Is Shakespeare any Good? E-Book

Richard Bradford

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 706

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Is Shakespeare any Good? reveals why certain literary works and authors are treated as superior to others, and questions the literary establishment's criteria for creating an imperium of "great" writers. * Enables readers to articulate and formulate their own arguments about the quality of literature - including works that convention forbids us to dislike * Dismantles the claims of academic criticism - particularly Theory - to tell us anything useful about why we like or appreciate literature * Challenges and shatters many longstanding beliefs about literature and its evaluation * Poses serious questions about the value of literature, and studying literature, and presents these in a lively and entertainingly provocative manner

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 A Brief Essay on Taste

2 The Dreadful Legacy of Modernism

3 Is Shakespeare Any Good?

4 Mad Theories

5 Defining Literature: The Bête Noir of Academia

6 Evaluation

7 Popular Literature

8 Is Literature Any Good For Us?

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Also available:

The Novel Now: Contemporary British FictionRichard Bradford

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30 Great Myths About the RomanticsDuncan Wu

Is Shakespeare Any Good?

And Other Questions on How to Evaluate Literature

Richard Bradford

This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bradford, Richard, 1957–   Is Shakespeare any good? : and other questions on how to evaluate literature / Richard Bradford.      pages   cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-1-118-22001-6 (cloth) ) – ISBN 978-1-118-21997-3 (paper)1. Canon (Literature)   2. Literature–Philosophy.   I. Title.   PN81.B64 2015   809–dc23

         2014050196

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright. Engraving from The Leisure Hour Magazine April 1864. © shutterstock/StocksnapperDecorative collage – bright vertical background © shutterstock/ Lukiyanova Natalia / frenta

For Ames

Acknowledgments

As usual, Dr Amy Burns has played a vital part in the preparation of this book, and my position as Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon, where literary aesthetics is a key aspect of research, has proved a stimulus for several of the chapters. Thanks in particular are due to Professor Madelena Gonzalez. The University of Ulster has provided an excellent environment for my research. A brief passage in Chapter 7 first appeared in Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015) and sections of Chapters 5 and 6 first appeared in Poetry: The Ultimate Guide (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).

Introduction

I gave some thought to including in the title of this book, or perhaps the subtitle, some reference to “literary aesthetics.” It was a brief and untroubling thought. Literary aesthetics, the artistic qualities and value of literature if you will, is a long-serving concept – as old as Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus – which has been so savagely dismembered and battered both by literary critics and philosophers as to defy even the most liberal, capacious attempt at a definition.

Longinus, for example, was responsible for the concept of the sublime. He argued that sublimity is a supplement to the persuasive power of rhetoric, something that transports the reader’s emotions to a state of exaltation. Burke and Kant had doubts about the value of this linguistic drug; Pater and Wilde worshipped it irrationally; Adorno and Lyotard ridiculed it as proof of the limitations of bourgeois thinking. Had these been simply differences of opinion then the matter might in itself be interesting, but when we read these thinkers we encounter not so much disagreement as a lack of consensus on what they are discussing. No one seems clear on what the sublime actually involves, and even if some thread of continuity can be traced back to Longinus’s original thesis a question remains. Did he argue that the sublime was a defining characteristic of literature? If so what is literature supposed to do for us? Make us feel better?

For those who did debate the function and purpose of literature, their exchanges resemble a conversation between figures speaking in different languages, each with only a slight knowledge of what the others are saying.

Plato treated poets as superfluous to the proper functions of the state. Shaftesbury and Hobbes, in the eighteenth century, saw them as shifty chroniclers of the harmony, or otherwise, of the society they represented and wrote about. Friedrich Schiller, conversely, regarded the instability of literary works as part of a dialogue between art and the undercurrents that society tried to disguise; in this he anticipated such Marxist critics as Lukács and Jameson.

My point is that whenever you start to follow a trail that will, you hope, lead toward a conclusive principle of literary aesthetics, all you will encounter are byways, unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions about what literature is and what it does. I will not ignore completely the subdiscipline of literary aesthetics; contemporary practitioners will feature prominently in the concluding chapter. But I will not allow its digressive self-absorption to divert us from the question at hand: how we distinguish between good and bad literature.

If the most frequently cited contributors to the subdiscipline of literary aesthetics have anything in common it is a collective reluctance to say anything specific about literature. Instead, poems, plays, and novels become an adjunct to their pursuit of other agendas, usually far more elemental and philosophically profound. Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Friedrich Nietzsche appear to disagree on virtually all elements of literature and art, but look closer at their writings and a common feature emerges. They are not really interested in literature per se at all. Coleridge uses it as a model for his faintly bizarre ideas regarding perception; Arnold sees it as a substitute for the decline in Christian belief; Nietzsche treats it as symptomatic of what Arnold fears that nineteenth century society is about to become: a delusional preoccupation with high emotion as a substitute for thinking. We read them and find ourselves clutching at unfulfilled promises, begging them to address basic questions, such as: “What is literature?” and “Why are some writers superior to others?” – questions they studiously avoid.

