcasting has evolved
for itself, as distinct from those other forms, which it has borrowed
or adapted from other arts or methods of publication. It is pure
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 207

radio, a new instrument for the creative writer and producer.”16

Though Gilliam overstates the purity of the feature—one might say
that it is, rather, a hybrid mixture of existing forms— it is notable
that he defines the genre as an attempt to understand the medium
on its own terms. Criticism by the Features Department would,
therefore, attempt to create new forms of criticism best suited for
the medium and its publics.
“New Judgment” ran for ten years from 1941 to 1951 with
thirty-nine total programs. Programs included V. S. Pritchett
on Daniel Defoe, J. B. Priestley on Charles Dickens, and two by
Elizabeth Bowen on Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope.17 At a
time of wartime paper rationing, BBC programs such as “New
Judgment” offered a rare platform for literary criticism in a highly
constricted publishing landscape. Robert Hewison describes paper
restrictions and conscription in the Second World War as giving
rise to the “grand slaughter of magazines.”18 The lack of publishing
opportunities, the BBC’s generous fees to writers for their work, and
the unparalleled audience size made offers from the broadcasting
corporation hard for writers to resist.19
Despite its origins in the Second World War, “New Judgment”
was not explicitly designed as a propaganda series. In fact, several of
the contributors noted how much they enjoyed working on a series
that they did not perceive to be propaganda. For example, BBC
producer Mary Hope Allen, who produced Rosamond Lehmann’s
George Eliot script, wrote to the actress Dorothy Holmes-Gore,
“I have been working on propaganda programmes, mostly about
factory workers, and to do a literary script again, with acting parts
is bliss.”20 Although the series was not overtly propagandistic,
Potter pitched the original idea in nationalist terms, describing it as
“series of literary programmes in which English writers of the past
will be presented, criticised or appraised by outstanding English
men and women of the present.”21 By 1942, the series would move
away from the strictly literary framework to include programs
on musicians, actors, political figures, and even a mountaineer;
however, the initial outline focused on the patriotic vantage of great
men and women of English literary history.
Moreover, some of the programs seemed to align nearly perfectly
with Ministry of Information policy directives. For instance, the
first broadcast in the series, Stephen Spender on Walt Whitman,
corresponded with a wave of broadcasts aimed at fostering sympathetic
208 The Critic as Amateur

bonds between the UK and the United States at a time when the
United States had not yet joined the war. Broadcast just a month
before Pearl Harbor, the script originally contained the following lines:
“Walt Whitman designed his work to be the poetry of democracy
as consciously as Americans are laying down the keels of liners to
bring arms to the aid of democracy today.”22 This line was later cut,
perhaps because it was unwise to broadcast information about the
neutral United States shipping arms to the UK or because it struck the
writer or producer as too propagandistic. Potter often seemed anxious
to distance these literary programs from propaganda broadcasting,
in one instance complaining that there was an incomplete transition
between a “New Judgment” program and what Potter refers to as
“the feeblest piece of propaganda I have ever heard,” which he feared
would lead listeners to assume that the two were linked.23
In line with other cultural endeavors during the war, the series
justified itself as a heritage program highlighting the best of British
culture past and present. In a 1941 memo, Potter outlines the
proposed series as follows:

They are half-hour programmes and the author will be required

to provide a script which will contain about 45 per cent. original
narration, 20 per cent. suggestions for passages to be read, and
the remainder, suggestions, material and framework for two or
three acted scenes. In addition to this, the authors will in most
cases be asked to speak their own narrative material. They will,
in fact, be responsible for the whole programme, except that in
the case of the acted scenes the adaptation and dialogue will be
done in collaboration with me.

In this memo, collaboration comes up as a potentially thorny issue.

Each author was told to provide a script with very specific parameters
for the distribution of material, and while they were trusted to write
the narration and offer “suggestions” for the literary passages to be
read, Potter was less confident that they would be able to handle
radio drama. In fact, fee structures for “New Judgment” were
determined by how much the author wrote on his or her own—those
writers who wrote the entire script tended to receive higher fees,
while those for whom the BBC brought in additional radio writers
received less. The critics, while experts in their literary genres, were
handled cautiously as promising amateurs in radio writing.
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 209

The professional identity of the radio producer was new, but it is

perhaps because of this novelty that people like Potter quickly claimed
the role of specialists. Radio introduced a new range of technical
experts who needed training to work in the medium; several high-
profile writers and critics such as William Empson, George Orwell,
and Louis MacNeice, attended the BBC’s training school in order
to become producers.24 If Potter was uneasy with specialization in
literary studies, he seems to have taken for granted specialization
in broadcasting. As the producer, Potter served as each program’s
technical expert, supervising and guiding the amateur radio critics.
Evidence for Potter’s heavy hand is apparent in the first program
in the series, “Stephen Spender on Walt Whitman.” Spender’s script
for this program includes a character called “Inglit Man” who is
an amalgam of all three types of literary man—the categorizer,
biographer, and “surface creeper”—that Potter caricatures in The
Muse in Chains. Spender and Potter both receive billing on the
program, the former as the headliner and the latter as presenter.
Spender spoke for the narrative sections and is accompanied by seven
other actors playing different parts such as Whitman and Emerson;
an American who enters to correct Spender on points relating to
Whitman’s American identity; and of course, the Inglit Man, who
one presumes would have spoken in a posh Ox-Bridge accent.25
The Inglit Man provides a foil for Spender, setting up his new
judgments of Whitman against a series of stuffy interjections. When
Spender argues that “Whitman designed his work to be the poetry
of democracy,” the Inglit Man protests: “Poets aren’t machines, they
don’t design their work like you do a ship or a house, surely. Isn’t it
true that they should grow like leaves on a tree?”26 While the Inglit
Man’s perspective is not written to be convincing, the program
stages a debate between Spender’s committed poetics, motivated
by a sense of persuasion, and the Inglit Man’s denial of authorial
intention and his belief that political design is a corruption of the
integrity of the work. This was a live debate in the 1930s and 1940s
and Spender was very much a partisan in the debate, arguing for
a Left poetics to address the urgent conflicts of the time.27 Spender
believed that the Left offered artists a sense of moral purpose in a
historical moment defined by crisis, but he was also adamant about
the autonomy of the artist who must be free to pursue literary forms
without bending them to political orthodoxy. Samuel Hynes argues
that for Spender and other members of the Auden circle:
210 The Critic as Amateur

Criticism is taken to be a function of the movement of history,

and so … it is correct and necessary that writers should be
political. But even if criticism is understood to be determined by
history, even if the necessary subject is understood to be politics,
the traditional literary considerations still remain.28

The new judgment that Spender offers on Whitman assimilates him

into a committed poetics that mirrors Spender’s own.
Spender also comes as close as he can on air to championing
Whitman’s most explicitly sexual sections from Leaves of Grass,
“L’Enfants d’Adam.” As Spender tells the audience: “Love for him
was a wide all-embracing amorphous emotion not attached to any
one person, and friendship with him—friendship for the soldiers
whom he nursed in the war—is really as intense a feeling as his
love.”29 The inclusion of these passages draws listeners’ attention to
Whitman’s sexuality and offers a new judgment that undermines what
Spender describes as the “moral disapproval” of Whitman’s critics.
Spender also uses the opportunity of the broadcast to champion
a homoerotic poem that had been suppressed or dismissed. As a
queer, socialist poet, Spender rehabilitates a Whitman in his own
image, one who lays a clear foundation for his own poetic project.
With “New Judgment,” Potter created a platform for writers to
articulate a version of the literary past most amenable to their goals
and ambitions for contemporary literature. Potter was clearly an
active collaborator in a script like Spender’s, down to the inclusion
of his own creation, the Inglit Man, but the critical approach to
Whitman is Spender’s own and reflects his politics and poetics.
When Spender wrote to Potter concerned that the audience
wouldn’t know enough about Whitman and that he should explain
more, Potter wrote back to say:

I think to a great extent you can forget the size of your audience.
I am reminded to say this by some question you asked, “would
such and such a point be too subtle”; and am fearful that you may
think it obligatory to do too much “writing down”—something
which, except in certain good senses of that phrase, you would
never normally do.30

Writing his first feature broadcast, Spender expressed concern

about how to pitch the program to radio’s unseen masses.31 Would
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 211

the program be too subtle, too literary, lacking the proper framing
for a public who may or may not be familiar with Whitman’s work?
Spender was not the only one to stumble upon the question of
audience, and Potter’s response, though confident, betrays a deeper
anxiety about whether such literary criticism was appropriate to
radio at all.
The audience for “New Judgment” programs was difficult to
gauge, especially in the days before the postwar Third Programme
offered a station explicitly for such “highbrow” programming.
These programs went out on the Home Service and reached a large
and undifferentiated public. By 1936, the BBC had established
a Listener Research Department to assess listener responses to
programs. The department was headed by Robert Silvey who
began his career in the statistical department for an advertising firm
where he began using the public opinion research techniques then
being honed in the United States by George Gallup and others.32
Previously, the BBC handled public opinion research, such as it was,
by sifting through the letters that listeners wrote in. Under Silvey’s
leadership, Listener Research adopted what were, at the time,
cutting-edge sampling techniques to estimate audience size and to
collect evaluative judgments on programming.33
In 1942 the department produced a report for Seán O’Faoláin’s
“New Judgment” on Oliver Goldsmith. According to the report,
the “Appreciation Index” for this program was only sixty-five—
the average for all Features programs on the BBC was seventy-five
and Bowen’s earlier “New Judgment,” Potter’s favorite, was rated a
seventy-two. On a survey card that was sent to listeners, one can see
that a major concern for the “New Judgment” series was whether
the audience was already familiar with the literary work and how
this impacted their appreciation for the program. The survey asked
listeners: “Before you heard this broadcast, how far were you
familiar with the works of Oliver Goldsmith?” It also gave two
options for listeners: one for those who felt “sufficiently familiar
with the works of Oliver Goldsmith to express an opinion” and
one for those who “do not feel competent” to evaluate O’Faoláin’s
criticism but were instead asked whether “the broadcast did arouse
your interest in Goldsmith’s works.”34 The programs were judged
by two parallel metrics: the value of the criticism to an informed
listener and the ability of the program to spark interest for listeners
unfamiliar with the author.
212 The Critic as Amateur

O’Faoláin’s script reveals less of Potter’s overt influence than

Spender’s. The script begins with the fanciful conceit of a statue of
Goldsmith outside of Trinity College coming to life and examining
the state of his posthumous reputation. O’Faoláin advocates for a
populist Goldsmith, one who was a man of the people, intensely
interested in common life. Audience responses to the program are
striking for the loquaciousness of the respondent’s own judgments.
As the BBC researcher notes, “The majority of the opinions
expressed were critical, though not unsympathetic.” If Potter’s
goal was to foster critical listening practices, then the audience
reports reveal a certain degree of success. Listeners, perhaps
primed by other broadcasts in the series, were often frustrated
with O’Faoláin’s biographical approach to Goldsmith’s life, which
they thought distracted from a proper focus on his works. As one
listener reported, it was “a study of a writer with the writings left
out, Hamlet without the Prince.”35 Another listener wrote in to say:

I think the author’s idea—that Goldsmith’s real métier was the

sympathetic delineation of low life—was interesting, and has a
good deal of probability, but the way it was presented was not
effective, only occasionally, and as it were accidentally, was it
supported by reference to his works. The author ably suggested
what Goldsmith might have done, but hardly considered what
he did do.36

Here we see not the passive listener that Adorno and others describe
as an outcome of mass media. Instead, the listener takes on the
role of critic, responding with judicious judgments to a literary
program. Some listeners felt that O’Faoláin’s take on Goldsmith
was not very new and compared it to Samuel Johnson’s. Even those
respondents who claimed ignorance of Goldsmith offered critical
assessments of the program. One wrote, “The arguments were too
clever for me. The impression I got was cleverness of the author
but not much substance in the arguments.”37 This listener doesn’t
simply profess ignorance but rather offers his or her own judgment
that the O’Faoláin’s script was clever without substance.
One outcome we see in the “New Judgment” series is the
emergence of mass media’s participatory culture. The final critics in
this series become not the producer or the author but the audience
members who participate in surveys and voluntarily write to the
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 213

broadcasting service to express their own judgments. Although these

research reports were never public documents, they clearly fulfilled
a desire among listeners to participate in the programs as critics. The
programs themselves modeled this participation, including listener-
figures within the broadcasts and otherwise highlighting modes of
active listening. As Potter demotes the professionalized Inglit Man
in favor of the voice of the contemporary writer, we see here that
the last word is given to the citizen-critic, the listener-in who wants
a share of the action. As a collaborative medium, radio points to the
origins of a participatory culture in which, suddenly, everybody’s
a critic. What often went without saying, however, is that this
acceptance of the critic as amateur often went hand in hand with
the rise of the technical expert. These new experts claimed positions
of authority by wielding access to technology and statistics. Anyone
can be a critic, they maintained, but only the trained expert could be
a radio producer like Potter or public opinion researcher like Silvey.
The amateurs enthusiastically contributing to radio’s participatory
culture, whether the critic crafting a first radio script or the listener
writing survey responses, were both carefully shepherded along by
newly minted technical experts. On the tilting scales of amateurism
and expertise, the role of literary critic became increasingly accessible
to all at the same moment that new professional experts emerged
to direct how this criticism would be disseminated and assessed.
In this sense, we are still living in the world of amateur criticism
that programs like “New Judgment” created. The expansion of
criticism to the everyday reader on review sites like Goodreads
or Amazon is made possible by computer programmers, today’s
foremost technical experts, who create the algorithms that shape
our experience of reading today.

Notes
1 Special thanks to the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham
for access to the “New Judgment” Production File and especially to
Matthew Chipping for his invaluable assistance. Different participants
in the series used variant spellings of Judgment (or Judgement).
2 The language of a “golden age,” of course, reveals a bias in favor of
radio’s professionalization. In contrast, Jesse Walker’s Rebels on the
Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (New York: New
214 The Critic as Amateur

York University Press, 2001) offers a counter-narrative that laments

the triumph of professionals over amateurs in the battle over the
airwaves. Walker describes regulatory measures in the United States
in the 1910s through 1930s as leading to “a series of enclosures, in
which the spectrum rights held by hams, non-profit broadcasters, and
small entrepreneurs were expropriated by powerful private interests
and the state,” 47.
3 Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1937), 17.
4 Ibid., 25.
5 Ibid., 37.
6 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 15.
7 Christopher Hilliard, English as Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25.
8 Qtd in ibid., 31.
9 For instance, in the seventh volume of the Cambridge Companion
to Literary Criticism: Modernism and the New Criticism. Volume
7. Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis
Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008) there are no references to radio or discussions of
the BBC as an institution for criticism (this, despite there being a
section on “The Critic and the Institutions of Culture”). For more
on Scrutiny, adult education, and Cambridge see Hilliard’s English
as Vocation. Scholars of American Literature have shown how the
Southern Agrarians helped establish New Criticism in American
universities. As Paul Lauter writes, following their failure to bring
about change in the broader public sphere, the Southern Agrarians
“were amazingly successful in establishing the hegemony of their
ideas in the culture of the academy at its apogee” (“Versions of
Nashville, Visions of American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no.
2 [1995]: 191).
10 For more on the influence of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
on the BBC, see Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics
and the BBC, 1922–1938 (New York: Ashgate, 2006). Avery aligns
the first general manager of the BBC, John Reith, with New Critics
such as F. R. and Q. D. Leavis as an “Arnoldian cultural theorist” and
the BBC as an “Arnoldian institution,” 25.
11 Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York: Routledge,
2001), 96.
12 Debra Rae Cohen, “Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener,”
Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 3 (2012): 585.
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 215

