The Critic as Amateur

Saikat Majumdar, Aarthi Vadde, Saikat Majumdar, Aarthi Vadde

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501341427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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.

PART ONE

The Amateur Impulse

1

In Praise of Amateurism

Derek Attridge

Amateurism vs. professionalism

The figure designated by the term “amateur” has been the object of both praise and blame for two centuries. At first (in the late eighteenth century) a neutral term close to its French meaning, “lover” or “devotee,” it wasn’t long before it was being used to make a distinction between those who carry out an activity as professionals and those who don’t—and this distinction led to the possibility of a pejorative sense for the word and thence to the emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century of the distinctly derogatory term “amateurish.” The more obvious the need for professional expertise in a particular activity, the stronger the criticism implied in calling someone an amateur: an “amateur train-spotter” is almost a tautology, an “amateur actor” carries a hint of disparagement, and “amateur surgeon” is wholly condemnatory.

But there is also a long history of assuming that the nonprofessional is to be preferred to the professional. This idea is much older than the word “amateur” itself. It is there in Plato’s representation of the rhapsode Ion in the dialogue of that name in which Socrates makes fun of the professional performer of Homeric epic who claims to be an expert but can’t say what it is he is an expert in; it is reflected in the many self-deprecating comments made by poets from antiquity to the present (the rhetorical trope of recusatio is one version of this apologetic stance); it governs the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman who carries out difficult tasks with easy sprezzatura. In this latter instance, its close association with class is evident: as a gentleman (and it was unquestionably a masculine accomplishment) you demonstrated your superiority to the lower echelons of society by doing naturally what they had to work diligently and obviously at.

These class implications lingered until the recent past and perhaps linger still in certain quarters. Sport is one example. I grew up in South Africa playing rugby union, a strictly amateur game, and was expected to regard the professionals who played the rugby league version of the sport as distinctly ill-bred. The slow acceptance of professional athletes into the Olympic Games during the course of the twentieth century testifies to similar class issues. Looked at from this angle, only those who can afford to pursue a sport or a study project without financial recompense are able to be true amateurs.¹ Praise of amateurism may not be as unprejudiced a posture as it seems.

A related phenomenon is the mistrust of the expert.² Here is the blurb for a recent book as it appears on Amazon:

Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives—work, knowledge, cities, politics—have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and rule followers.³

This mistrust was disastrously evident in the campaign in favor of Brexit, when predictions of the dire economic effects of Britain’s departure from the European Union were dismissed by populist politicians on the grounds that they were the not-to-be-believed utterances of experts, and similar rejections of available knowledge have proved politically useful on a number of other occasions around the world, not least in the most recent US presidential campaign as well as in denials of the human responsibility for climate change

The prizing of the amateur has been in evidence in British culture (and many other cultures) over a long period. The enduring Romantic ideal of organic wholeness influentially advanced by Schiller is opposed to the specialization that cultivates only one aspect of human potential, while Wordsworth’s related attack on the meddling intellect that murders to dissect has had numerous echoes since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Victorian age was the great era of the prominent amateur; the men we call the “Victorian sages” did not acquire their eminence through any professional association or endorsement but through their own achievements.

The field of literary study has been particularly marked by this tendency. Doubts about literature as an academic subject produced much opposition to its acceptance as a legitimate subject for university study, and the hostilities did not end when its supporters were victorious. In 1937, for instance, Stephen Potter published The Muse in Chains, whose title gives a clear pointer to its argument, and in 1969 John Gross brought out, to wide acclaim, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters in which he lamented the disappearance of the taste-making literary colossus under the onslaught of academics and experts.⁴ Exactly when this was supposed to have happened remains unclear; Gross asserts that the founding of The Review of English Studies in 1925 indicated that “the academic apparatchiks were in full command” (189), but he also finds professionalism rearing its blood-drained head in earlier centuries. Some of the most heavy-hitting literary critics of the mid-twentieth century, F. R. Leavis, R. P. Blackmur, and Kenneth Burke among them, had a queasy relationship with academic specialisms,⁵ and the widespread resistance to the influx of theoretical writing in the latter part of the same century often reflected a distaste for technical terminology deemed to be distant from the simpler and more genuine expressions of literary appreciation.⁶

