Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins [Paperback]

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us.

Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli argues, criticism involves three moments:Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don’t know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us.

We tend to associate criticism with scholarship and journalism. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism, but what he calls “poetic criticism”—a staging ground for surprise, dread, delight, comprehension, and incomprehension. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay,Something Speaks to Medraws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Kant and Schlegel to Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Barthes, and Cavell. Reflecting on these dimensions of poetic experience,Something Speaks to Meis less concerned with joining academic debates than communicating the urgency of criticism.Michel Chaouliis professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities. His recent publications includeThinking with Kant’s “Critique of Judgment”and the coedited volumePoetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature.I want to tell you about a mishap I had while teaching Franz Kafka’s novelThe Triala few years ago. The basics are quickly summarized: after reading out loud a passage that I had chosen because it seemed especially rich, I found I had nothing to say about it. Nothing. I tried finessing things by reading it a second time: still nothing. Panic rising, I skipped to another passage I had marked and read it to the class, alÉ