13 Henry Mead notes that George Orwell modeled “Voice” on little

magazines like The Adelphi and Horizon. Henry Mead, “‘Keeping
Our Little Corner Clean”: George Orwell’s Cultural Broadcasts
at the BBC,” in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Matthew
Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury,
2014), 183. For more on E. M. Forster’s “Some Books,” see Daniel
Ryan Morse’s “Only Connecting?: E.M. Forster, Empire Broadcasting
and the Ethics of Distance,” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 3
(2011): 87–105.
14 Randi Koppen, “Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the
Politics of Broadcasting,” in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed.
Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),
140.
15 Letter from Stephen Potter to Seán O’Faoláin, February 18, 1942,
New Judgment Production File, 1941–1946, R19/822/1, BBC
Archives, Caversham.
16 Laurence Gilliam, BBC Features (London: Evans Brothers Limited,
1950), 10. Gilliam’s book is an edited anthology that collects
exemplary models of the Features genre, including one example from
the “New Judgment” series on Cardinal Manning by Christopher
Sykes. In editing Features programs for the page, however, Gilliam
rendered them in essayistic prose, which obscures their generic
complexity.
17 Elizabeth Bowen’s contributions to “New Judgment” are available
in published form: the Jane Austen script can be found in Listening
In, edited by Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010), and the Anthony Trollope script is in The Mulberry Tree,
edited by Hermione Lee (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986), and was also published by Oxford University Press in 1946.
For more on Bowen’s contributions to “New Judgment,” see my
chapter “Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Radio,” in The Wireless Past,
Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
18 Hewison, Robert, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.
19 A few writers who Potter approached and who expressed interest
such as Rebecca West, Desmond McCarthy, and Kenneth Clark
decided not to participate in the end.
20 Letter from Mary Hope Allen to Dorothy Holmes-Gore, August 12,
1942, New Judgment Production File, 1941–1946, R19/822/1, BBC
Written Archives Centre, Caversham. The George Eliot broadcast
involved women as producer, writer, and subject; however, the
series generally veered much more heavily toward men. Only four
216 The Critic as Amateur

programs were by women writers (in addition to Rosamon Lehmann

on George Eliot, there were the two by Elizabeth Bowen, as well as
Edith Evans on Mrs. Siddons).
21 Letter from Stephen Potter to Lord David. October 14, 1941, New
Judgment Production File, 1941–1946, R19/822/1, BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
22 Stephen Spender, “New Judgment: Stephen Spender on Walt
Whitman,” November 2, 1941, Scripts Library, BBC Archives Centre,
Caversham.
23 Stephen Potter, Memo on the Guedalla Froude Programme, January
12, 1942, New Judgment Production File, 1941–1946, R19/822/1,
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
24 These writers all took BBC training courses during the Second
World War when there was a large wave of hiring to supply the
new demands for propaganda writing. William Empson and George
Orwell both attended the BBC’s training course, titled “General
Broadcasting Technique,” which was run at Bedford College,
University of London. See John Haffenden’s William Empson:
Against the Christians, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 23 and D. J. Taylor’s George Orwell: A Life (New York:
Macmillan, 2003), 304. Louis MacNeice described his experience
at the BBC training school as a gradual turn away from his earlier
cynicism about the BBC and a growing appreciation of the skill
involved in broadcasting, which he found “technically fascinating.”
See MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison
(London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 439.
25 There are no recordings of the “New Judgment” series in the
BBC Sound Archives. The BBC only recorded a small fraction of
its programming and during the war it is more likely that these
resources would have been allocated to programs of importance to
national security.
26 Spender, “Walt Whitman,” 2.
27 Spender refers to himself as a “democrat” in the program but does
not, of course, mention that he had joined the Communist Party in
1937. He would later famously revoke his affiliation as a contributor
to The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949), a collection of
personal testaments against Communism.
28 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in
England in the 1930s (London: Bodley Head, 1976), 161–162.
29 Spender, “Walt Whitman,” 16.
30 Stephen Potter, Letter to Stephen Spender, September 27, 1941, New
Judgment Production File, 1941–1946, R19/822/1, BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 217

31 Previously to “New Judgment,” Spender’s poems had appeared

in poetry anthology programs; he had given one talk for Schools
Broadcasting on William Wordsworth (March 12, 1935) and had
participated in a discussion on poetry with Walter de la Mare and
Desmond Hawkir (November 8, 1940).
32 Silvey was hired to create the Listener Research Department (late the
Audience Research Department) on the strength of a report he did
for his advertising agency, the London Press Exchange, that surveyed
the British public’s newspaper reading habits. Robert Silvey, Who’s
Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 16.
33 Silvey describes these techniques, which were still new in the UK when
the Listener Research Department was formed, as a combination of
Probability Sampling and Quota Sampling. He attributes both systems
to public opinion researchers in the United States: the former to
Rensis Likert’s Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan
and the latter to George Gallup. Silvey, Who’s Listening?, 51.
34 BBC Listener Research Department, Survey on “New Judgment: Sean
O’Faolain on Oliver Goldsmith,” New Judgment Production File,
1941–1946, R19/822/1, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
35 “New Judgment: Sean O’Faolain on Oliver Goldsmith,” Listener
Research Report, New Judgment Production File, 1941–1946,
R19/822/1, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. “The Schema of Mass Culture.” In The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 61–97. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Allen, Mary Hope. Letter to Dorothy Holmes-Gore. August 12, 1942.
New Judgment Production File, 1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC,
1922–1938. New York: Ashgate, 2006.
BBC Listener Research Department. Report on “New Judgment: Sean
O’Faolain on Oliver Goldsmith.” New Judgment Production File,
1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
BBC Listener Research Department. Survey on “New Judgment: Sean
O’Faolain on Oliver Goldsmith. New Judgment Production File,
1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
218 The Critic as Amateur

Bloom, Emily. The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC,
1931–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Cohen, Debra Rae. “Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener.”
Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 3 (2012): 569–592.
Gilliam, Laurence. BBC Features. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1950.
Haffenden, John. William Empson: Against the Christians. Vol. 2. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
Hepburn, Allan. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by
Elizabeth Bowen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Hewison, Robert. Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–1945.
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Hilliard, Christopher. English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England
in the 1930s. London: Bodley Head, 1976.
Lauter, Paul. “Versions of Nashville, Visions of American Studies.”
American Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1995): 185–203.
Litz, A. Walton, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey. Cambridge
Companion to Literary Criticism: Modernism and New Criticism. Vol.
7. New York: Cambridge, 2008.
Koppen, Randi. “Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics
of Broadcasting.” In Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, edited by
Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, 137–154. London: Bloomsbury,
2014.
MacNeice, Louis. Letters of Louis MacNeice, edited by Jonathan Allison.
London: Faber and Faber, 2010.
Mead, Henry. “‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s
Cultural Broadcasts at the BBC.” In Broadcasting in the Modernist
Era, edited by Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead,
169–194. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Morse, Daniel Ryan, “Only Connecting?: E.M. Forster, Empire
Broadcasting and the Ethics of Distance.” Journal of Modern
Literature 34, no. 3 (2011): 87–105.
North, Joseph. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Potter, Stephen. Letter to Lord David. October 14, 1941. New Judgment
Production File, 1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written Archives Centre,
Caversham.
Potter, Stephen. Letter to Sean O’Faolain. February 18, 1942. New
Judgment Production File, 1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
Potter, Stephen. Letter to Stephen Spender. September 27, 1941. New
Judgment Production File, 1941–1946. R19/822/1. BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air 219

Potter, Stephen. Memo on the Guedalla Froude Programme. New

Judgment Production File, 1941–1946. R19/822/1. January 12, 1942,
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
Potter, Stephen. The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1937.
Silvey, Robert. Who’s Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research.
London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974.
Spender, Stephen. “New Judgment: Stephen Spender on Walt Whitman.”
November 2, 1941. Scripts Library. BBC Written Archives Centre,
Caversham.
Taylor, D. J. George Orwell: A Life. New York: Macmillan, 2003.
Walker, Jesse. Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in
America. New York: New York University, 2001.
220
 10
The Small Press and the
Feminist Critic

Melanie Micir

Florence Howe knew next to nothing about publishing when she

founded The Feminist Press in 1970. After being approached by
several university presses to write a biography of Doris Lessing,
she had countered with a different sort of project, one that would
“produce one hundred small biographies about the lives and work
of important women in literature and history.”1 She planned to
enlist a number of contemporary writers, including Lessing, in this
project, and various editors were initially interested. But whenever
her pitch reached the ears of “financial managers,” it got voted down
for the same reason: “There’s no money in it.”2 For a time, she gave
up on the idea, but unbeknownst to her, word of the project spread
quickly through newsletters of women’s liberation groups across
the country, and Howe received “about a hundred letters” from
women who “wrote that they were eager to work on this project,
either by writing it or by buying the finished products.”3 She then
invited these women to attend a meeting at her house, which is
how, on November 17, 1970, Florence Howe ended up hosting fifty
people in her living room, and The Feminist Press was born:

Most of the meeting was taken up with introductions. Leah Heyn

said she was there because her seven-year-old daughter had asked
222 The Critic as Amateur

for a book that depicted a woman doctor … She had searched

bookstores and libraries, and had found nothing, though she
knew that women had been doctors since the nineteenth century.
As we went around the room, it was clear that, while no one
had experience in publishing, no one seemed awed by the tasks
before us. The room crackled with energy.4

Howe did not concern herself overmuch with the obviously

amateur nature of this collective undertaking. She thought that,
as a “movement project,” it would only last a few years, and she
“imagined that ‘regular publishers’ would seize on the idea once
they saw it in action.”5 She was entirely wrong on the first count—
the press is still in operation today—but she was only somewhat
wrong on the second. While more traditional publishing presses
did not line up to collaborate with Howe, the transformation from
idealistic project to functioning press only happened after Howe
took an academic position in New York and suddenly found herself
surrounded by “publishing professionals.”6 The financial managers
of the big presses still stayed away, but individual women working
in publishing flocked to the project. Many had already heard about
The Feminist Press, and one such “publishing professional,” Verne
Moberg, “volunteered to work full time as unpaid staff” to take
care of the many “matters [Howe] knew nothing about.”7 For years,
many members of the staff were volunteers. The “Reprints Advisory
Committee” consisted of “a large group of young academic
teachers of literature and history, all of whom are now well-known
scholars,” and even the readers were considered part of the larger
undertaking, as “during the first decade and into the second, we
knew our enthusiastic audience personally.”8 The project was a
labor of love for virtually everyone involved.
Howe’s description of the founding of The Feminist Press focuses
on energy and enthusiasm, not expertise or even experience. The
“essential goal” during the early years of the press, according to
Howe, was “to publish so that college students could read texts
written by women, as part of their literary education.”9 The women
in Howe’s living room were motivated not by a potential profit
margin but by the collective sense that they had to do it—sometimes
explicitly for their daughters, as in Heyn’s introductory testimony—
or it simply would not be done. The small press thus became an
urgent matter for modern feminism. As feminists adopted journalist
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 223

A. J. Liebling’s dictum that “freedom of the press is guaranteed

only to those who own one,” they formed their own presses—
at times in their own living rooms.10 And although many feared
that feminist politics would be warped by traditional publishing
structures—indeed, Julia Penelope, a lesbian feminist activist and
academic, suggested in 1985 that “no reconciliation seems possible
between political conscience and economic survival”11—The
Feminist Press continues to be the oldest women’s publishing house
in existence today.
Despite this longevity, there have been relatively few studies of
the significance of independent feminist presses for literary, cultural,
and political history. According to literary historian Simone Murray,
whose Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics
offers a British-focused corrective, feminist publishing studies is a
“phantom discipline—commented upon as much for its absence as
for its contributions.”12 And while Murray’s 2004 monograph is
primarily concerned with print culture, her title suggests that any
current iteration of feminist publishing studies would necessarily
encompass the growing terrain of feminist media history as well.
Whether asked of old or new media, however, Murray’s underlying
question remains relevant: why have professional scholars routinely
dismissed or given only “glancing acknowledgment” to the
significance of feminist presses?13 Even in scholarship focused on
women and literature, and even within the field of women’s studies,
feminist publishing has been ignored, marginalized, or only briefly
acknowledged.14 Howe’s reflection on her work with The Feminist
Press ends with a question about the nature of this critical neglect:
“Does it matter that young people know nothing of the history I
have outlined in this essay?”15
My answer, however surprising, is: not necessarily. Although I
of course share Howe’s belief in the importance of understanding
history, especially feminist history, the truth is that it may not always
matter whether “young people” know much about this history before
embarking on their own publishing projects. Not knowing may have
certain advantages. In the case of contemporary feminist publishing,
George Santayana’s haunting aphorism—that those who cannot
remember the past will be condemned to repeat it—is actually a
good thing. Maybe every generation gets the independent feminist
publishing project it needs. Because although The Feminist Press
remains operational, we still live in a publishing world dominated
224 The Critic as Amateur

by straight white men, as the annual VIDA Count makes abundantly

clear.16 And in the last decade or so, a number of women, crackling
with energy once again, have followed Howe’s lead and founded
feminist and/or woman-focused presses of their own.
But this is all the more reason to push back against the idea
that, categorically, “young people” don’t know this history. What
Howe’s question, published in an academic journal, reveals is that
it is scholars who have not always acknowledged the significance
of feminist publishing’s long history. As Murray demonstrates, the
“widespread academic obliviousness to the dynamics of feminist
publishing” is a peculiarly vexing issue given that, in the non-
or sometimes para-academic “arena of public literary debate,”
feminist publishers have frequently enjoyed a relatively “high
public profile.”17 And in contrast to their professional, academic
counterparts, these feminist publishers tend to know this history
very well indeed—not as scholars but as critical practitioners.
In this chapter, I offer case studies of several contemporary feminist
publishing projects—presses, subscription services, collections—in
order to suggest that the act of literary curation and publication is
a mode of criticism inflected and even buoyed by enthusiasm, an
almost excessive devotion, and the kind of unruly desire Carolyn
Dinshaw describes as hallmarks of an “amateur sensibility.”18 This
label of amateurism is not a derogatory term; if it points to a lack
of training or professionalization, it does so while highlighting the
generative possibilities made available by this openness. Elsewhere
in this collection, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan refers to this kind
of openness as “suggestion,” a term she uses in opposition to the
sometimes deadening qualities of expertise. Amateurism, she writes,
is “a mode of thinking, being, and writing untethered to formal license
or qualification.” And as Saikat Majumdar, citing Marjorie Garber’s
notion of “magisterial unprofessionalism,” reminds us, “Amateur
status as a critic can just as effectively be a postprofessional as a pre-
or unprofessional state.”19 In this chapter, the critical amateurism
I see in these projects is largely para-professional; the founders’
slow accrual of experience and even expertise in feminist publishing
occurs alongside a continued willingness to describe the projects in
the vernacular of amateurism. This paradoxically persistent amateur
spirit is rooted in a kind of feminist determination, a bias toward
the small and self-sufficient rather than the big, male-dominated
institutions of the publishing world.
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 225

These independent, woman-run projects—Dorothy, a publishing

project; Emily Books; and The Second Shelf; among others—
were each founded by women writers, and they continue to
exist alongside their founders’ ongoing work in other spheres.
Danielle Dutton (Dorothy’s founding editor) is a novelist and
tenured professor. Ruth Curry and Emily Gould (Emily Books’
two founding curators-turned-editors) are cultural critics; Gould
is also a novelist. A. N. Devers (founder of The Second Shelf) is
an arts journalist and cultural critic. The backgrounds of these
founding editors, by and large, were not steeped in the practices
of professional publishing; instead, these presses and projects
began as side hustles, labors of love, amateur affairs. Each has an
explicitly feminist publishing model: Dorothy publishes “works
of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women”;
Emily Books is devoted to promoting and now publishing “weird
books by women”; and The Second Shelf collects and sells “rare
books, modern first editions, manuscripts, & rediscovered works
by women.”20 As Urmila Seshagiri has written about Persephone
Books, a London-based press that reprints “neglected fiction and
non-fiction by mid-twentieth century (mostly) women writers,”
these small undertakings bring “a deliberate transparency to
the institutional vectors of literary production, promotion, and
circulation.”21 And, even beyond this transparency, they invoke an
unusual intimacy between publisher, writer, and reader, so much
so that The Atlantic likened the Dorothy catalog to the “ringing
endorsement of writers you’ve never heard of by a friend whose
taste you can absolutely trust,” and Brooklyn Magazine described
Emily Books as “a collection of titles by women that feels more like
a secret handshake than a business plan.”22 These descriptions might
well be taken as further examples of how women’s writing is too
often denigrated within a publishing world dominated by men. But
in these intimations of cultish friendships and secret handshakes,
they also highlight the comparative cool of the scrappily amateur
project.
Throughout this chapter, curation is understood to be a
form of criticism, and these upstart projects practice an implicit
(“suggestive,” in Srinivasan’s sense) but hugely important form of
feminist criticism. Publishing, like criticism, embeds questions of
judgment. These projects bring books—variously judged and
dismissed as “feminist,” “subversive,” “weird,” and “neglected”—
226 The Critic as Amateur

into print and into view, and in doing so, they hail an audience
too often ignored by large presses: a feminist, subversive, weird,
and neglected audience willing to support their mission by buying
subscriptions and becoming members in an ad-hoc literary
salon. These projects are powered by what Persephone founder
Nicola Beauman described as her “inconvenient attachment”
to the unpublished, under-appreciated, and/or the out of print.23
Their acts of curation have their origins in personal obsessions,
experiences, and even friendships, but they nevertheless constitute
modes of criticism that revalue writers and texts that have fallen
outside of the professionalizing apparatus of the program era. The
work of collecting, collating, and publishing are all critical practices
that remain behind the scenes, less recognized and celebrated than the
(usually) solo enterprise of critical or scholarly writing. Yet heeding
Lawrence Rainey’s call to read institutionally means recognizing
literary and artistic movements as “a social reality, a configuration
of agents and practices that converge in the production, marketing,
and publicization of an idiom, a shareable language in the family of
twentieth-century tongues.”24
In a feminist account of literary history, reading institutionally
reveals the gendered nature of the “configuration of agents and
practices” that are necessary to literary production and circulation.
From Sylvia Beach, Jane Heap, and Harriet Monroe during the
early decades of the twentieth century to Dutton, Curry, Gould,
Devers, and so many others today, it has fallen to women editors
and “agents” to perform the literary care work necessary to secure
other women writers’ places in our ongoing literary conversations.
Writing about modernist collections (in museums and anthologies),
Jeremy Braddock suggests that we should understand collecting as a
form of public engagement rather than a retreat into an elite private
sphere. In this view, modernist collections of literature and art were
“a means of addressing the work of art to the public, modeling
and creating the conditions of modernism’s reception.”25 Dorothy,
Emily, and The Second Shelf do this work today. More than
securing publication for these marginalized or forgotten writers,
these feminist projects perform a kind of curatorial sharing—the
creation of networks of influence, appreciation, and even economic
gain outside or in excess of the professional world of the book trade.