Echoing these diagnoses, but from a very different perspective, Terry Eagleton argues in the Function of Criticism that “the founding of English as a university ‘discipline’ […] entailed a professionalization of literary studies which was quite alien to the [Victorian] sage’s ‘amateur’ outlook, and more resolutely specialist than the man of letters could afford to be.”⁷ He continues, “Criticism achieved security by committing political suicide; its moment of academic institutionalization is also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force.” Within academic English, the conflict between “amateur” and “professional” was to continue, transposed into a quarrel between “criticism” and “scholarship” (65). In Loving Literature: A Cultural History, Deidre Shauna Lynch traces the history of the idea that literary works are things we might love, and, although she stops her narrative just before the introduction of English literature into the university curriculum, she notes the tension between the two conceptions of literary study embodied in its academic institutionalization:

Our pursuits of rigor or campaigns for a new professionalism have often been shadowed by expressions of nostalgia for a past ostensibly readier to acknowledge that the project of really understanding literature necessarily eludes the grasp of expert cultures—readier to acknowledge that literature involves readers’ hearts as well as minds, and their sensibility as well as training.⁸

Some commentators on this tension between heart and head regard it as not simply an opposition between two very different approaches to literature but as the manifestation of a more complicated relationship. One such was Stanley Fish, who, in a set of essays collected in Doing What Comes Naturally (1989), set his sights on the question of the bad odor into which the idea of professionalism appeared to have fallen.⁹ Of these essays, the one most fully relevant to the question of amateurism bears the title “Anti-professionalism” and reaches the characteristically Fishian conclusion that “anti-professionalism is professionalism in its purest form” (245): in other words, expressing antagonism toward the inroads of the bean counters and box-tickers, the narrow specialists and the promotion-seeking game-players, is a quintessential gesture of the academic professional. Furthermore, Fish argues that this apparently self-contradictory state of affairs is not one we should object to, since it is a manifestation of the paradox by which we live our lives, wholly determined by the conditions and conventions of our place and time yet unavoidably operating on the assumption that we are not. Amateurism understood in this way, to extrapolate from Fish’s argument, is the belief that we can best function as fully active and astute human beings by trusting in our own free exercise of powers and shunning the narrowness of disciplinary formations and the lure of financial reward. And this belief is, Fish claims, at the center of our professional activities and principles, since not to hold it would be to surrender to helplessness in the face of our determining context.

Bruce Robbins also argues that it is too simple to oppose the amateur, in the guise of the “public intellectual,” to the professional. “There are no more intellectuals today, we are told,” he writes in Secular Vocations, or else there soon will be none, largely because there is no longer room for them in our compartmentalized, commodified, bureaucratized society. Society today makes room only for professionals—credentialed carriers of institutionally defined expertise who sell their commodity on the market, academic or otherwise, and are thus constitutionally incapable of carrying on the intellectuals’ public, independent, critical functions.¹⁰

Robbins’s challenge to this view begins with two chapters that complicate the simple opposition between the amateur intellectual and the professional academic, the first an analysis of the film western The Professionals and the second, partly in response to Fish, a discussion of the “professionalizing of literary criticism.”¹¹ Although he is more receptive to the possibility of political action on the part of the professional academic than Fish (or Eagleton), Robbins, too, sees the stance of anti-professionalism as an aspect of professionalism. Professional literary critics, he argues, “adopt […] an anti-professional point of view which seems capable of representing and bestowing the legitimacy they fear they lack,” concluding that “anti-professionalism is a ritual of professional legitimation” (74).

Marjorie Garber echoes these refusals of an absolute distinction between amateur and professional, though in a more sweeping manner: “What is most fascinating is the way in which these terms circulate to make the fortunes of the one rise higher than the fortunes of the other, while determinedly resisting the sense that one is always the necessary condition for the other.” And she adds a further twist: “Not only are they mutually interconnected. Part of their power comes from the disavowal of the close affinity between them.”¹² It would be impossible to intertwine the two apparently opposing attitudes more intimately than this.

The amateur impulse

To write in praise of amateurism in literary studies, then, is to plunge into this already full stream of debate and dissension. My aim is to identify what might be valuable about the amateur impulse without making myself complicit either with the naïve view of the professional and the expert as blights on the living organism of literary appreciation or with the sophisticated view that to do so is merely a typical expression of professionalism. It is easy but not very interesting to condemn the excesses of professionalism, such as the overuse of technical terminology, the slavish following of critical fashion, or the prioritizing of peer recognition and financial reward over genuine inquiry, and this kind of objection, as Fish, Robbins, and others have shown, is indeed part and parcel of the discourse of professionalism itself. If to be professional in one’s dealings with literature is to be aware of these dangers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Criticism for the Whole Person
• Part 1: The Amateur Impulse
• Part 2: The Amateur in the Age of Professionalization
• Part 3: The Critic as Amateur in Old and New Media
• Epilogue: New, Interesting, and Original—the Undergraduate as Amateur
• Index
• Imprint