All of this was a horrible forecast for the present state of things. The chapter on “Literature” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics begins by instructing us that literature cannot be defined, either in terms of its intrinsic formal properties or as a cultural and social institution. The author, Peter Lamarque, is a professional philosopher but his sentiments are routinely echoed in all branches of academic literary studies. The standard formula is to inform, or remind, the reader that in years gone by the boundary between literary and nonliterary texts was often unrecognizable; that the King James Bible was admired for its “literary” qualities, that more recently Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature without having composed a novel or poem between them. After that, in case you are not yet convinced, you are shown that the supposedly defining elements of verse and fiction all feature in television advertisements, newspapers, and road signs.

I will tackle these contentious issues in more detail but I must first reflect on their ludicrous nature. A professional philosopher or academic critic might feel it appropriate to ask if the King James Bible is intrinsically different from the first generation of novels produced a century later by Defoe and others, but are sane, intelligent individuals troubled by such questions when they browse through the opening pages of a novel in a bookshop or even on Amazon? Let me ask you: do you have to remind yourself that a volume by Jamie Oliver is not, in truth, a work of fiction or a selection of his verse? The hypothesis is too absurd to merit a response. We know the difference between literary and nonliterary works much as we know the difference between a refrigerator and a motor car: our ability to make this distinction involves a facility generally referred to as common sense.

To summarize: Academia has decided that literature cannot be defined and has also therefore absolved itself from addressing the question of literary quality. If we don’t know what it is we can’t evaluate it, can’t compare this novel or that poem with another in terms of its stylistic execution and general significance.

The situation is preposterous in that we have a canon of authors, and books, which is the mainstay of literary studies at every point from GCSE through A levels to degree courses. But since we can’t come to any conclusion on what literature is, nor can we justify our elevation of a particular group of writers to the status of greatness.

Evaluation – that is, deciding on whether we enjoy, admire, and respect one author above another – is the elephant in the sitting room of the literary establishment. Every day – if we read literary works – we make decisions on whether we enjoy or admire authors, and so do reviewers in newspapers. But in doing so we refer to no abstract model for literary merit – even as something we might wish to disagree with – because schools and universities do not enable us to comment on issues such as quality.

It is the principal purpose of this book to build bridges between instinctive judgments and reasoned assessment. I will not attempt to impose upon readers a standard formula for the rating literary tests – in the end personal preference has to play an important part in this – but what I will do is to enable readers to articulate and formulate arguments.

I offer readers case studies on key aspects of literature and evaluation. Each is proactively controversial and although I shall attempt to maintain a degree of evenhandedness I will be merciless in exposing the conspiracies and inherent contradictions that inform the world of writing, publishing, selling, and discussing books. In Chapter 6 I provide readers with an evaluative forum, a means of articulating their opinions on literature; they are offered a platform from which they can confidently take on professional critics and the academic establishment.

I should add that my opinions on literature, as expressed in this book, are to an extent an extension of my temperamental characteristics. But no one is impartial. I shall in the book do two things. I will be honest and provocatively nonconformist; I will challenge shibboleths and make readers reconsider what they have taken for granted. I will also shift the focus to what in cold analytical terms literary evaluation actually involves.

1A Brief Essay on Taste

This essay might seem not only brief but somewhat random, yet there is method in it. I have chosen points in the history of literature when authors have, for whatever motive, gone against the general expectations of what literature is supposed to be and do. Literary history is punctuated mainly by revolutions; some gradual, even benign, others sudden and momentous. Since the sixteenth century, thanks to the printing press, there has been a recorded dialogue between literature and criticism and from this we can discern trends in the way that the literary establishment, ostensibly acting on behalf of the reader, has responded to these changes. Prior to the middle of the twentieth century a general rule was maintained. When writers did something different, most notably when they tinkered with or transgressed established conventions, they were largely treated as sub-standard or as a capricious oddity. That a considerable number of these authors are now regarded as the greats of our literary heritage raises the question of why and how their reputations were transformed. There is no simple answer to this but by the end of this chapter we will, I hope, be better equipped to address it. The related question of why this game of transgression, adverse response, and acceptance is no longer played is equally complex and one that will be properly considered in the next chapter, but I will, to an extent, spoil the surprise: after modernism literary history came to a close.