***
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 227

Though this chapter only focuses on a handful of contemporary

feminist projects, I do not mean to imply that they are operating
without historical precedent. Women have long been significant
players in the publishing world; women—mostly straight, white
women—constitute the clear majority of today’s industry. According
to Publisher’s Weekly, “women represented 74% of the publishing
workforce in both 2015 and 2016,” and “78% of those … are cis
women, of whom 88% are heterosexual and 79% are white.”26 But
with few exceptions, major presses have been and continue to be run
by (straight, white) men. At a 2016 panel about women’s writing
organized by Emily Books, Caroline Casey, an editor at Coffee
House Press, scoffed at the idea that feminists should “infiltrate and
change” the big publishing institutions: “‘Those institutions are
already ours,’ she said. ‘[Women] are all the people who work there.
[Men] are just in charge.’”27 Given this ongoing state of affairs,
women continue to turn to smaller, independent publishing ventures
for full editorial control. As Virginia Woolf, who ran the influential
Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard Woolf, from 1917 until
her death in 1941, argued in Three Guineas, independent presses
provide intellectual freedom:

Still, Madam, the private printing press is an actual fact, and

not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and
duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. By using these
cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid
yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They will
speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at
your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed,
is our definition of “intellectual liberty.”28

Unsurprisingly, the pursuit of this intellectual freedom has been

routinely cited by women throughout the twentieth (and into the
twenty-first) century as their primary reason for starting their own
presses.
The independent spirit, determined amateurism, and “crackling
energy” Florence Howe described as characteristic of the founding
meetings of The Feminist Press are common characteristics of the
origin stories of these independent, woman-run presses. Just a few
years after Howe’s living room meeting, for example, Virago Press
began “at founder Carmen Callil’s kitchen table in her home in
228 The Critic as Amateur

Chelsea, … fueled by red wine and late nights spent arguing over the
politics of the emerging women’s liberation movement.”29 In 1984,
Urvashi Butali and Ritu Menon began Kali for Women, India’s first
and oldest feminist publishing house, in order to make women’s
voices and issues heard; after they left Kali in 2003, Butali and
Menon each started a new feminist publishing project: Zubaan and
Women Unlimited, respectively.30 Lisa C. Moore founded RedBone
Press in 1997 to address the lack of voices of color in feminist and
queer publishing. When other presses saw “no market” for her
anthology of black lesbian coming-out stories, she created a press
for what she knew was an underserved but existing market: “In the
face of white feminist presses who say they don’t know how to sell
work by women of color, Moore goes to where Black queers are,
selling books at Black lesbian conferences and Black queer prides
across the country.”31
In 1998, Persephone Books “began in a room above a pub,”
where Nicola Beauman determined to publish “a handful of ‘lost’
or out-of-print books every year, most of them interwar novels by
women,” and the press’s most important criteria continues to be that
they will “only publish books that we completely, utterly love.”32
Similarly emphasizing her desire for editorial control, Rhonda
Hughes described her founding of Print Vision and Hawthorne
Books as rooted in the realization that “I wouldn’t get what I
wanted unless I left and did it myself.”33 And C. Spike Trotman,
the founder of Iron Circus Comics, noted that she “didn’t trust the
intentions and motivations of a lot of large publishers.”34 This is an
incomplete list, to be sure. Among those presses still operational
today, we might just as easily focus on Aunt Lute (1982–), CALYX
(1976–), Cleis (1980–), Editions des Femmes (1972–), Firebrand
(1984–), Modjaji (2007–), Seal (1976–), Second Story (1972–),
Tender Buttons (1989–), or Third Woman (1980–), among others.
Equally influential but now shuttered presses might include
Kitchen Table (1982–1989), Onlywomen (1974–2011), Press Gang
(1970–2002), Shameless Hussy (1969–1989), or Sister Vision
(1985–2000). And while there are many important differences—
of class, race, nationality, sexuality, generation, and/or funding
strategy—between the presses named here, in virtually every case,
the founders cite their commitment to feminist social principles as
paramount. No one thought they were going to make much, if any,
money. Everyone thought they were going to make the publishing
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 229

world (and the shelves of bookstores and libraries) more diverse,

open, and inclusive—and, in various ways, they did.
These once upstart, now established feminist publishing projects
do not just continue on, however haggardly, today; they are
bolstered by a growing community of new ventures—like South
Africa’s Modjaji Press, founded in 2007 to publish African women
writers—that spring up every year. Despite their differences, the
origin stories of these new presses remain remarkably similar to
those shared by the many decades of feminist publishers who came
before them. And although they belong squarely within this longer
history of feminist publishing, many of these new ventures continue
to foreground their amateur spirit. Many but not all: the vocabularies
of amateurism are deployed and received differently across racial,
national, and class lines. Who can afford to be considered an
amateur? And for whom does amateurism designate a youthful,
anti-establishment vibrancy rather than a mode of denigration
and dismissal? Like Howe before them, the women described in
the following pages highlight rather than hide the ways in which
their projects are undertaken in the relative absence of expertise
and the overabundance of larger feminist commitments. But is the
discourse of amateurism wielded proudly by the white, cis-gendered,
heterosexual, highly educated, Anglo-American founders of these
feminist publishing projects helpful rather than harmful to them as
a direct result of this demographic privilege? Or, to put a finer point
on it, to what degree is the public success of these projects—their
semi-viral notoriety and the positive media attention lavished on
their aesthetics of the amateur—dependent upon a media landscape
that bestows an aura of professionalism even to those white women
who defiantly proclaim their amateur status? In the remainder of
this chapter, I will focus on the discursive similarity between three
of the most well known of these contemporary feminist publishing
projects. But the question of why these operations and their editors
have come to represent a significantly more diverse movement
is a question that deserves considerably more attention in both
academic and nonacademic contexts.

***

“Hi, we’re Emily Books. We make weird books by women.”35

These two lines, splashed across the page in hot pink, are the first
230 The Critic as Amateur

thing you see when you visit the website of Emily Books, an ongoing
experiment in feminist publishing and literary curation run by Ruth
Curry and Emily Gould. Elsewhere on their website, they declare,
somewhat less pithily and more expansively, that they are “passionate
about the writing of women, trans people, and queer people”:

We seek out works that challenge genre distinctions, especially

the distinction between memoir and fiction. We look for books
that are funny, challenging and provocative. Our favorite
writers are frank and unapologetic and make often-ignored
or misunderstood subjectivities and points of view feel both
relatable and utterly unique.36

But Curry and Gould have only been “making” these books since
2016, when they partnered with the more established but still
independent Coffee House Press to publish two original titles per
year. Initially, Emily Books was a kind of feminist subscription
service, sending their loyal subscribers one e-book each month
from 2011 to 2016. These books were both old and new; authors
included mid-century writers like Barbara Comyns, Muriel Spark,
and Sylvia Townsend Warner alongside contemporary writers such
as Elena Ferrante, Eileen Myles, and Jenny Zhang. All of them were
readily available elsewhere, both in print and in e-book form. And
while all subscribers received these e-books in their inboxes every
month, what they really signed up for was the recommendation
itself, the sense that they were reading the right stuff—the books
they should have known about but didn’t. Emily Books wasn’t
helmed by Oprah or Gwyneth, but its subscribers still constituted
a micro-community of fans.37 Gould, in particular, had made quite
a name for herself—not always good—within millennial New York
publishing circles during the early years of the twenty-first century:
she kept a popular blog, Emily Magazine, and she wrote for Gawker,
a now shuttered gossip site. Gould’s rise to fame, if not necessarily
fortune, has largely coincided with the explosion of social media,
and this culture of sharing, liking, and friending has made Emily
Books possible. “I wanted to use my charm and charisma on behalf
of other people’s books,” she confessed in 2014, “and that seems
to, mostly, be working.”38 With the initial iteration of Emily Books,
Curry and Gould were in the business of targeting and tending to
what Lauren Berlant has called an “intimate public”:
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 231

An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc

of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express
people’s particular core interests and desires. When this kind of
“culture of circulation” takes hold, participants in the intimate
public feel as though it expresses what is common among them,
a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history
and their ongoing attachments and actions. Their participation
seems to confirm the sense that even before there was a market
addressed to them, there existed a world of strangers who would be
emotionally literate in each other’s experience of power, intimacy,
desire, and discontent, with all that entails: varieties of suffering
and fantasies of transcendence; longing for reciprocity with other
humans and the world; irrational and rational attachments to
the way things are; special styles of ferocity and refusal; and a
creative will to survive that attends to everyday situations while
imagining conditions of flourishing within and beyond them.39

It is of course no accident that Berlant’s primary example of an

intimate public is US women’s culture. The women who subscribed
to Emily Books were one such world of emotionally literate
strangers, interpolated but not created by Curry and Gould’s picks
each month. Emily Books, in its earliest days, was not a work of
feminist recovery but feminist reorganization. It took literary
material that already existed in the world, set it alongside and in
juxtaposition with its allies and ancestors, and then opened that
circle to readers. It found, and named, an intimate public that had
grown organically. As a publishing imprint, it is no less invested in
the continuity and sustenance of that public, rendering the often
invisible arcs of feminist literary history visible by identifying new
writers plotted on the same trajectories. But if Emily is and was a
project rooted in curating literary collections and building intimate
communities along the margins of the canon, other small feminist
presses have focused on what has been lost beyond those margins.
In 2010, Danielle Dutton and her husband, Martin Riker, both
experimental novelists with what Tom Lutz calls in this volume a
“polymathic relation to the archive,” started Dorothy, a publishing
project. The pair had both worked at Dalkey Archive Press (Dutton
as a book designer, Riker as Dalkey’s associate director) before
starting Dorothy, a press that “is dedicated to works of fiction
or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women,” and this
232 The Critic as Amateur

experience influenced the intertwined origin stories Dutton has

told in interviews about the press. In one version, she emphasizes
that she wanted to bridge the divide she saw between mainstream
American literary fiction and more experimental writing. To make
this happen, she intended for Dorothy to publish two “aesthetically
different” books each year.40 The first pairing consisted of Renee
Gladman’s experimental Event Factory and Barbara Comyns’s
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which had first been
published in England in 1954 but had been out of print for years.
By offering the two books together at a discounted price, Dutton
hoped to create a “crossover readership”: she wanted to “encourage
people to buy both when they came looking for just one—to get
Renee Gladman’s book into the hands of Barbara Comyns’s readers
and vice versa.”41 So far, there are eighteen Dorothy books, and
it continues to be possible to buy each pairing together; it is also
possible to buy any six Dorothy books or the entire catalog at a
substantial discount. Emily Books uses the lure of social media
connectivity to bolster and broaden the network of voices and
readers that constitute its own intimate public; Dorothy uses the
old-school apparatus of the press itself—publishing schedules, bulk
discounts, inventive marketing—to constitute theirs. Dorothy takes
a suggestion now mostly associated with algorithms and endows it
with the thoughtful intimacy of friendship: “readers who bought
Renee Gladman also bought Barbara Comyns.”
But the origin story doesn’t end with the art of persuasive pairing.
Dutton was at least as concerned with writers as readers, and she
wanted her press to be a home for under-appreciated women
writers, past and present. While working at Dalkey, she “saw that
the number of submissions were overwhelmingly from men,” and
she wanted to create space for women to submit their work. She
was incensed by the lingering misogyny in literary publishing:

Right around this time, too, I was talking about a book with a
man who said to me, “I really liked it because five pages in I didn’t
know it was written by a woman. I couldn’t tell a woman had
written it.” And I thought, Are you kidding me? Are we still talking
about this nearly a hundred years after A Room of One’s Own?42

Infuriated, she started Dorothy in order to explicitly support

women’s writing. And in yet another version of Dorothy’s origin story,
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 233

the impetus to start the press was even more specific: she wanted to
support not just women’s writing, in general, but the writing of one
woman in particular, Renee Gladman. Dutton heard that Gladman
was almost finished writing a trilogy of amazing books—known
as her Ravicka books, the trilogy is now a quartet—but could not
find anyone to publish them. Like Sylvia Beach offering to publish
James Joyce’s Ulysses when no other publishers would do so by
turning her Left Bank bookstore and lending library, Shakespeare
and Company, into a publishing house, Dutton “sent an impulsive
email to Gladman, who she didn’t know. ‘Let me publish you, I’ll
start a press,’ she says the email said; it was met with a miraculous
response—‘OK.’”43 And, just like that, Dorothy was born.
As with Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, the small size of
Dorothy, as a venture, allows for quick shifts of direction, responsive
adjustments of priority, even opportunistic social media blasts. The
large presses, against which these small presses are defined, can use
their scale and heft to establish canons, exclude marginal voices,
even police those margins, but that scale can also be a disadvantage.
Large presses move slowly, they must be less averse to risk, and they
are less able to be guided by the kind of nimble and imaginative
directorship we see in Emily and Dorothy. In these small presses,
we see porous boundaries between the acts of curation, collection,
design, publication, marketing, and even sales. These presses are
not small because they turn away from the market; they merely see
the market—their current and future readers—as indistinguishable
from the books they publish. The publisher, the book, and the
reader are equal parts of the same project: a transhistorical feminist
community of readers and writers.
Most recently, A. N. Devers, a UK-based arts journalist and book
collector, founded The Second Shelf, a business focused on “rare
books, first editions, manuscripts, and other work by and about
women.”44 Several years earlier, in an article entitled “The Second
Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women,”
novelist Meg Wolitzer had described the “second shelf” as the
home of “‘Women’s fiction,’ that close-quartered lower shelf where
books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women
are often relegated.”45 Wolitzer’s essay highlights the difficulty, for
women novelists, of making the “leap onto the upper shelf where
certain books … are prominently displayed and admired” by men
and women alike.46 While women read books by and about men,
234 The Critic as Amateur

the reverse is not true: men too often “see most fiction by women
as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.”47
In a subtle shift, however, Devers seems less interested in correcting
men’s reading and reviewing habits than in—like Emily Books and
Dorothy, a publishing project—targeting a previously underserved
audience of women readers and collectors. Let the books on that
close-quartered shelf stay together, she suggests—just raise the
whole thing up to eye level where it can be easily accessed. The
idea for the project arose while Devers was attending book fairs
during her early days as a collector. She noticed not only that most
of the dealers and collectors around her were men but also that
the prices of first editions by women authors were notably lower
than those of their male peers. This was no less horrifying for being
unsurprising, and she began to think about starting what would
eventually become The Second Shelf. In doing so, she reimagined
her role as a passive collector into one that could actively change
some of the disparities she saw around her:

