Doing Criticism Across Literary and Screen Arts

Not only an accessible hands-on guide to writing criticism across the literary arts, the dramatic arts, and the narrative screen arts, but also a book that makes a case for how and why criticism matters today

Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts is a practical guide to engaging actively and productively with a critical object, whether a film, a novel, or a play. Going beyond the study of lyric poetry and literature to include motion picture and dramatic arts, this unique text provides specific advice on how to best write criticism while offering concrete illustrations of what it looks like on the page.

Divided into two parts, the book first presents an up-to-date account of the state of criticism in both Anglo-American and Continental contexts—describing both the longstanding mission and the changing functions of criticism over the centuries and discussing critical issues that bridge the literary and screen arts in the contemporary world. The second part of the book features a variety of case studies of criticism across media, including works by canonical authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and W. B. Yeats; films such as Coppola's The Conversation and Hitchcock's Vertigo; screen adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day; and a concluding chapter on several of Spike Lee's film "joints" that brings several of the book's central concepts to bear on work of a single film auteur.

Helping students of literature and cinema write well about what they find in their reading and viewing, Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts:

• Discusses how the bridging of the literary arts and screen arts can help criticism flourish in the present day
• Illustrates how the doing of criticism is in practice a particular kind of writing
• Considers how to generalize the consequences of criticism beyond personal growth and gratification
• Addresses the ways the practice of criticism matters to the practice of the critical object
• Suggests that doing without criticism is not only unwise, but also perhaps impossible
• Features case studies organized under the rubrics of conversation, adaptation, genre, authorship and seriality

Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts is an ideal text for students in introductory courses in criticism, literary studies, and film studies, as well as general readers with interest in the subject.

James Chandler is William K. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago, USA. He has written widely about Romanticism, British and Irish literature since the early Enlightenment, American cinema, and the relationship of literary criticism to film criticism. He is the author of several books including England in 1819 and An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema.

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Part I Critical Issues 1

Chapter 1 Doing Criticism/Doing without Criticism 3

1 Functions of Criticism 3

2 Two Thought Experiments 7

3 Limits of the Lyric Paradigm 12

4 Criticism in the Convenience Store 21

5 Criticism between Page and Screen 26

Chapter 2 Makings of the Critical Essay 36

1 Objects, Occasions, Frames of Reference 36

2 Criticism and the Essay Form 41

3 Critical Questions I 49

4 Critical Questions II 61

5 Critical Judgments 68

Part II Criticism in Practice 83

Chapter 3 Conversations 85

1 Beyond the Poem Itself 85

2 Coppola Sounds Out Hitchcock 97

3 Austen, Edgeworth, and the Moral Economy of the Novel 111

Chapter 4 Adaptations 127

1 Two-Way Street 127

2 Point of View in Fiction and Cinema: The Remains of the Day 137

3 Frankenstein and Its Adapted Progeny 154

Chapter 5 Genres 170

1 Laws of Genre 170

2 Satire across Media: Character and Impersonation 178

3 Melodrama across Media: Character and Personalization 198

Chapter 6 Conclusion: Authorship and Seriality— Spike Lee’s Joints 217

1 Authorship, Seriality, and the Case of Spike Lee 217

2 Some Spike Lee Joints: Conversations and Adaptations 227

3 Crossing Genres in Bamboozled 251

Index 269

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