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Crrritic!
Sighs, Cries, Lies, Insults, Outbursts,
Hoaxes, Disasters, Letters of Resignation, and Various Other Noises
Off in These the First and Last Days of Literary Criticism ... Not
to Mention the University
| Edited by John Schad and Oliver Tearle |
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| John Schad is
Professor of Modern Literature at University of Lancaster. His
most recent book, Someone Called Derrida (2007), is
a real-life detective narrative centred on Jacques Derrida’s
secret Oxford life. His novel, Nowhere Near London. Or,
I Am Not Walter Benjamin, comes out in 2011.
Oliver Tearle
is currently
completing a doctoral thesis on hallucination in weird fiction
at Loughborough University. He has written for (among others)
Notes and Queries, Critical Sense, and the Modern
Language Review. His first book, The Curtained Room,
will be published by Sussex Academic Press.
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The Verb to Crrritic!
Radio 3’s cabaret of the word, featuring the best poetry,
new writing and performances recently included John Schad’s
GodotOnSea. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0106w1r
Well this is it: the end, last gasp, final straw;
in short, the concluding dark volume in a series of books some idiot
called ‘critical inventions.’ Let us be like wry Oscar
Wilde, said the idiot, and dream of the critic as artist, or at
least as someone else, as someone other than who we had thought
he was, or been taught he was. Let us, continued the idiot, set
the critical dogs off the leash and see what they come back with.
And here they are: no less than twenty-four press-ganged souls all
huddled together for warmth; some are critics, some are poets, and
some are critic-poets; among them such as Steven Connor, Jonathan
Dollimore, Ewan Fernie, Mark Ford, Kevin Hart, Geoffrey Hartman,
Esther Leslie, Willy Maley, and Michael Simmons Roberts.
… So, twenty-four voices, twenty-four shots in the
dark, or maybe shots at the dark, or possibly the head, or even
the foot. But whatever, each is a shot at pushing the battered perambulator
of dear old criticism so far and so fast that someone somewhere
– whether in anger, derision, or pain – might just cry
‘Crritic!,’ that curse of all curses, the best of all
possible anathema. But maybe, just maybe, the exclamation ‘Crritic!’
will here double as a cri de coeur, or howl of self-loathing, or
scream of delight, or laugh in the night, or just a smashed-up and
beaten old prayer. We shall see.
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WAY IN
John Schad
MANIFESTOS
The Lexicon of Punk Criticism
Oliver Tearle
Our Never-to-be-slighted ‘Fun’
Tony Sharpe
The Critic as Artist
John Goodby
Rage, Rage Against the Dying of Delight
Steven Connor
ON THE WALL
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
Michael Symmons Roberts
The Writing on the Byre Beams
Helen Farish
Dithering
Mark Ford
HISTORIES
Criticism and Creativity
Graham Holderness
Broken Hallelujah
Kevin Mills
The Critic as Fiction, or Dr. King on Sheds
– an Entertainment
Simon King
OFF THE WALL
Days of 1989
Helen Farish
Six Children
Mark Ford
The Ghosted Interpreter
Geoffrey Hartman
IDEAS
The Bruise that Heidegger Built
Drew Milne
Critical Criticism’s Critique: 13 Theses,
or, It is All Rubbish
Esther Leslie
Of the Falling of Stones: Notes Towards a Theory
of Intuition
Harold Schweizer
Do We Live in an Age of Science and of Poetry?
An Interview with Charles Olson and a Time Traveller
Peter Middleton
OVER THE WALL
Turning Pages; or, The Critic as Baby
Jonathan Taylor
That Shadow
Kevin Hart
The Death of Hart Crane
Mark Ford
LIVES
On Leaving
Jonathan Dollimore
Uni and Me
Willy Maley
How to Kill a Labrador (an Elegy)
Susan Bradley-Smith
INVENTIONS
Lamenting Maud’s Worth Becoming Maud
Duraid Jalili
GodotOnSea
John Schad
From Dunsinane
Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey
WAY OUT
Oliver Tearle |
| ‘Wow! What can one
say more? After this book, academic “discourse”
(note the “scared quotes”) in all its genres,
not to speak of poetry, and not to speak of the distinction
between creator and crritic, will never be the same again.
This book fulfills, and then some, the project of John Schad’s
series, “Critical Inventions”: “. . . this
series seeks the truly critical critic – or, to be paradoxical,
the critic as critic; the critic who is a critic of criticism
as conventionally understood, or misunderstood. He or she
is the critic who will dare to disturb the universe, or at
least the university - in particular, the institutionalisation
of criticism that is professional, university English.”
The twenty-four critical creations gathered here are almost
all by Britishers, two by European-born immigrants to the
United States, one by an Australian. These include poems that
are critical essays; autobiographies that are really critiques
of the British institutionalization of literary study; critical
essays that flaunt the established conventions of such essays,
et cetera. The law of genre is shamelessly defied. Allusions
overt and covert abound, as if to indicate that the flotsam
and jetsam of the Western literary tradition is floating around
the minds of these writers in strange juxtapositions, testifying,
it may be, to the not entirely predictable result of much
academic literary study. Perhaps the most devastating effect
of this collection is to make the reader, this reader at least,
feel that everything he has ever written has been unconscious
parody. Read, but read at your peril. Caveat lector.’
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Academic and poet Dr Kevin Mills, Reader in English Literature,
and tutor in English and Creative Writing has won the inaugural
M Wynn Thomas Award for the best critical essay. http://news.glam.ac.uk/news/en/2012/apr/25/glamorgan-academic-wins-m-wynn-thomas-award/
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Publication Details
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Hardback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-342-3 |
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Paperback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-382-9 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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320 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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June 2011 |
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Illustrated: |
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No |
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Hardback Price: |
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£50.00 / $69.95 |
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Paperback Price: |
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£19.95 / $34.95 |
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| This book can be ordered online or by telephone. |
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For the UK and Rest of the World:
Gazelle Book Services
tel. 44 (0)1524-68765 |
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For the United States:
International Specialized Book Services
tel. (1) 503 287-3093 or (800) 944-6190 |
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For Canada:
Scholarly Book Services Inc.
tel. (1) 800-847-9736 |
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