Book collectors help determine which writers are remembered

and canonized, and which are forgotten. The collector trade
is part of a supply line, to readers’ bookshelves, universities,
archives and libraries. Historically it has been male-dominated
(bookmen), white, and oriented around a western canon. Women,
particularly women of color, are left under-recognized, their
books deemed less collectable and given less space on shelves.48

But what if she gave them a shelf of their own, so to speak? As she
began to collect women’s writing with an eye toward turning her
amateur undertaking into a future business, Devers was inspired
by other women who entered the book business after leaving other
careers. For example, Heather O’Donnell, of the Brooklyn-based
Honey and Wax Booksellers, had been a successful academic before
entering the rare books business. And while Honey and Wax,
founded in 2011, has so far proven to be a successful business
venture, O’Donnell explicitly values and encourages women’s
amateur contributions to the book trade by offering an annual book
collecting prize. Awarded to outstanding book collections that have
been conceived and acquired by young women, The Honey and Wax
Book Collecting Prize was designed “to be open, as no others are,
to women who are not in school … particularly … the many young
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 235

working women—in publishing, design, bookselling, advertising,

book arts, etc.—who pursue quirky and obsessive book collections
for their own pleasure … [and who] are unlikely to be reached by
the traditional antiquarian and academic channels.”49 The Honey
and Wax prize is explicitly for amateurs; its very existence is an act
of both criticism (of the existing book trade) and uplift (of those
who might slowly change it).
For Devers, too, the social and historical goals of her project
loom larger than its eventual bottom line, but she has admitted that
she remains unsure whether it will prove to be a “viable business”:

Still, when I am at a fair and buying up books by women for The

Second Shelf, I am asked by the sellers if I really think I will be
able to make a profit or find a buyer. They are incredulous at my
purchase of the books they have just sold me, which I take quiet note
of, and let it fortify my determination to find and sell exceptional
work that might have been lost due to inequality and uninterest.50

Despite the disbelief of her industry peers, Devers has received an

outpouring of support for the project: its crowd-funded Kickstarter
campaign concluded in June 2018 after receiving over six hundred
contributions and exceeding its initial funding target by over 10,000
British pounds.51 The first issue of The Second Shelf: A Quarterly was
distributed in Fall 2018, and because the Kickstarter campaign—a
mode of contemporary fund-raising, open to amateurs and
professionals alike, that has become increasingly necessary in light
of ongoing cuts to public funding for the arts—was so successful,
Devers has already expanded the scope of The Second Shelf in ways
that continue to develop. Like Emily’s and Dorothy’s readerships,
the funders of The Second Shelf believe in the worthiness of the
project itself and trust the critical vision of the woman at its helm.
In each of these projects—Emily, Dorothy, and The Second
Shelf—there is an ongoing connection between amateur energy and
feminist activism. Undertaken as labors of love and squeezed in
around other professional commitments, these feminist publishing
projects demonstrate the power of small communities to resist and
transform the cultures of publishing across old and new media. To
be an amateur, to nourish a small network of like-minded readers
and writers, is not a mark of professional failure but a deliberate
posture of challenge to the established institutions of contemporary
236 The Critic as Amateur

publishing. For these women, amateurism is an occasional feminist

stance. And in their hands, collecting, publishing, and otherwise
circulating writing by and about women is a form of feminist
criticism no less significant for its consistently devalued status in
print and digital publishing scenes dominated by men.

Notes
1 Florence Howe, “Lost and Found—and What Happened Next: Some
Reflections on the Search for Women Writers Begun by The Feminist
Press in 1970,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 2 (2014): 141.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 142.
4 Ibid., 143.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 144.
7 Ibid. According to Howe, Moberg “set up ISBN numbers and
copyright mechanisms, as well as professional design, editing, and
marketing” (144).
8 Ibid., 145.
9 Ibid., 136.
10 Qtd. in Jennifer Gilley, “This Book Is an Action: A Case for the Study
of Feminist Publishing,” The International Journal of the Book 9, no.
1 (2012): 4.
11 Julia Penelope, “The Perils of Publishing,” Women’s Review of Books
2, no. 12 (1985): 3. For more on the historical context of Penelope’s
article as a response to the Lesbian Nuns publishing scandal earlier
that year, see Gilley, “This Book Is an Action,” 3.
12 Simone Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing
Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 22. For more recent exceptions
to this “phantom discipline,” see Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar
Farr, eds., This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and
Activist Aesthetics (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of
Illinois Press, 2016), and Catherine Riley, The Virago Story: Assessing
the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018).
13 Ibid., 6–7.
14 Ibid.
15 Howe, “Lost and Found,” 151.
16 Since 2010, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has organized volunteers
from across the country to perform their “count”: they “manually,
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 237

painstakingly tally the gender disparity in major literary publications

and book reviews.” For more information, see http://www.vidaweb.
org/the-count/.
17 Murray, Mixed Media, 6.
18 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur
Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2012), 32.
19 Saikat Majumdar, “The Critic as Amateur,” New Literary History 48,
no. 1 (2017): 22.
20 These descriptions come from the presses themselves. See http://
dorothyproject.com/about/; https://www.emilybooks.com/; https://
thesecondshelf.com/.
21 Urmila Seshagiri, “Making It New: Persephone Books and the
Modernist Project,” Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 2 (2013): 244.
22 See Nathan Scott McNamara, “American Literature Needs Indie Presses,”
The Atlantic, July 17, 2016. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.
com/entertainment/archive/2016/07/why-american-publishing-needs-
indie-presses/491618/?utm_source=atltw. See also Kristen Evans, “We’ve
Got Nothing to Lose: Emily Books Is Disrupting Publishing as Usual,”
Brooklyn Magazine, July 5, 2016. Available online: http://www.bkmag.
com/2016/07/05/emily-books-jade-sharma-problems/.
23 In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Beauman described her
decision to start Persephone as one that was rooted in love: “Virago
[another publisher of lost women’s classics] was, and is, great as far it
goes, and sometimes they did do books I suggested to them. But I had
this inconvenient attachment to all these other books that they wouldn’t
publish. That’s all I care about, really, you see: the text, the text, the
text.” Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/
nov/25/nicola-beauman-persephone-books-founder-interview.
24 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public
Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–5.
25 Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 3. “At a time when the
cultural value of modernist art was acknowledged but the mode of
its institutionalization, its canon, and its relationship to society were
undecided, the contest for modernism’s social definition took place
within this field of collections” (4).
26 Anisse Grosse, “Women Rule in Indie Publishing,” Publisher’s
Weekly, April 28, 2017. Available online: https://www.
publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-
news/article/73469-the-indie-publishing-feminist-revolution.
html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=a41addeacd-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_01&utm_medium=email&utm_
term=0_0bb2959cbb-a41addeacd-304530177.
238 The Critic as Amateur

27 Moira Donegan, “What Is Women’s Writing?: A Discussion at

the Emily Books Symposium,” The Awl, September 13, 2016.
Available online: https://www.theawl.com/2016/09/what-is-womens-
writing/#.33s0tjf0h. It is no coincidence that Moira Donegan, the
journalist who wrote about this story for The Awl, is the woman
who later started the “Shitty Media Men” list in October 2017. For
more about this list and its ensuing scandal, see Moira Donegan, “I
Started the Media Men List. My Name is Moira Donegan,” The Cut,
January 10, 2018. Available online: https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/
moira-donegan-i-started-the-media-men-list.html.
28 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; New York: Harcourt, 2006),
116.
29 Murray, Mixed Media, 34. Even after its sale to major publisher
Little, Brown in 1995, Virago’s influence as “the first mass-market
publishers for 52% of the population—women” and its importance
for feminist history is undeniable.
30 A documentary about the significance of Kali for Women, The Books We
Made, was released in 2016. For more information about Zubaan, see
Somak Ghoshal, “Urvashi Butalia: I Want to Prove Feminist Publishing
Can Survive Commercially,” LiveMint, June 14, 2013. Available online:
https://www.livemint.com/Companies/595QfElEltDLfuvgNqTiOI/
Urvashi-Butalia–I-want-to-prove-that-feminist-publishing-c.html.
31 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “To Hell with ‘There’s No
Market for You’: Queer Writers of Color and Independent Publishing,”
Make/Shift (Fall/Winter 2008–2009): n.p. RedBone later expanded its
mission and began to publish writing by black gay men, too.
32 See http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/about-us/.
33 Grosse, “Women Rule in Indie Publishing,” n.p.
34 Ibid.
35 See https://www.emilybooks.com/. In a subtle but interesting
difference, the Twitter profile for Emily Books reads: “We sell weird
books by women.” The emphasis on “selling” rather than “making”
in the Twitter profile may well be language from the curatorial era of
Emily Books that has yet to be updated to reflect the editorial era.
36 Ibid.
37 For more about how fandoms and other kinds of collaborations and
collectivities have influenced the contemporary digital publishing
scene, see Aarthi Vadde, “Amateur Creativity: Contemporary
Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene,” New Literary History
48 (2017): 27–51.
38 Aaron Heckling, “Overstepping the Bounds: How Blogger Emily
Gould has been Oversharing,” The Guardian, December 14, 2014.
Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/14/
overstepping-bounds-blogger-emily-gould-oversharing.
 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic 239

39 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business

of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2008), 5.
40 Nicole Ruddick, “Press Pass: Dorothy,” The Paris Review, September
24, 2012. Available online: https://www.theparisreview.org/
blog/2012/09/24/aunt-dorothy/.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Aaron Calvin, “How Small Presses Are Welcoming More Women into
Publishing,” Pacific Standard, December 21, 2016. Available online:
https://psmag.com/news/how-small-presses-are-welcoming-more-
women-into-publishing.
44 A. N. Devers, “Balance the Books: One Woman’s Fight to Keep Great
Female Writers on Shelves,” The Guardian, May 18, 2018. Available
online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/18/the-
second-shelf-an-devers-balance-the-books.
45 Meg Wolitzer, “The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction
for Men and Women,” The New York Times, March 30, 2012.
Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/
on-the-rules-of-literary-fiction-for-men-and-women.html.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Devers, “Balance the Books,” n.p.
49 Emily Temple, “Announcing a New Annual Prize for Young Female
Book Collectors,” Lithub, May 23, 2017. Available online: https://
lithub.com/announcing-a-new-annual-prize-for-young-female-book-
collectors/. For more information on the prize itself, see https://www.
honeyandwaxbooks.com/prize.php.
50 Devers, “Balance the Books,” n.p.
51 For detailed information on the current status of The Second Shelf’s
crowd-funded support, see: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/
writershouses/the-future-of-books-is-female-the-second-shelf-qua.

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Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting as Modernist Practice. Baltimore: Johns
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Calvin, Aaron. “How Small Presses Are Welcoming More Women into
Publishing.” Pacific Standard. December 21, 2016. Available online:
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Devers, A. N. “Balance the Books: One Woman’s Fight to Keep Great
Female Writers on the Shelves.” The Guardian. May 18, 2018.
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Esposito, Veronica Scott. “Independent Bookstore as Essential Political Act.”
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bookstore-as-essential-political-act/ (accessed June 25, 2018).
Evans, Kristin. “We’ve Got Nothing to Lose: Emily Books Is Disrupting
Publishing as Usual.” Brooklyn Magazine. July 5, 2016. Available
online: http://www.bkmag.com/2016/07/05/emily-books-jade-sharma-
problems/ (accessed June 25, 2018).
Ghoshal, Somak. “Urvashi Butalia: I Want to Prove Feminist Publishing
Can Survive Commercially.” LiveMint. June 14, 2013. Available
online: https://www.livemint.com/Companies/595QfElEltDLfuvgNqT
iOI/Urvashi-Butalia–I-want-to-prove-that-feminist-publishing-c.html
(accessed June 25, 2018).
Gilley, Jennifer. “This Book Is an Action: A Case for the Study of Feminist
Publishing.” International Journal of the Book 9, no. 1 (2012): 1–9.
Grosse, Anisse. “Women Rule in Indie Publishing.” Publishers Weekly.
April 28, 2017. Available online: https://www.publishersweekly.com/
pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/73469-the-indie-
publishing-feminist-revolution.html (accessed June 25, 2018).
Harker, Jaime and Cecilia Konchar Farr, eds. This Book Is an Action:
Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics. Urbana, Chicago, and
Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Heckling, Aaron. “Overstepping the Bounds: How Blogger Emily Gould
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bounds-blogger-emily-gould-oversharing (accessed June 25, 2018).
Howe, Florence. “Lost and Found—and What Happened Next: Some
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Majumdar, Saikat. “The Critic as Amateur.” New Literary History 48, no.
1 (2017): 1–25.
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for You’: Queer Writers of Color and Independent Publishing.” Make/
shift (Fall/Winter 2008–09): n.p.
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Project.” Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 2 (2013): 241–287.
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lithub.com/announcing-a-new-annual-prize-for-young-female-book-
collectors/ (accessed June 25, 2018).
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Digital Publishing Scene.” New Literary History 48 (2017): 27–51.
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Men and Women.” The New York Times. March 30, 2012. Available
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242
 Epilogue: New, Interesting,
and Original—the
Undergraduate as Amateur

Kara Wittman

When Descartes for the first time in history made reference to

a provisional morality, he created an unprecedented concept of
morality by the simple act of using an adjective in a novel way.
He replaced the commandments (divine, social, traditional) with
elective values, rules that a person chooses to follow. To get to
this point required years of critical thought, but the creation of
the phrase morale par provision was surely instantaneous. The
words simply came out that way, in unexpected juxtaposition;
and as they flowed from his pen or passed through his head, he
saw that they were good.
—Gabriel Zaid, The Secret of Fame

Nothing special was in my mind. I was just looking.

—T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death

What Gabriel Zaid says of Descartes also is true of T. J. Clark:

“When I say that I came to the paintings without previously having
worked on Poussin much, this does not mean that I came to them
with an open mind. I had a view of Poussin, which was no doubt all
244 The Critic as Amateur

the more dogmatic for never having been spelled out—”1 Descartes’s
instantaneous creation, his “unprecedented concept,” and Clark’s
“just looking” required years of thought, of study, even of dogmatic
hardening. In a moment, like lightning or wonder, appeared a new
morality, a “corrective to dogma,” something apparently original. The
professional art historian and the philosopher were “just looking,”
just shifting adjectives, and something new “simply came out.” But, as
Zaid observes, and Clark admits: the “just,” the “simply,” dissemble.2
Our students suspected this all along. The philosopher’s flash of
insight from the novel adjective, the detail in Poussin’s Landscape
with a Man Killed by a Snake that “dislodge[d]” the “scholarly piling
on of facts,” rely on years of thinking. Seeing what is important or
understanding what is worth saying—what is original—is not the
amateur’s happy accident. This is the work of experts.
Still, what seasoned critics feel for the unexpected adjective or a
turned heel in a painting might nonetheless be an amateur’s love.
As others in this volume observe, the amateur impulse enlivens
much of our work. We can appreciate the originality of Descartes’s
morale par provision or Clark’s diaristic meditations on Poussin as
evidence not just of scholarly achievement but also of something
more personal and wonderful, freer from professional constraints,
subjectively revelatory. Clark is a professional art historian who was
nonetheless “just looking” and The Sight of Death is original because
both things are true. That’s hard to explain in an undergraduate
classroom, and that’s where I begin in this concluding chapter.
The originality we ask from our undergraduates reveals the knotty
heart of the critic-as-amateur. Originality does not align neatly with
either amateurism or professional criticism. It requires something
of both. When we ask our students to be original—and we do ask
that of them—we ask them to occupy two positions at once.3 When
we ask them to be “original,” (as the syllabus says, “your thesis
should be original,” should be “imaginative, authoritative, with
original insight,” “original, interesting, and relevant”)4 we ask them
to walk the line between expert and tyro, professional and amateur:
to be enough of a naïf to experience the wonder of “first-ness”5 and
knowledgeable enough to recognize that first-ness as such.
This contradiction emerges alongside the blossoming concern
with “originality” as a literary value in eighteenth-century Europe.
Françoise Meltzer captures a version of this paradox: “What emerges
in the requirements for greatness in literary authorship is a paradox:
 Epilogue 245

the demand for spontaneous creativity on the one hand (proof of

‘natural’ genius), and a work ethic that insists upon earning acquired
goods or status on the other.”6 Or Paul Saint-Amour: “Originality
is a property licensed by its vaunted self-sufficiency and heterodoxy
but really only attainable by the most external, contingent, and
generally orthodox means possible.”7 We are not perhaps asking
our students to be “great” or incomparable in Wordsworthian
terms, but we ask that their originality be recognizable to a critical
community, which takes work. To put a finer point on it, it takes the
kind of work we do as professional critics, which puts our amateur
students, perforce, in an awkward position.
Considering what we ask of our students when we ask them
to occupy this contradictory space allows us to reflect on how we
negotiate the space between expertise and amateurism, critics and
amateurs, professionals and hobbyists, epistemic confidence and
unsettling wonder. These contradictions occupy the essayists in this
volume, who find them in our scholarship, our relationships with our
mentors, in historical figures and in virtual spaces. By spending time
in the complicated space—and, in some ways, proving ground—
of the undergraduate classroom I hope also to think through
contradictions at the heart of our own labor, our pedagogy, and
our values as literary critics. And, I should add, our desire. When
we ask our undergraduates to be original we ask them to practice
being professionals, but we also look for something of the wonder
and self-creation that amateurs seem to represent. The historically
unsettled term “original” lets us get at what we value in the amateur
spirit even as it contradicts our professional values. The originality
we desire, I’ll end by suggesting, is perhaps akin to Benjamin’s weak
messianism, something that “produces the conditions” for seeing
things differently, “the elusive temporal richness that promotes the
indeterminacy of ever-present possibility,”8 a way to think about
“originality in secular, as opposed to magical language.” Or rather
what we perhaps desire is not the “originality” we name in our
writing prompts and style guides but something we move steadily
away from as experienced scholars and then look for in the receding
category of the amateur: the promise of beginning.
The prompts, guides, and rubrics we give our undergraduate
writers often ask them to be original. “Produce original interpretive
work,” these documents urge: “contribute original scholarship”;
demonstrate “thoughts that are original”; have a thesis that is
246 The Critic as Amateur

