Reviews for Revaluation

The average rating for Revaluation based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-16 00:00:00 Len Ziak This is a good book to read if you're interested in the history of literary criticism, but I found it difficult to take any of Leavis' readings or theories completely seriously because they're so different from contemporary critical methods. We should certainly read Leavis charitably (i.e. we should historicise him and I'll return to this) but the problem is that he is too loose in throwing around undefined, yet fine-grained, evaluative criteria. For example, "[Dryden] may be a greater poet than Marvell, but he did not write any poetry as indubitably great as Marvell's best" (37). I feel like this relatively complex system of comparing internally-differentiated bodies of work against each other sort of sounds convincing but would be very difficult to actually argue for and spell out. Perhaps ironically, Leavis often grapples with the question of whether a given poem admits of a coherent prose paraphrase, and in passages like this I feel like he's saying something very compressed which can't really be unpacked explicitly (perhaps like a poem, except unhelpful). Historicising, we would clearly still value Leavis for contributing to the systematisation of English as a discipline in a university. He gestures at several points to the need for separating literary criticism from biography and for a criticism based on precise terms, and he seems to do a better job of this than a lot of other critics in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. But another issue that I have with his method of criticism is the fact that he seems to be working towards a fixed characterisation of the style of each poet under consideration. I think we see this in the odd habit he has of speculating about whether a given passage could have been written by another poet, or how much a passage is reminiscent of another. On page 64, he considers how Milton is like Shakespeare; at 245 he says of Keats "If one might justifiably call the poem Shakespearian, it would be in emphasizing how un-Tennysonian it is," which gets a little confusing. The confusion is most unintentionally humorous on page 210, where Leavis goes through all the different Shakespeare characters who could have spoken the lines of a Shelley work (even fictional speakers have an identity that Leavis can spot in latter days). I think it leads to a certain hypostatisation of the authorial proper name, which also becomes a kind of signifier in a network of proper names defined by their relationship to each other (how much Milton is in Pope, what ratio of Shakespeare-to-Tennyson characterises Keats versus Shelley, etc). Leavis does do a few things that I agree with, though. I think that's the appeal of this book, the fact that it is an explicit attempt to go against and 'revalue' a series of critical orthodoxies. He doesn't hesitate to deflate Milton, who apparently wrote so much Latin poetry that he forgot how to write English (56). And Pope is elevated, confirmed as the one truly great (whatever 'great' is supposed to mean, other than an appeal to our intuitions) poet of the eighteenth century (lucky that my intuitions agree here). In upending these critical orthodoxies Leavis of course creates a new series of his own orthodoxies, and I think the famous one is his dislike for Shelley, which speaks to a certain masculinism of the early twentieth century which is only resolved when the Big Six Romantic poets become central to the academy in the mid-twentieth century, when critics like Harold Bloom take up their defence. Shelley is totally trashed in this book and is probably the best case study for learning about what Leavis really cares about. In the Wordsworth chapter Shelley is described as full of "caressing, cherishing, fondling, and, in general, sensuously tender suggestions," and his eroticism comes off badly against Wordsworth's "cold … contemplation" (157). His dislike becomes progressively less veiled: "Even when [Shelley] is in his own way unmistakably a distinguished poet, as in Prometheus Unbound, it is impossible to go on reading him at any length with pleasure; the elusive imagery, the high-pitched emotions, the tone and movement, the ardours, ecstasies, and despairs, are too much the same all through. The effect is of vanity and emptiness (Arnold was right) as well as monotony" (198). Near the end we get what I think is a clearer idea of what Leavis' deal is. Keats is better than Shelley and Byron because "The facts, the objects of contemplation, absorb the poet's attention completely; he had none left for his feelings as such. As a result, his response, his attitude, seems to us to inhere in the facts, and to have itself the authenticity of fact" (252). Of course Leavis isn't, or isn't simply, a New Critic, but we can discern here I think the same inclination towards a kind of hard objecthood for poetic form.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-28 00:00:00 Pham Thuan This book is a solid introductory text to the history of American political theory and practice. It focuses on the various meanings and uses of the word "freedom" (frequently in relation to its opposite, slavery and, later, fascism and communism). Foner does an excellent job of showing how the various definitions begin and transform over time. As a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Foner has a sharp eye for historical irony. In this book, the most obvious example is the idea of "freedom-as-equality" found in the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who believed in the inherent inferiority of black people and in an early state's rights. "Freedom-as-equality" became the touchstone of the early civil rights movement, a movement based on racial equality and with a robust belief in federal intervention. The last chapter "Conservative Freedom" is excellent at illustrating how high a cost the political left has placed on itself by abandoning the language of "freedom" for the language of "rights". Our current conceptions of "freedom" tend to presume ideas of freedom such as "freedom-as-gun-ownership" and "freedom-as-free-markets". As Foner shows, however, it wasn't always so. While "rights" have usually had an individualistic cast (consistent with its origins in the 1920s avant garde movements), "freedom" has frequently been viewed as a condition that requires a baseline of material support provided by the larger community to be actualized. This has expressed itself in calls for federal land grant programs advocated for by some of the Founding Fathers to social programs from the Great Society to the New Deal. Ultimately, if I were to recommend one book on the history of American political thought who wants a quick overview, this would be it. Foner's history is an invaluable reminder that freedom is being fought for every day, and the most important battles occur in determining how to define it. Whoever defines "freedom" defines the country.