The Critic as Amateur

by Saikat Majumdar (Editor), Aarthi Vadde (Editor)

Overview

Can the criticism of literature and culture ever be completely professionalized? Does criticism retain an amateur impulse even after it evolves into a highly specialized discipline enshrined in the university?

The Critic as Amateur brings leading and emerging scholars together to explore the role of amateurism in literary studies. While untrained reading has always been central to arenas beyond the academy – book clubs, libraries, used bookstores – its role in the making of professional criticism is often disavowed or dismissed. This volume, the first on the critic as amateur, restores the links between expertise, autodidactic learning and hobbyist pleasure by weaving literary criticism in and out of the university.

Our contributors take criticism to the airwaves, through the culture of early cinema, the small press, the undergraduate classroom and extracurricular writing groups. Canonical critics are considered alongside feminist publishers and queer intellectuals. The Critic as Amateur is a vital book for readers invested in the disciplinary history of literary studies and the public role of the humanities. It is also a crucial resource for anyone interested in how literary criticism becomes a richly diverse yet shared discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501341403
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He is the author of numerous books, including Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (2013), College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), and the novel The Scent of God (2019).

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, USA. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2016 (2016), winner of the 2018 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Criticism for the Whole Person Aarthi Vadde 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 Milliard 109

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

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 Chris Townsend 181

9 New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air Emily Bloom 201

10 The Small Press and the Feminist Critic Melanie Mich 221

Epilogue: New, Interesting, and Original-the Undergraduate as Amateur Kara Wittman 243

Index 265

Editorial Reviews

This splendid, exhaustively researched, and timely collection—buoyed by the editors’ equally comprehensive introduction and a contrapuntal pedagogical epilogue on New, Interesting, and Original: The Undergraduate as Amateur—is substantial in developing its arguments.” - World Literature Today

“It is a rare book of literary criticism that can both expand the field and offer a self-exegesis of it. The Critic as Amateur, edited by Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde, is such a book. This richly suggestive collection of essays negotiates the derring-do of the provocateur-amateur position, while reflexively demonstrating the scholarly expertise required to argue for the importance – indeed necessity – of such a position." - Jourbanal of Postcolonial Writing

“This is an engaging and often enthralling collection of essays that goes to the heart of current debates about the purpose of literary studies. Neither a simple defense of amateurism nor a disparagement of it, it offers substantial and thought-provoking insights on the many entanglements of professional and amateur reading.” —Rita Felski, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA, and Niels Bohr Professor, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

“Nothing amateurish about this kaleidoscopic array of essays on a question central to literary criticism and to the humanities more generally: How do love and work shape esthetic experience and the project of analyzing that experience? From a cast of characters populated by fans as well as writers, jourbanalists as well as monograph-writers, students as well as teachers, emerges the insight that even—or especially—professionals engage in amateur criticism, and that the resulting genres challenge received understandings of populism, institutions, and indeed reading itself. A thought-provoking set of arguments accessible to professionals and amateurs alike.” —Leah Price, Professor of English, Harvard University, USA

“In an age marked simultaneously by sterile professionalism, revolts against experts, and information overload, The Critic as Amateur bracingly highlights both new and neglected ways of understanding literature, the self, and the world. Anyone concerned about the future of reading and writing should read it.”” —Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017) and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012)

From the Publisher