“original and interesting”; write a paper that is “imaginative,

authoritative, with original insight.” And so on.9 The language,
varied only slightly, proliferates; I hadn’t thought much about it.
That changed a few years ago when one of my colleagues and I
wondered how undergraduates think about literature seminars,
about our expectations, about what they’re doing in there. So we
asked them. In January 2015 we convened a working group of four
English undergraduates and one graduate student and planned
a series of discussions for the semester. Rather than proceed like
a focus group, we took an inductive approach, letting student
concerns emerge from our loose discussions about the English
major and the study of literature.
What emerged was the specter of originality, something they
saw haunting the relationship between our critical expertise, their
passionate amateurism, and the demand that they occupy both
positions at once. As one of our students put it:

When professors tell students to come up with an “original idea”

it always seems like they’re asking something of me that I can
never seem to achieve. I mean, what really is an original idea? Is
it original in the sense that they’ve never heard it or seen it on
paper before? Or original in the sense that I myself have never
explored such an idea before? […] When you find sources that
support it and that seem rather similar to it, does that mean it
wasn’t even that original in the first place? How do I know if
someone, somewhere across the world or in an alternate universe
hasn’t already come up with this idea? Do I need to copyright
my idea for it truly to be original? Does it have to be interesting/
provocative to be original?10

Her questions accurately represent the mood of the group, and she
categorizes originality in ways that reflect this collection’s concern
with the poles of criticism as specialized practice and idiosyncratic
pursuit, not to mention the long history of thinking about
originality in literature. To be original is, perhaps, (1) something
circumstantially, locally new; (2) something heretofore unuttered
or unwritten; (3) something entirely personal to the thinker; (4)
something unlike anything else; (5) something no one anywhere has
thought before; (6) something confirmed as such by a market; (7)
something judged to be interesting, something that feels original.11
 Epilogue 247

Such language traces the conflicting associations of originality

with, on the one hand, amateurism and, on the other, professional
criticism. How we define originality informs how we train our
undergraduates. Do we hope students will hold on to the aspects of
their amateurism that allow them to wonder and explore without
feeling constrained by professional expectation, to remain, as Roland
Barthes puts it, in the epistemological “as if” of the “Amateur,” the
subjective and intimate “pinnacle of [their] particularity”?12 Are we
hoping instead that they will shed these traces of amateurism and
win “the certification of the original”13 adjudicated according to
already recognized scholarly standards of innovation?14
Those expectations are confusing. And undergraduates are told
as much, with some candor, by one of the most popular sources for
writing and research help on the internet today. Here is the Purdue
Online Writing Laboratory [OWL] on “Intellectual challenges in
American academic writing”:

There are some intellectual challenges that all students are faced
with when writing. Sometimes these challenges can almost seem
like contradictions, particularly when addressing them within
a single paper. For example, American teachers often instruct
students to:
Develop a topic based on what has already been said and written
BUT write something new and original.
Rely on experts’ and authorities opinions BUT improve upon
and/or disagree with those same opinions.
Give credit to previous researchers BUT make your own
significant contribution.
Improve your English to fit into a discourse community by
building upon what you hear and read BUT use your own words
and your own voice.15

The OWL does not offer any advice for navigating these
contradictions; the subsequent section is on avoiding plagiarism.
And avoiding plagiarism returns us to one ostensible reason for
our prompting students to “contribute original scholarship”:
intellectual property, theft, the agony of influence. But the literature
on plagiarism is anything but straightforward, shot through as it is
by the complexities of Western thinking about originality.
248 The Critic as Amateur

As it concerns undergraduate writing, the literature on plagiarism

is vast. Extending from the comparatively banal (tutorials and
handbooks on citation styles, paraphrasing, quotation sandwiches)
to the menacing (“colleges, faculty, and students … [are] equally
consumed by the notion that plagiarism is widespread and
uncontrollable […] the fear that plagiarism is not only rising
but attaining the status of a pandemic; that the core values of
our society [such as its reverence for originality] are threatened
by this virus”16), writing on plagiarism is anxious to make sure
undergraduate writers show the proper respect for the cultural
values represented in the intellectual marketplace. “Avoiding
plagiarism is important,” write the authors of a popular handbook
on student writing, “for in Western culture the use of someone
else’s words or ideas without acknowledgement and as your own
is an act of academic dishonesty and can bring devastating results”
(emphasis in original).17 According to its website, the “originality
and plagiarism checking service” Turnitin.com is “trusted by over
15,000 higher education institutions in over 140 countries.”18
In other words, the anti-plagiarism juggernaut is working to
professionalize students, to prepare them to be recognized in
and by a culture that will reward “original expression” or “the
absence of verbatim copying and the demonstrable presence of
a modicum of creativity.”19 Part of the professionalization effort
is about avoiding plagiarism and thus demonstrating a student’s
capacity for original thought; the other part is about citing sources
accurately and consistently and thus honoring the originality of
others. Both aspects participate in the implicit belief that originality
can be sniffed out, tracked, and measured so that the student can
pass through this extensive security clearance into the scholarly
community.
But worries about plagiarism and professionalization are only
part of the desire for students to “demonstrate thoughts that are
original.” The advice for undergraduate writers in the Purdue
OWL enjoins students to account for what they have learned but
then rates that learning according to its capacity to exceed itself,
to generate something new. And the newness is cast in terms that
predate—and also underwrite—the modern intellectual property
marketplace: the language of genius, originality, and self, language
that imagines something “new and original” immanent in “your
own words and your own voice.”
 Epilogue 249

In his essay “The Critic as Amateur,” Saikat Majumdar recounts

the story of Pankaj Mishra’s “failure to write an original piece on
Edmund Wilson,” the self-doubt attending that scholarly failure,
and Mishra’s subsequent turn to a more personal narrative about
the critic. We might see that “failure to write an original piece”
as a professional failure, an inability to enter the marketplace
of ideas, but neither Majumdar nor Mishra sees it that way. For
Mishra, failure was the result of writing in someone else’s voice,
from someone else’s perspective. A recent graduate, living in a
provincial, decolonized city, Mishra wanted to learn and to honor
the American critic from whom he had already learned so much,
but his twinned anxiety about not having read enough, and having
read just enough to write in someone else’s voice without realizing
it, made him feel he could not be original. “Original” here sounds
much like the originality celebrated by anti-plagiarism invectives,
but the originality at which Mishra in fact arrived looks more
like the originality of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original
Composition. What Mishra produces out of his own sense of
failure, Majumdar tells us, is a “remarkable,” even beautiful story
of Bildung, “an unlikely story of autodidacticism,” an “essay
about reading, and, particularly, engaging with literary criticism,”
motivated by a narrative impulse emerging from a ravenous desire
to learn and Mishra’s “unexpected” perspective.20 This is Young’s
celebrated originality: “they had but little learning, and few books;
yet may the most learned be struck with some astonishment at their
so singular natural sagacity, and most exquisite edge of thoughts,”
an unexpected group of luminaries burning with “cælestis origo.”21
What Mishra eventually authors, Majumdar contends, he could
only author “not as a professional scholar, but as an amateur.”22
If the professional scholar’s originality manifests in the avoidance
of plagiarism (Mishra: “What I wrote seemed to me too much like a
reprise of what a lot of other people had already said”), something
in which we are certainly training our students, we seem also to be
looking for a slightly different originality from them. This other
originality indexes learning while also revealing what Young called
“vegetable” genius.23 Originality is perhaps not entirely about the
marketplace but also about our desire to see that our students
are learning. We register that learning by asking them to refract
what they’ve encountered through something in themselves and
thus originate something new. David Matheson writes that “ideas
250 The Critic as Amateur

produced from a student’s own point of view can sometimes

produce a new insight.”24 This is not exactly “creation ex nihilo,”
but, as Robert Macfarlane reminds us, neither was Young’s.25 What
persists from Young’s work (and the Romantic theories it inspired)
is the notion of the individual whose compositions exceed “mere
imitation” by virtue of the tendrils from that original “vital root” or
bulb of genius that emerge from within. “Use your own words and
your own voice,” the Purdue OWL catechizes, to make something
“new and original.”
We cultivate our students’ ability to pass learning through the
prism of their own “words and voices” and so to be original. In
doing so we ask them to occupy paradoxes articulated by Saint-
Amour and Meltzer: to be at once preprofessional scholars, able
to navigate with some acumen the vast body of ideas that exist,
and originals, creators with something new to contribute. That new
thing, we suggest, will be at once the ticket to entering an existing
marketplace of ideas and the measure of some internal process—
learning, perhaps. But not just learning, because metrics for
learning are easy and various. Asking our students to inflect their
learning with their own words and voices suggests we’re looking
for something in addition to learning, some mark of an original
self, some sign of individuality, some human desire. Our work as
professional critics sets us up to register the second according to the
terms of the first: originality only appears in an extant, known field
against which it can bear the mark of the singular. How we recognize
it as original depends in large part on our own scholarship. William
Duff, publishing his Essay on Original Genius (1767) eight years
after Edward Young’s Conjectures, recognized in what terms his
own originality would be judged:

In an Essay on Original Genius, Originality of Sentiment will

naturally, and may, no doubt, justly be expected [ … T]he Author
begs leave to subjoin a caution to his Readers: It is, that they would
not expect to meet with original sentiments in those parts of this
Essay, where it is scarce possible they should be discovered. […]
In what degree Originality of Sentiment is really discovered …
must be left to the determination of the intelligent and impartial
Reader. The Author, for his own part, can at least declare, that
he is not conscious of having borrowed his observations on these
subjects from the Writings of any other person whatever.26
 Epilogue 251

Duff’s mea culpa locates him clearly, and not without good company,
in the period’s contradictory messaging about originality—messages
we echo in the imperatives we issue our undergraduates. For
example, when that ostensive champion of original genius, Percy
Shelley, writes in a letter to William Godwin after publishing The
Revolt of Islam, “I exercised myself in the despair of producing any
thing original,” he says this not in response to some failure of the
poem but because it failed in the marketplace.27 Although he takes
pains in the “Author’s Preface” to assure his readers that the worth
of the poem emerges from his not imitating “any style of language
or versification” peculiar to any other poet, the true adjudicator of
its worth—and perhaps thus of its originality—appears to be, for
him, the paying public.28
Just as, for Majumdar, Mishra’s turn from producing scholarship
on Edmund Wilson to his unconventional, deeply personal,
intellectual-coming-of-age narrative marks a turn from professional
to amateur, so do the shifting values that attend “originality” map a
tension between the professional critic and the amateur. The heavily
cited book of literary criticism marks its originality relative to a
field, whereas the originality of the sparsely researched book must
be congenital, sui generis. “Among scholars … footnote citation
indexes are used as a measure of comparative value,” Marjorie
Garber observes; “the absence of footnotes is a bold, in-your-face
declaration of professional amateurism in its most magisterial
form.”29 In short, our profession valorizes two mutually constitutive
but perhaps finally inconsonant manifestations of originality.
Professional originality takes the form of the idea made recognizable
in its newness by its divergence from existing scholarship and vetted
by peers according to those terms, the idea that can then be published
and copyrighted. What we might call amateur originality sprouts
from uncultivated soil of self, voice, “some vision of the work as
having been made entirely from scratch, happening this time and
this time only, in perfect synchronicity with its own becoming.”30
This amateur originality is not about origination as pioneering
or trailblazing, about the “newness” that only an extant field can
register, but rather is about discovering a wondering, feeling “I.”31
The originality we demand from our students asks them to
comprehend both, to “be informed about critical debates and
literary theories” and yet also to “find their own way into a
literary work, not to parrot the interpretations of others.”32 As
252 The Critic as Amateur

fledgling preprofessional critics, our students demonstrate in the

carefully cited papers that flag their own contributions among the
parenthetical and superscript “mark[s] of professional display”33
that they are able to ratify and uphold the regimes that undergird
our profession. As amateurs, their incipient textual sovereignty
gives us access to “the passion that comes from investment in
one’s work, pride of authorship of writing one owns and loves,”
the “exhilarating, creative, [and] fun” that gives our work and our
teaching meaning.34
As I’ve been suggesting, the tension between professional and
amateur criticism this volume explores plays out in the terms
of the originality we want, at least as our learning outcomes,
rubrics, and style guides have it, from our students. But is this
really what we want, or are there different desires at work here?
What if this slippery notion of originality gets in the way of our
valuing amateurism on its own terms and understanding the
amateur impulses that linger in our own professional criticism?
And what if studying our desire for student originality helps
us to understand that both our notions of professionalism and
amateurism—terms that rely on each other—have obscured for us
what it means to be a critic and a student? Originality, as Young
took pains to establish, is aspirational; “nature” might, as he puts
it, create originals, but in order not to “die Copies,” we require
a lifetime of becoming, not being, that seedling original. As Anis
Bawarshi shows us, the distinction between “what is known and
what is new” is generically, historically, and culturally specific;
the “supposedly original writer” works with “inherited lexical,
grammatical, and semantic encounters”; originality might, in fact,
simply be ongoing displacement, “a name for an endless, perhaps
occasionally violent, substitution of one experience for another.”35
As Paul Valéry puts it,

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the

hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind […]
there are … works of which the relation with earlier productions
is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the
direct intervention of the gods.36

Or, in less vaunted terms, Jonathan Lethem offers this in the “Key”
to his breathtaking plagiarism The Ecstasy of Influence:
 Epilogue 253

Though in truth by the time I’d finished, his words were so

utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary
cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to
me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another’s
distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond
my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.37

In his essay on Modernist citation, Kevin Dettmar puts it in terms

that hit perhaps closest to where our undergraduates live: “To put
it crudely: Stephen [Dedalus] wants to be Byron when he grows up,
but it is starting to look like there will not be any openings by the
time he is ready to go on the market.”38
So maybe we can never be original. But considering the tension
between the professional and the amateur in terms of originality
allows us to view both categories not in their impossible contingencies
but in terms of the desire that animates our work as critics. We need
neither be what Darren Hick calls “originality deniers,” nor to tack
between the dependent terms “professional” and “amateur” to get
at the love and wonder that might still linger in our criticism.39 Our
students, not ready to be original in the marketplace and maybe
not original geniuses (is anyone?), offer us something beyond the
“professional amateur,” or the “critic as amateur” or the imagined
“interesting and original” author of a million term papers. They
are, simply, beginners.
There’s a curious moment in Plato’s Theaetetus in which
Socrates—normally the confident “midwife” for his young students’
learning—talks himself into a corner about the nature of knowledge
and pulls back, annoyed at his own garrulity, frustrated that his
incontinent desire to get at the true nature of knowledge led him
so far down a false path that he convinced himself he’d arrived at
something new. “I am not only annoyed,” he tells Theaetetus, “I
am alarmed. I am afraid of what I may say if someone asks me,
‘So Socrates, you’ve discovered false judgment have you?’ […] I
believe I am very likely to say ‘yes,’ with an air of flattering myself
upon our having made some beautiful discovery.”40 Socrates gets so
uncomfortable with the disorienting lostness and wonder necessary
to philosophy, that he persuades himself he’s discovered something
that is in fact just wrong. This is bad, he tells Theaetetus; we have
“to go back to the beginning.”41 Once there, the interlocutors come
to the conclusion that they don’t know what knowledge is, that
254 The Critic as Amateur

everything they’ve produced has been a “wind-egg,” and that this

was the lesson. Beautiful discoveries are nothing, Socrates tells
Theaetetus; the point is to be able again and again to deliberate,
to cast aside dogma, to ask new questions. And so, “in freeing the
young philosopher from his own fledgling doctrines,” Mary-Jane
Rubenstein writes, “Socrates [frees] him for the aporetic vertigo of
wonder,” the “only beginning of philosophy.”42
The lesson of Theaetetus, a key text for the Romantics in its
affirmation of the wonder they understood as immanent in poetic
genius, is in fact not about origination at all. It’s about teaching a
young student to begin. “Every student of literature,” Edward Said
offers in his 1975 Beginnings, “necessarily deals with originality
and with the related subject of influences and sources; yet very few
critics have systematically tried to examine originality in secular,
as opposed to magical, language.”43 Said is interested in the weak
messianism of beginnings as “opposed to originalities, or to those
ideal Presences whose ideal originality Yeats called ‘self-born
mockers of man’s enterprise.’” A beginning, he continues, “is what I
think scholarship ought to see itself as, for in that light scholarship
or criticism revitalizes itself. […] For the scholar or researcher, a
beginning develops when the conditions of his reality become equal
to the generosity of his, of everyman’s, intellectual potential.”44 In
other words, a beginning is a choice; it is active; it renews itself; it
“promotes the indeterminacy of ever-present possibility.”45
Shifting the terms of our pedagogical expectations and
injunctions from originality to beginning allows us to reconcile
some of the paradoxes that attend originality and in doing so to
understand the value of amateurism, the amateur spirit not in its
impossible contingencies, or in any bad faith disavowals of our
compensation, our expertise, or our professional status. To see the
critic as beginner rather than as professional or indeed as amateur
is to see her as finding in her own critical position what Said sees
as “the possibility of freedom, of a new cleanness, of prospective
achievement, of special and novel appropriation,” to see her
perpetually “transformed by the renewing of [her] mind.”46
Our two-part fascination with originality—as, on the one hand,
the market-friendly avoidance of plagiarism and, on the other,
evidence of organic thinking and an individual mind—crystallizes
something about what we value in both the professional and the
amateur critic. Our students rightly see the contradictions in our
 Epilogue 255

desires: “When professors tell [us] to come up with an original idea,”

my student said, “it always seems like they’re asking something of
me that I can never seem to achieve.” Of course we are. Because they
are, ipso facto, amateurs, they can stand in for the love, the wonder
not yet deformed by the strictures of professionalism and scholarly
rectitude that make our lives worth it, while also upholding our
professional values. Originality circulates between these things
because we’ve accepted the opposition between amateur and
professional in these terms: the amateur critic is a vegetable genius;
the professional is very good at footnotes.
The challenge is to think of the student as something other than
an amateur or a professional while taking from each the values of
both and, in doing so, holding onto something that we want from
originality not as originality but as a sustained beginning. I think
Derek Attridge is right when he suggests that “the best hope for a new
emphasis on the amateur impulse in literary studies, perhaps, lies in
the classroom,” because the students in our classrooms are amateurs,
yes, but more importantly they are beginners. If we can teach them
not to be “original,” but to begin, perhaps we can get at what we want
from the amateur without needing to disavow its opposite, to revivify
our work without making a stalking horse of professional criticism.
“If originality as a conception,” writes Said, “has had the power
for too long of depressing time backwards into lost primacy at best,
and regained utopias at worst, this is a good reason for reorienting
our study systematically toward the future.”47 What that will mean,
for Said, is turning toward thinking about beginnings and in the
concept of beginning finding a way to reconcile the antipodes of
originality: “an obligation to practical reality,” to one’s “concrete”
circumstances, to learning, to one’s field of study, and “to sympathetic
imagination,” writing into what “cannot be known except by
inventing it, exactly, intentionally, autodidactically.”48 For Barthes,
this describes the epistemological position of the “Amateur”:

It is important for me to act as if I were to write this utopian

novel. And here I regain, to conclude, a method. […] I proceed
to another type of knowledge (that of the Amateur) and it is in
this that I am methodical. “As if”: is not this formula the very
expression of scientific procedure, as we see it in mathematics? I
venture a hypothesis and I explore, I discover the wealth of what
follows from it.49
256 The Critic as Amateur

Said, too, in his 1993 Reith lecture “Professionals and Amateurs,”

finds in the amateur the salutary, disruptive, and radical qualities of
the resolved beginner:

An amateur is what today the intellectual ought to be, someone

who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a
society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even
the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves
one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens
as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit
as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional
routine most of us go through into something much more lively
and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can
ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect
with a personal project and original thought.

In 1984, he called that amateur a beginner: “But if there is some

especially urgent claim to be made for criticism … it is in that
constant re-experiencing of beginning and beginning again whose
force is neither to give rise to authority nor to promote orthodoxy
but to stimulate self-conscious and situated activity, activity
with aims non-coercive and communal.”50 In other words, the
extra-institutional force and prerogative of the amateur have less
to do with “de-professionalization” and more to do with flexibility,
transformation, and the possibility of beginning again and again
without or within the academy, the corporate body.51
We don’t want our students “to parrot the interpretations
of others” when they begin to engage a literary text. We want
something we’re calling original thought. That mandate, as we’ve
seen, assumes a set of preexistent relationships: to the germ of a
coherent, original self; to the field, the discipline, the market.
Socrates’s brief philosophical panic can be helpful for us here:
originating something, falling back on those preconditions, might
give us a way out of aporetic wonder, a way to demonstrate
knowledge, but it can also be a devil’s bargain. The danger is in
originating, he says to Theaetetus; what we need is to begin.
If I can tell my student—who wants to know “what really is
an original idea” and how do I know if I’m having one and
according to whom?—that actually no, I don’t care so much about
the original idea, I don’t care so much about plagiarism or the
 Epilogue 257

market or whether she’s harboring some bulb of vegetable genius,

my classroom will, I think, look different. It will look more like
what it is, a classroom of beginners, but beginning will take on new
meaning as an important part of the animating spirit of criticism,
as an anti-authoritarian, open, ethical value. Whereas both
“professional” and “amateur” suggest ontologies, and certainly
so does the notion of origins, “beginning” is epistemological—a
spirit of potential, of “articulation” in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe’s sense, where what students learn changes both what they
read and their own selves.
How would asking students simply to begin, “to write in and as
an act of discovery,”52 as opposed to asking them to “have original
thoughts,” or write something “interesting and original,” change
the way we create our prompts? How might it change the way we
articulate our goals for a course? Or the writing assignments we
produce? Or find in imitation not the misdeed of plagiarism but a
kind of intervention or even resistance? For many of us, the shift
might seem subtle, but as I’ve learned, our students feel even these
spectral presences. For me, turning toward criticism as beginning
has meant freeing my students from the strictures of thesis
statements and even more so from conclusions; it has allowed me
to spend much more time on questions, even unanswerable ones; it
has meant turning to the form of the essay that we inherit not from
Francis Bacon’s allergy to wonder but Michel Montaigne’s embrace
of it. “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study”; he
muses, “it is not a lesson for others, but for me.”53
A common thread running through this volume is this notion
of a constant reexperiencing of beginning and beginning again.
“An amateur reading,” writes Attridge, “involves an openness to
whatever the work, on a particular occasion, will bring—a readiness
to have habits and preconceptions challenged and a willingness to
be changed by the experience.” It will involve a perpetual process
of “learning and unlearning, as well as a constant making and
unmaking of critical language,” suggests Peter McDonald. The boy
who can calm the wild steed, for Tom Lutz, is not an amateur, not
really—he needs not disavow the professional to become himself.
The boy simply falls in love “over and over again,” his love only
and always beginning. “Non-knowing is an enabling condition of
[this] work,” writes Ragini Srinivasan. “If we don’t know what we
don’t know, we are free to know otherwise.” “By trading ‘certainty
258 The Critic as Amateur

for uncertainty,’” she writes of Jhumpa Lahiri, “she is able to

‘learn, again, to write.’” Mimi Winick finds something like this
beginning in Vernon Lee’s “conjectural and suggestive” aesthetic,
her “becoming identity … forever in process.” It’s even present in
the image of Dorothy Richardson talking about films from the
position of a spectator, someone, we take it, always walking into
the cinema filled with anticipation to see a film for the first time,
like Stephen Potter’s audiences coming to the literary criticism they
heard over the airwaves as beginners, or Pramatha Chauduri, “an
essayist, in relation to the literary field,” and as an essayist always
at the infinitive beginning of the experiment, trying.
What we can take from our students is that they are neither
professionals nor amateurs: they’re beginning. It’s a worthwhile
place to be, as this essayists in this volume suggest: at the beginning
of something, again and again. Asking our students to be original
casts them at once backward to some theological origin of their
own nebulous self and forward into a marketplace of ideas in which
they will have attended carefully, professionally, to their intellectual
brand. If as professional critics we’ve lived for a long time in the
marketplace, our amateur impulses suggest a deep desire to shuttle
back toward the origin, the vegetable and creative self. But our
students allow us to think something else: perhaps we do not need
to be amateur critics or critics as amateurs. Perhaps we can just, and
again, begin.

Notes
1 T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 12.
2 Gabriel Zaid, The Secret of Fame: The Literary Encounter in an Age
of Distraction (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2008), 169.
3 The “we” here can, of course, never be all of us. This “we” is
comprised of the preponderant expectations for originality in the
learning outcomes advertised by Departments of English; disciplinary
trade handbooks and style guides casting “originality” as that to
which student writers should aspire; individual and departmental
grading rubrics; assignment prompts and course descriptions. This
“we” also comprehends the near-universal institutional anxiety about
originality’s opposite: plagiarism.
 Epilogue 259

4 Janet E. Gardner, Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide

(New York: Macmillan, 2009), 18; English Literature Writing
Guide (University of Edinburgh, 2017), 19. Available online: https://
www.ed.ac.uk/files/imports/fileManager/English%20Literature%20
Writing%20Guide%20final.pdf; Maralee Harrell, “Grading
according to a Rubric,” Teaching Philosophy 28, no. 1 (March 2005).
See also, for just a small sample of literature programs using the
language of student “originality,” the Department of English learning
outcomes for the University of Oregon, Kansas State University,
Pomona College, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, and
the University of California, Berkeley.
5 “Wonder [seems] premised on ‘first-ness’: the object that appears
before the subject is encountered for the first time, or as if for the first
time.” Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 179.
6 Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary
Originality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 4.
7 Paul St. Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the
Literary Imagination (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 8.
8 Russ Castronovo, “The Function of Criticism at a Different Time,”
in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 247.
9 Eric Dugdale, “Essay Rubric”; Sophia McClennan, “General
Evaluation Rubric for Papers”; “Courses Guide,” Literature Program,
University of Pittsburgh; “Example of an Analytical Research Paper,”
University of Richmond Writing Center; Donna Campbell, “Literary
Studies Paper with Possible Points”; Sara Spurgeon, “Guidelines
for Seminar Paper: Topic Proposal, Abstract, Paper.” All materials
publicly available: see Works Cited.
10 Catherine Zinski, Blackboard Discussion. Mills College, Spring 2015.
Quoted with permission.
11 Cf. Sianne Ngai’s work on the category of the “interesting”:
she traces the tensions that “interesting” undergirds: between
“individual and system,” “unknown and known,” “individuation and
standardization.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “original” and “interesting”
often show up together in our instructions for undergraduate
literary criticism. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute,
Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
12 Roland Barthes, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure
…,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 289.
13 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 162.
260 The Critic as Amateur

14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York:

Routledge, 1989).
15 OWL: The Purdue Online Writing Lab, “Intellectual Challenges in
American Academic Writing.” Available online: http://owl.purdue.
edu/owl/resource/589/01/ (accessed May 2018).
16 Linda Adler-Kassner, Chris Anson, and Rebecca Moore Howard,
“Framing Plagiarism,” in Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism:
Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, ed. Caroline Eisner and Martha
Vicinus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 231.
17 Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, Everything’s an
Argument (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 404.
18 Turnitin.com. Available online: http://turnitin.com/en_us/higher-
education (accessed May 2018).
19 Saint-Amour, Copywrights, 7.
20 Saikat Majumdar, “The Critic as Amateur,” New Literary History 48,
no. 1 (2017): 2.
21 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J.
Morley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 16–17.
22 Majumdar, “Critic,” 2.
23 Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 7.
24 David Matheson, An Introduction to the Study of Education (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 347 (my emphasis).
25 Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in
Nineteenth-century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 18n1.
26 William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius and Its Various Modes
of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry
(London: Forgotten Books, 2015), xv.
27 Macfarlane, Original, 30.
28 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Author’s Preface,” in The Revolt of Islam
(London: John Brooks, 1829). That he equates market failure with
his own failure to be original does not mean that he turned all
value judgments over to the consuming public—only that he saw
a relationship between market failure and his own capacity to be
original.
29 Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 40–42.
30 Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the
Humanities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 138.
31 “Pleasure” comes up often in this volume as something to which
an amateur has perhaps more, or at least different, access than the
professional.
32 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 11.
 Epilogue 261

33 Garber, Instincts, 41.

34 For more on “textual sovereignty” see Meltzer, Hot Property, 4.
35 Anis Bawarshi, “Genres as Forms of In(ter)vention,” in Originality,
Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, ed.
Eisner and Vicinus (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2008),
79; Steiner qtd in Macfarlane, Original, 4; Edward Said, “On
Originality,” in Uses of Literature, ed. Monroe Engel (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1973), 53.
36 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985), 15.
37 Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc.
(New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 117.
38 Kevin Dettmar, “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics
of Postmodernist Plagiarism,” in Perspectives on Plagiarism and
Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World, ed. Lise Buranen and
Alice M. Roy (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 103.
39 Darren Hick, Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of
Copywright and Appropriation (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2017), 6.
40 Plato, Theaetetus, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. M. J. Levett
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 195c.
41 Ibid., 199d.
42 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of
Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008), 7. Rubenstein’s work first alerted me to the
real discomfort Socrates evinces in his conversation with Theaetetus.
There is much to be said beyond the scope of this essay about
wonder in this “postcritical” moment. Rita Felski evokes wonder in
her discussion of “enchantment” in Uses of Literature, but especially
as it concerns Plato and Aristotle, wonder and enchantment must be
kept separate.
43 Said, Beginnings, 14.
44 Ibid., 380.
45 Castronovo, “Function of Criticism,” 247.
46 Said, Beginnings, 35.
47 Said, “On Originality,” 65.
48 Said, Beginnings, 349.
49 Barthes, “Longtemps,” 289.
50 Said, Beginnings, xiv.
51 See Rosinka Chauduri in this volume on “de-professionalization.”
52 Said, Beginnings, 379.
53 Michel Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal,
Letters (New York: Knopf, 2003), 331.
262 The Critic as Amateur

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 INDEX

Absent Yet Present 118 impulse 35–9, 41–4, 74, 88,

academic criticism 13–14, 90, 255, 258
93–4, 97, 201 intellectual 34
Academic Instincts 24 n.8, 44 n.1 internet culture and 4–6, 39
academic professionalism 88–9, 96 originality 251
academic study of literature 41–4 origination 134
Addison, Joseph 9–10 and professionals 4, 8, 12–13
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 93 radio writer 202
Adorno, Theodor 17, 131, 136, reading 39, 41, 46 n.18
146 n.5, 152, 205, 212 scholarship 152–4, 161–2
adult education 110–11, 113–14, sensibility 224
116–17, 122 sexuality 173 n.40
Adult Education (journal) 114 students (see students, amateur)
aesthetic criticism 155, 164 woman/lady 154–6, 158–61
aestheticism 155 “Amateur Creativity” 24 n.3
Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: amateurism 2–3, 8, 12, 16–19, 53,
1840–1940 172 n.38 73–4, 135, 137, 145, 152,
Aesthetic Theory 131, 146 n.5 224, 229, 236, 244, 247,
Against Everything 76–7 252, 254
Against Interpretation 105 n.74 critical 41–4, 69, 73, 76–7, 79,
Ahmed, Sara 72–3 81 n.16, 224
Ālāler Ghare Dulāl 139 as elective affinity 3
Allen, Mary Hope 207, 215 n.20 humanities 3–4
“Almost Persuaded” 189 and literary expertise 4–19
amateur(s) 31–3, 49, 51, 53, 59, naive 156–7, 162
109–10, 117, 131–3, 145, performances 74
255–6 professional 251, 253–4
and Barthes 39–41 vs. professionalism 31–5
criticism 252 romance of 74–5
detective 133–4 sophisticated 17, 152–7, 159,
digital 5, 8 163, 165, 168–70
film critic 183 Annadāmangal 148 n.26
gentleman 7 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina
identities of 2 166, 168
266 INDEX

anti-intellectualism 79, 110 modern 143, 145

anti-plagiarism 248–9 naming convention 147 n.8
anti-professionalism 13, 34–5, 90 Bengal Magazine (magazine)
Arguments 91–2 147–8 n.21
Armstrong, Tim 188 Berlant, Lauren 230–1
artistic merit 90, 95 Bernstein, Charles 86–8, 94
The Atlantic 225, 237 n.22 Best, Stephen 102, 105 n.73
Attridge, Derek 13–14, 255, 257 Bhāratchandra Ray 132, 144–5,
critical amateurism 14–15 148 n.26
Auerbach, Erich 77 Birmingham School 81 n.22
authoritarianism 92, 205 Bishwasāhitya (World Literature)
autodidactic/autodidacticism 10, 104 n.60
15, 51, 57, 58–9, 249 The Black Atlantic: Modernity
Avery, Todd 214 n.10 and Double Consciousness
“avoiding plagiarism” 247, 254 63–5
The Awl 238 n.27 Blackmur, R. P. 33, 45 n.5
The Black Stallion (novel) 50–1,
Bacon, Francis 257 54, 59–60
Balaka (Wild Geese) 138 Blakeston, Oswell 182–3, 185,
Bandyopadhyay, Rangalal 143 188, 193, 194–5 n.11
Barry, Iris 183, 185–6, 192 Blanchfield, Brian 74–5, 77–9
Barthes, Roland 3, 9, 11, 17, 79, Blanchot, Maurice 15–16, 90–102,
134, 136–7, 141–2, 152, 103 n.30
247, 255, 259 n.12 Bloom, Emily 18
and amateur 39–41 Bloom, Harold 89
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Blum, Beth 20, 22, 26 n.25
Photography 40, 46 n.20 The-Book-of-the-Month Club 21,
Roland Barthes by Roland 110
Barthes 39–41, 46 n.19 The Books We Made 238 n.30
Barth, John 52 Borges, Jorge Luis 51, 142
Bawarshi, Anis 252 born-digital media 6
Beach, Sylvia 226, 233 Bose, Buddhadeva 129–30, 132,
Beauman, Nicola 226, 228, 237 134, 137
n.23 Bose, Satyendranath 136
Beauty and Ugliness and Other Bowen, Elizabeth 18, 215 n.17
Studies in Psychological Braddock, Jeremy 226, 237 n.25
Aesthetics 166–8 British film industry 183–4
Bed and Sofa (film) 190 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman)
Beginnings 254 181, 183, 185, 190–3, 194
Belcaro 162 n.1, 194 n.10, 196 n.39
Bell, Martin 121 Buckland, Adelene 171 n.11
Bengali literature 132, 134, Burdick, Alan 172 n.23
141–3 Burke, Kenneth 33
 INDEX 267

Butalia, Urvashi 228 Clark, T. J. 243–4

Buurma, Rachel Sagner 24–5 n.9 Close Up (film magazine)
Buzzfeed website 6 17–18, 181–2, 185, 188,
Byatt, A. S. 158 190–4, 194 n.11. See also
Richardson, Dorothy
Callil, Carmen 227–8 Christie’s depictions of 188
Calvin, Aaron 239 n.43 contributors to 186
Camera Lucida: Reflections on early years of publication 183
Photography 40, 46 n.20 extra-cinematic writing 182
“Can Tolstoy Save Your and Moore 185
Marriage?” 21, 26 n.26 para-cinematic writing 182,
capitalist realism 88 193
Carpenter, Edward 173 n.40 and POOL Group 181–2
Casey, Caroline 227 Coffee House Press 227, 230
Castle, Hugh 188 coffeehouse society 10
The Centre of Indian Culture 100 Cohen, Debra Rae 206
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 137 Collini, Stefan 9
Chakravorty, Swapan 148 n.27 colonial education system 100
Chassain, Adrien 40, 46 n.21 Columbia Institute 101
Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 141, complex advice networks 22–3
143 Comyns, Barbara 230, 232
Chattopadhyay, Sunitikumar 136 Conjectures on Original
Chaudhuri, Amit 92, 146 n.6 Composition 249–50
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 58, 135–6, contemporary feminist publishing
146 projects 223–4, 227–9
Chaudhuri, Pramatha 3, 16–17, creative “ananda” (joy/delight)
130–1, 134, 136–8, 145, 258 98, 100
in Bengali writing 138–40 creative criticism 15–16, 94–6,
on Bhāratchandra 144 98–9, 101–2
as critic 132, 139, 144, 146 creative writers/writing 10–11, 79,
early life 135 80–1 n.14, 123, 141, 203
as poet 140 critical amateurism 14, 41–4, 69,
rasik 16–17, 135–6 73, 76–7, 79, 81 n.16, 224
“The Story of Bengali critical humanism 14
Literature” 143–4 Critical Studies programs 81
and Tagore 138 n.20
writing style of 132 critical writing 11, 18, 94, 98, 100
Chaudhuri, Rosinka 16–17 critic/criticism 49–50, 53, 85,
Chiang, Mark 71 97, 111, 134, 136–7, 141,
Christie, Ian 188 182–3
“The Cinema in Arcady” 187–8 academic 13–14, 90, 93–4, 97,
Cinematograph Act (Quota Act) 201
of 1927 183–4 aesthetic 155, 164
268 INDEX

career in India 142 Devers, A. N. 225–6, 233–5, 239

creative 15–16, 94–6, 98–9, n.44
101–2 Dialogue in Dixie 189
feminist 225 diaspora theory of Gilroy 63–4
Fiedler on 53, 56 Dickinson, Renée 185
film 17–18, 184, 186, 190 digital amateurs 5, 8
interdisciplinary 67 digital connectivity 6
with journalism 92–3 digital humanities 41, 46 n.26
literary (see literary critic/ Dinshaw, Carolyn 152, 157, 173
criticism) n.40, 224
practical 110–13, 115, 117, on amateur scholarship 161
121, 123, 145, 204 disciplinary literary study 12, 18, 21
professional 244, 247, 251–2, Doing What Comes Naturally 34
255, 258 Donald, James 188
purpose of 19–23 Donegan, Moira 238 n.27
university-based 90 Donne, John 38, 116, 118–19
Criticism and Truth 134, 136 Dorothy: A Publishing Project
“Criticism for the Whole Person” 225–6, 231–5
20 Duff, William 250–1
“Criticism in Practice” 117–19, Duke Literature department 81–2
126 n.31 n.22
cultural studies 89–90 Dutton, Danielle 225–6, 231–3
Curry, Ruth 225–6, 230–1 Dutt, Toru 141, 143, 147 n.21
Dyke, Anne 122
Dalkey Archive Press (publishing
project) 231–2 Eagleton, Terry 33, 133
Damrosch, David 101, 148 n.27 The Ecstasy of Influence 252–3
Das, Sajanikanta 136 edification/edificatory register 166
Datta, Michael Madhusudan 135, Edmund Wilson in Benares 24 n.4,
139, 143, 147 n.17 50, 60 n.1
Day on the Grand Canal with education 19–20
the Emperor of China (or adult 110–11, 113–14, 116–17,
Surface Is Illusion but so Is 122
Depth) 141 colonial education system 100
day-to-day knowledge 91 humanities 22
de Botton, Alain 20–1, 23, 26 n.26 literary 36–7
Delta (literary magazine) 121 marketization of higher 42, 87
Dennisoff, Dennis 172 n.38 transformative 72–3
de-professionalization 131, 146 “Education and Cinema” 190
n.6, 256 Eisenstein, Sergei 185, 192
Descartes, René 243–4 elective affinity, amateurism 3
detective, amateur 133–4 Eliot, George 116, 207, 215 n.20
Dettmar, Kevin 253 Elliott, Eric 183
 INDEX 269

Emily Books (publishing project) Fisher, Mark 88

225–7, 229–35 Fish, Stanley 13, 34–6
Brooklyn Magazine on 225 Flaubert, Gustave 6
Twitter profile for 238 n.35 Forster, E. M. 206
Emily Magazine 230 Fraser, G. S. 121
Empson, William 112, 209, 216 Fraser, Hilary 167
n.24 “free speech year” programming
English in Schools 117 169
English-language literature 12 Freud, Sigmund 55–6
Errata 87 “The Front Rows” 187, 191
Essay on Original Genius 250 Function of Criticism 33
Eudaemonia, Aristotle’s 20
Evangelista, Stefano 172 n.25 Gallup, George 211
Event Factory 232 Galsworthy, John 115
extra-cinematic writing 182 Gandhi, Leela 173 n.40
Eyers, Tom 41, 46–7 n.26 Gangopadhyay, Manilal 138, 140
Garber, Marjorie 24 n.8, 35, 44
Felski, Rita 26 n.24, 96, 101, 168, n.1, 45 n.14, 50, 57, 224,
261 n.42 251
feminist criticism 225 Garrity, Jane 192–3
The Feminist Press General Broadcasting Technique
feminist publishing studies 223 training course 216 n.24
goals of 222 general readers 21–3
Moberg as volunteer with 222 gentleman amateur 7
origination of 221–2, 227 German Ideology 40
Ferrante, Elena 230 Ghare Bāire (The Home and the
Fiction and the Reading Public World) 138, 140
110 Ghoshal, Somak 238 n.30
Fiedler, Leslie Ghosh, Kasiprasad 143
on criticism 53, 56 Gilliam, Laurence 206–7, 215
Toward an Amateur Criticism n.16
50, 60 n.2 Gilroy, Paul 63–5, 67–9
film critic/criticism 17–18, 184, Gladman, Renee 232–3
186, 190 goddesses, Olympian 161
“Film Gone Male” 189 Godwin, William 251
film industry, British 183–4 Golden Treasury 118
Film Problems of Soviet Russia Goldmann, Lucien 91
192 Goldsmith, Oliver 205, 211–12
Films for Children Goodreads website 6, 45–6 n.17,
Bryher’s 191 213
Richardson’s 190 Gould, Emily 225–6, 230–1
“Films in Education: The Complex Greif, Mark 74–7, 79
of the Machine” 190 Grosse, Anisse 237 n.26
270 INDEX

Gross, John 33 The Feminist Press (see The

The Group (literature) 121–3 Feminist Press)
Grundmann, Reiner 23 n.2 How to Read 112
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline 72–3 How to Teach Reading 112, 125
Gupta, Atulchandra 136 n.10
Gupta, Baradacharan 136 How We Became Posthuman:
Guy, Josephine M. 24 n.8 Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and
Hankins, Leslie 186 Informatics 87
Harrison, Jane 161 Hudson, Benjamin 173 n.40
Hauntings 156–60, 163–4 Hughes, Rhonda 228
Hawthorne Books (publishing Hullot-Kentor, Robert 131, 146
project) 228 n.5
Hayles, N. Katherine 87–8, 92 humanists 20, 79, 173 n.38
Hayot, Eric 83 n.60 humanities 3–4, 42
H. D. 181, 188 digital 41, 46 n.26
Heap, Jane 226 scholars 20
Hearts in Dixie (film) 189 Hynes, Samuel 209–10
Heckling, Aaron 238 n.38
Heffernan, Laura 24 n.9 idioculture 38
Herring, Robert 182–6, 188, 193, idiolect 38
194 n.10, 196 n.39 Ignatieff, Michael 92
Hewison, Robert 207 Ignorant Schoolmaster 72
Heyn, Leah 221–2 imperial project 7
Hick, Darren 253 “The Increasing Congregation”
highbrow culture 6, 17, 20, 22, 187
110 India 98, 132
Hill, Donald L. 95 career for criticism in 142
Hilliard, Christopher 11, 16, 204 first feminist publishing house
Hindu Music 132 228
historicist/contextualist paradigm imperial project in 7
41 intercultural studies 100
Hobsbaum, Philip 121–2 literary language in 142
Hockney, David 141 modernism in 145
Hoggart, Richard 114–17, 122 indignant syllogisms 169–70
Holbrook, David 120 Indira Devi 130
Holmes-Gore, Dorothy 207, 215 In Loving Literature: A Cultural
n.20 History 33–4
Honey and Wax Booksellers In Other Words 75
234–5 In Praise of Amateurism 14
Howe, Florence 221, 227, 229, Intercultural Studies 101
236 n.7 interdisciplinarity 15, 70–1
feminist history 223–4 interdisciplinary criticism 67
 INDEX 271

internet culture, amateur and 4–6, classroom practice 121

39 eighteenth-century culture 110
intimate public 230–1 and Lawrence 115
Iron Circus Comics (publishing and minority culture 109
project) 228 and practical criticism 110–11,
120
Jakobson, Roman 10–11 robustness 115
James, C. L. R. 58 teaching of 112–13, 123
James, William 17, 157, 163–5, and Thompson 117
167, 174 n.51 and Whitehead 120
Jayadeva 132 Leavis, Q. D. 110, 124 n.6, 130,
Johnson, Samuel 110 214 n.10
Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Leconte de Lisle 147–8 n.21
Masculinity 172 n.23 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget) 3, 17,
Joyce, James 233 151–2, 258
Joyless Street (film) 190 aesthetics of 155, 167
and Anstruther-Thomson 173
Kakutani, Michiko 133 n.46
Kali for Women (publishing and art 166
project) 228, 238 n.30 Belcaro 162
Kallol (journal) 137 Evangelista on 172 n.25
Kermode, Frank 133 Fraser on 167
Kickstarter campaign 235 Hauntings 156–60, 163–4
Kindley, Evan 68–9, 81 n.16 and James 164–5, 167, 174
knowledge 5, 7–8, 65 n.51
day-to-day 91 on literary/scientific authority
scholarly 91 157–8
understanding and 9 Louis Norbert 156, 158–61,
knowledge society 4–5 163–4
Koppen, Randi 206 on love 162–3
Kucich, John 153 redefinition of truth 164–5
scholarly writing 166, 168
Laclau, Ernesto 257 scholarship 163, 169
Lahiri, Jhumpa 74–6, 79, 258 sophisticated amateur 153–6,
Landscape with a Man Killed by a 163, 165, 168–70
Snake (painting) 244 spiritual approach 164–6
Lauter, Paul 214 n.9 Vital Lies: Studies of Some
Lawrence, D. H. 115, 201 Varieties of Recent
lay expertise 5, 8 Obscurantism 163, 165,
“Learning to Rap” 76–7 167
Leavis, F. R. 16, 22, 33, 109, 112, Vital Lies/vital liars 151, 153,
125 n.10, 130–1, 204, 214 164–8
n.10 legacy media 6
272 INDEX

Lejeune, Caroline (C. A.) 183–6, Living a Feminist Life 72

192 The London Mercury (literary
Lenauer, Jean 182, 188 magazine) 184–5
Lesbian Nuns 236 n.11 Loofbourow, Lili 68–9
Lessing, Doris 221 Louis Norbert 156, 158–61,
Lethem, Jonathan 252 163–4
Liebling, A. J. 223 Love, Heather 173 n.40
linear professionalism 152 Lucie-Smith, Edward 121–3
The Listener (magazine) 185 Lutz, Tom 13–15, 19, 231, 257
Listener Research Department Lynch, Deidre 9, 33–4
211, 217 nn.33–4 Lytton, Lord 118
literary activism 92
literary biography 93 Macbeth 112
Literary Criticism: A Concise Macfarlane, Robert 250
Political History 46 n.25, Macherey, Pierre 141
203 Maciak, Philip 69
literary critic/criticism 2, 11, 13–14, MacNeice, Louis 209, 216 n.24
16–18, 24 n.7, 35, 41–2, 89, Macpherson, Kenneth 181–3, 185,
91, 93, 109, 141–2, 146, 188, 193
201–6, 213, 245, 258 Madhū-smriti (Memories of
literary expertise 4–19 Madhu/Sweet Memories)
literary history 141, 146, 226 147 n.17
literary magazine 184–5 magisterial unprofessionalism
literary study 1–2, 4, 7–10, 12, 14, 224
18, 24 n.9, 33–4, 36, 42, Majumdar, Saikat 45 n.16, 50–1,
89–90, 101, 203, 255 53–4, 56–9, 60 n.1, 70, 224,
literary theory 93 249, 251
literary works 37–8, 42–4, 113 the man of letters 7, 24 n.8, 205
reading/hearing 39 Marantz, Andrew 169
reviewers of 38–9 Marcus, Laura 186
literary writing 95, 98–9, 102, Marcus, Sharon 69, 80 n.12, 102,
137, 143 105 n.73
literature 8, 11, 33–4, 92–3, 96, market activism 92
101, 142, 146, 202–5 Marx, Karl 40, 99, 132
academics in 41–4 masculine professional scholarship
Bengali (see Bengali literature) 156
contemporary 204, 206, 210 Mason, Harold 121
English-language 12 Mass Civilisation and Minority
on plagiarism 247–8 Culture 109
professors of 9–10, 21 Matheson, David 249–50
publishing industry 36 Matheson, Hilda 206
Wood on 9 matrilinear system 161
Litvak, Joseph 152 McCracken, Scott 192
 INDEX 273

McDonald, Peter 14–16, 19, 257 Mother (film) 190

McDonald, Rónán 24 n.7, 89–90, Mouffe, Chantal 257
92–5, 98, 105 n.72 Mukhopadhyay, Bimalaprasad 136
McNamara, Nathan Scott 237 Mukhopadhyay, Dhurjatiprasad
n.22 136, 140
Mead, Henry 215 n.13 multiple time-sense in poetry 78–9
media industry professionals 182 Murray, Simone 223–4, 236 n.12,
Meisel, Edmund 185 238 n.29
Meltzer, Françoise 244, 250 Murry, John Middleton 7, 24 n.8
Menon, Ritu 228 The Muse in Chains 33, 201–3,
Micir, Melanie 11, 18–19, 73 209
middlebrow culture 17–18, 20–2, with New Criticism 204
26 n.24 Myers, L. H. 115–16
minority culture 109–10 Myles, Eileen 230
Mishra, Pankaj 5–6, 8, 24 n.4,
50–1, 53–4, 57–8, 60 n.1, Nabokov, Vladimir 10–11, 52
249, 251 Naipaul, V. S. 58
Miss Brown 172 n.38 naive amateurism 156–7, 162
mistrust of expert 32 Nakamura, Lisa 24 n.5
Mittra, Peary Chand (Tekchand The Nation (periodicals) 21
Thakur) 139 naturalism, scientific 166
Mixed Media: Feminist Presses The Nearest Thing to Life 93
and Publishing Politics 223, networked expertise 5, 8
236 n.12, 238 n.29 New Criticism 203–4, 214 n.9
Moberg, Verne 222, 236 n.7 “New Judgment” (radio series) 18,
Modern Bengali Prose 134 201–2, 204–5, 209
modernist collections of literature Appreciation Index for 211
and art 226 audience response for 211–12
modernity, Indian 145 Bowen’s contributions to 215
modern literary criticism 120 n.17
modern research university 7, 22, fee structures for 208
168 final critics of 212–13
Modjaji Press (publishing project) programs of 202, 207–9, 211,
229 215 n.16
Molla, Rani 24 n.6 recordings of 216 n.25
Monroe, Harriet 186, 226 New Left Review (journal) 92
Monro, Harold 186 Newtonian disciplines 7
Montaigne, Michel 257 Newton, Isaac 7
Moore, Lisa C. 228 The New Yorker (periodicals) 21
Moore, Marianne 182 New York Review of Books
Moore, Olive 183, 185, 192 (magazine) 6, 54, 57
morale par provision 244 Ngai, Sianne 259 n.11
moral sophistication 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55–6
274 INDEX

Nikolova, Zlatina 17–18 Pilgrimage 181, 192–3

North, Joseph 22, 41, 46 n.25, plagiarism 257
203–4 “avoiding plagiarism” 247, 254
Nouvelle Revue Française (literary The Ecstasy of Influence
magazine) 100 252–3
literature on 247–8
O’Donnell, Heather 234 and professionalization 248
O’Faoláin, Seán 18, 205–6, Plato 31, 253
211–12 Poetry 186
Olympian goddesses 161 Poetry and Drama 186
O’Malley, Raymond 117–18 POOL Group 181–2
On Bengali Writers 143 A Popular Literature for Bengal
Online Writing Laboratory 143
(OWL), Purdue 247–8, 250 Porter, Peter 121
“On Reset” 78 “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” 173
Oprah’s Book Club 21 Possession (novel) 158
original/originality, students postcolonial theory 93
244–55, 258, 258 n.3, 259 post-critique method 25 n.24,
n.4 101–2, 169, 175 n.74
Orwell, George 206, 209, 215 Potter, Stephen 33, 201, 205–6,
n.13, 216 n.24 209, 212–13, 258
“Ou en est la critique literary broadcasts 204–5
aurjourd’hui?” (Where Is memo of 208
Criticism Today?) 91 The Muse in Chains 201–4,
209
Pabst, G. W. 183, 185, 190, 192 and New Criticism 203–4
Padacāraṇ (To Walk/To Recite) “New Judgment” (see “New
140 Judgment” (radio series))
Palgrave, Francis Turner 118 to O’Faoláin 206, 215 n.15
Pandora’s Box (film) 185 and Spender 210–11, 216 n.30
para-cinematic writing 182, 193 writers approached by
parent majors 10 215 n.19
Parsons, Talcott 22, 26 n.31 Pound, Ezra 44 n.1, 112, 142
Partisan Review (magazine) 6, 21, Poussin, Nicolas 243–4
54 Prac Crit (online journal) 92
passion majors 10 practical criticism 110–13, 115,
Penelope, Julia 223, 236 n.11 117, 121, 123, 145, 204
Persephone Books (publishing Practical Criticism 118
project) 225, 228, 237 n.23 Premer Kheyāl (Love Song) 140
Peterson, Jordan 157–8 pre-professional scholarship 157
Phalguni (Of Spring) 138 Principles of Literary Criticism
phantom discipline 223, 236 n.12 111
Picard, Raymond 136–7 print journalism, radio 206
 INDEX 275

Print Vision (publishing project) radiogenic literary criticism 18

228 Radway, Janice 21
Pritchett, Elizabeth 192 Rainey, Lawrence 226
“The Problem of Expertise in Rancière, Jacques 72
Knowledge Societies” 23 n.2 rasik 16–17, 135–6
professional-managerial class 4 Rāyater Kathā (The Peasant’s
The Professionals (film) 35 Story) 132
Professionals and Amateurs 256 Ray, Dwijendralal 137
professionals/professionalism 4, 8, readers 2, 39, 42–3
12–18, 22, 36–7, 42, 54–6, amateur 14–15, 44
59, 86–9, 152, 251–4 eclectic 14
academics 69, 79, 89, 96 general 21–3
vs. amateurism 31–5 and hearer 38
critic/criticism 182–3, 244, Reading and Criticism 114, 116–17
247, 251–2, 255, 258 Reading and Discrimination
Lee’s 156 117–18
linear 152 recommendation system algorithm
prophets 164 6–7
publishing 222 RedBone Press (publishing
for Robbins 89 project) 228, 238 n.31
scholars 70, 151, 153, 155, Redgrove, Peter 121, 123–4
157, 223, 249 Reith, John 214 n.10
scholarship 154–5, 157 Reprints Advisory Committee 222
“The Professions and Social “A Review of Modern Bengali
Structure” 26 n.31 Literature” 129
The Progress of the Soul 119 The Revolt of Islam 251, 260 n.28
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing Richards, I. A. 16, 22, 89, 111–12,
77–8 118, 120, 125 n.10, 204
public writing 68–9, 80 n.12 Richardson, Dorothy 3, 17–18,
outlets 81 n.16 181–2, 185–7, 258. See also
publishing industry 36 Close Up (film magazine)
Purdue OWL 247–8, 250 Almost Persuaded 189
and Barry 186
“Qu’en est-il de la critique?” and Bryher 192, 194 n.1
(What about Criticism?) 91 on cinema 186–8
Dialogue in Dixie 189
radio (mass media) in film criticism 182–4, 190,
Adorno on 205, 212 193
for critic 213 Films for Children 190–1
Gilliam on feature of 206–7 “Films in Education: The
modernism 206 Complex of the Machine”
print journalism 206 190
professional identity of 209 “The Front Rows” 187, 191
276 INDEX

Garrity on 192–3 scholarly writing 16, 69, 71, 151,

“The Increasing Congregation” 166, 168
187 scholarship 65–6, 71, 73, 76–7,
Marcus on 186 79–80
Pilgrimage 181, 192–3 amateur 152–4, 161–2
on sound film 189–90 Lee’s 163, 169
on sound technology 188–9 masculine academic 154–5
Richards, Prince 90 masculine professional 156
Riker, Martin 231 pre-professional 157
The Rise and Fall of the Man of professional 154–5, 157
Letters 33 Smith on gendered ideas of 155
Robbins, Bruce 35–6, 50, 89, 95 The School of Life (educational
Roland Barthes by Roland institution) 21–2
Barthes 39–41, 46 n.19 scientific academic scholarship
Room, Abram 190 155–6
A Room of One’s Own 65 ScoopWhoop website 6
Rose, Jonathan 24 n.9 Scott, C. P. 184
Rossetti, Christina 115 Scrutiny (literary journal) 114,
Rubenstein, Mary-Jane 254, 116–17, 204
261 n.42 The Second Shelf (publishing
Rukeyser, Muriel 78–9 project) 225–6, 233–5, 239
Ryan, Kay 66 n.51
The Second Shelf: A Quarterly
Sabujpatra (journal) 136–8, 140 235
Sāhitya (literature) 142–3, “The Second Shelf: On the Rules
148 n.27 of Literary Fiction for Men
Said, Edward 3, 254–5 and Women” 233
Saint-Amour, Paul 245, 250 Secular Vocations: Intellectuals,
Sanibārer Cithi (Saturday Letter) Professionals, Culture 35,
136 89
Sanneh, Kelefa 172 n.23 semipublic writing 69, 76, 80
Sanskrit poetics 142 n.14
Santayana, George 223 outlets 81 n.16
Sarkar, Jadunath 100 Seshagiri, Urmila 225
Sasidharan, Keerthik 74–6 Shakespeare and Company 233
amateur impulse of 74 Shapiro, Ben 169
Schneider, Mark A. 166 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 118–19, 251,
scholar(s) 70, 80 n.14, 254 260 n.28
amateur 161 Shitty Media Men 238 n.27
independent 71, 73 The Sight of Death 244
professional 151, 153, 155, silent vs. sound film 189
157, 223, 249 Silvey, Robert 211, 213, 217 n.33
scholarly knowledge 91 “The Sky Is Falling” 83 n.60
 INDEX 277

Sloane, Paul 189 students, amateur 244–8, 254–6

Small, Helen 25 n.18 beginning 258
Smith, Bonnie G. 154–5 contribute original scholarship
on pre-professional scholarship 245, 247
157 originality 245, 250–2
social media 5–7, 19 subjectivist impressionism 90,
Society for Psychical Research 98
(SPR) 157–8 suggestion/suggestive power 65
sociotechnical milieu 4–5 Srinivasan on 224
Socrates 31, 253–4, 256 Woolf on 65–7
Some Books program 206 Surface Reading 102, 105 n.74
Som, Nagendranath 147 n.17
Sonnet Pancāśat (Fifty Sonnets) Tagore, Rabindranath 15–16,
140 89–90, 96–102, 104 n.60,
Sontag, Susan 102, 105 n.74 104 n.66, 130, 132, 136–41,
sophisticated amateurism 17, 145–6, 148 n.27
152–7, 159, 163, 165 The Tatler (periodicals) 10
vs. sophists 168–70 Tel-Nun-Lakri (Oil-Salt-Wood)
sophisticated naiveté 152 132
The Sot-Weed Factor 52 Temple, Emily 239 n.49
“The Sound Film: Salvation of Theaetetus 253–4, 256
Cinema” 188 A Theory of Literary Production
sound technology 188–9 141
The Space of Literature 97 “There’s No Place like Home”
Spark, Muriel 230 187
The Spectator (periodicals) 10, “95 Theses” 86
186 Thomas, T. W. 114
Speculative Formalism: Literature, Thompson, Denys 117–18,
Theory, and the Critical 126 n.31
Present 46 n.26 Three Guineas 227
Spender, Stephen 18, 205, 209–10, TLS (literary review) 6, 54
216 n.27, 217 n.31 To a Skylark 119
spiritual approach 165–6 Toward an Amateur Criticism 50,
Squire, J. C. 185 60 n.2
Sri Chaitanya 132 Towheed, Shafquat 166
Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor 14–15, Townsend, Christopher 17–18
224, 257 traditional news venues, websites
Starobinski, Jean 91 of 6
Steele, Richard 9–10 transcendentalism 137
Steiner, George 87–90, 95–6 “Treating the whole person”
Stein, Gertrude 182 approach 20
“The Story of Bengali Literature” Trinh T. Minh-ha 66
143–4 Trotman, C. Spike 228
278 INDEX

Turnitin.com 248 Walker, Jesse 213–14 n.2

tutors, adult education 113–14, Warner, Michael 25 n.24
117 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 230
Wasson, Haidee 184, 186
Ulysses 233 Weber, Max 22
Uncritical Reading 26 n.24 The Western Canon 89
undergraduate writers 245, 248 Whitehead, Alfred North 22
“Universities at the Crossroads” 87 Whitehead, Frank 118–20
university-based critics 90 Whitman, Walt 205, 209–10
Use of English 117–18, 126 n.31 Who Was Changed and Who Was
The Uses of Literacy 116 Dead 232
The Uses of Literature 26 n.24 Wiegman, Robyn 71
Wilde, Oscar 173 n.39
Vadde, Aarthi 24 n.3, 26 n.31 Willetts, David 87–8, 102
A Valediction: Forbidding Williams, Raymond 113–14, 116,
Mourning 118 122
Valéry, Paul 252 ‘Will to Believe’ pragmatism
The Value of the Humanities 25 164–5
n.18 Wilson, Edmund 54, 249
Varughese, E. Dawson 71, 73 Winick, Mimi 17, 258
“vegetable” genius 249, 255, 257 wisdom 22
Victorian sentimentalism, de Botton on 21
Rossetti’s 115 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9
Victorian sophistication 153 Wittman, Kara 19–20
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Wolitzer, Meg 233
224, 236–7 n.16 woman/lady amateur 154–6,
Viner, Katharine 91 158–61
Vingt mot-clés sur Roland Barthes Wood, James 93, 133
40, 46 n.23 Wood, Michael 8–9
Virago Press 227–8, 238 n.27 Woolf, Leonard 227
visual arts 45 n.13 Woolf, Virginia 56, 69, 110, 206,
Visva-Bhārati University 100–1, 227
105 n.72, 130 criticism of 66
visva sāhitya (World Literature) A Room of One’s Own 65
145, 148 n.27 on suggestion (suggestive
Vital Lies: Studies of Some power) 65–7
Varieties of Recent Three Guineas 227
Obscurantism 163–4, 165, Words with Friends: Socially
167 Networked Reading 24 n.5
Vital Lies/vital liars 151, 153, Wordsworth, William 33
164–8 World Literature 101, 142, 145,
Voice program 206 148 n.27
 INDEX 279

Writing Degree Zero 141, 148 n.24 Zaid, Gabriel 243–4

writing, qualities for mode of 65 Zhang, Jenny 230
Zubaan and Women Unlimited
Yiannopoulos, Milo 169–70 (publishing project) 228
Young, Edward 249–50