Critiquing Criticism: From the Ancient to the Digital
Sophie Corser, Lucy Russell
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The Scrutiny of Poet Squab: John Dryden and the Figure of the Critic in Late Seventeenth-Century London, 1668-1700
Sean Whitfield
doi:10.59860/wph.a4920fa

This essay intends to investigate the role of the Restoration Poet Laureate, John Dryden, (1631-1700) in the emergence of literary criticism in the late seventeenth-century, and the extent to which he and his works were scrutinised by his libertine contemporaries. By examining the interconnecting literary spaces of Restoration London, this study will demonstrate how the city’s coffeehouses were associated with and utilised by a rising class of critics as a public platform for the distribution and consumption of criticism. Moreover, it will elucidate the way in which these coffeehouses were simultaneously viewed as a threat to the established forms of a libertine masculinity. This essay will discuss plays and poetry that scrutinised the literary critic, but were themselves the creative expression of critical perception. Such works include The Rehearsal (1671) by George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687), which is taken to caricature Dryden in its portrayal of the character Bayes, an unrefined conformist playwright preoccupied with his own fame. Other courtiers who formed a literary coterie with Buckingham, such as John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), championed the aristocratic judgement of art, and were opposed to the literary ideologies expressed by Dryden’s criticism and his social position. In the 1670s, shortly after Dryden’s appointment as Poet Laureate, this culminated in the lashing out of a libertine culture that had newly reinstated its dominance over literature and taste at the time of the Restoration in 1660.

‘In the Advance Guard’: Evelyn Waugh as a Reviewer
Yuexi Liu
doi:10.59860/wph.a588ea1

Evelyn Waugh was an indefatigable reviewer, but his reviews fail to receive the critical attention they deserve. The novelist’s reviews of his contemporaries’ works, both fiction and nonfiction, provide insight into his own writing; they also illuminate his, and his generation of writers’, complex relationship with high modernism. Henry Green’s Living (1929) was considered by Waugh in his review entitled ‘A Neglected Masterpiece’ as ‘modern in the real sense of the word’. Notably, Green experimented with ‘the ‘‘novel of conversation’’’, or what I prefer to call ‘talk fiction’, which, for Waugh, was pioneered by Ronal Firbank. Waugh’s exteriority parallels what Wyndham Lewis in Satire and Fiction (1930) termed the outside method of fiction, as opposed to the inside method of Woolf and Joyce. Waugh reviewed Lewis’s book and found the discussion about the two methods particularly interesting. Reviewing Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), Waugh claimed that ‘[n]ow it is the cinema which has taught a new habit of narrative.’ Cinema was essential to Waugh, as part of his outside method, and Greene because they were the first generation of writers – to borrow a term from David Trotter – ‘in the First Media Age’. Examining Waugh’s reviews of Green, Lewis, and Greene, I explore how Waugh, with a strong generational sense and ‘in the advance guard’, understood the idea of being modern as privileging exteriority over interiority, particularly talk over thought. I argue that Waugh, with some writers of his generation, departed from high modernism and made it new by what I call ‘exterior modernism’. Waugh’s reviews not only helped him crystallise his own version of modernism but also contributed to its promotion.

Into the Author’s Mind: Cesare Garboli and the Essay as Embodied Comprehension
Paolo Gervasi
doi:10.59860/wph.a6982e8

In light of the blurring of strict boundaries separating different literary genres, literary theory during the twentieth century considered criticism as a particular kind of rewriting, in which the meaning of the primary text is recreated through a new text, that is the text of the critic. This theoretical turning point is grounded in the idea that style can be a method of comprehension, and writing an extension of the mind, through which thoughts are shaped and not merely transcribed. If the space of writing is the very place where thought happens, rewriting becomes a strategy for understanding. The enhancement of writing as an interpretative tool is particularly relevant to the essay, conceived as a hybrid genre bridging criticism and literature. Indeed, the essay assumes stylistic patterns commonly associated with literature, such as a narrative tendency, the use of figurative and metaphoric language, and a combination of historical and fictional elements. Moreover, the cognitive value of the act of rewriting is endorsed by more recent research on human cognition. Philosophical, cognitive, and even neuroscientific studies, in fact, have underlined the role of empathy and reenactment in the processes of comprehension, elaborating the idea that cognition is an embodied process, instead of a pure intellectual faculty. This contribution aims at showing how the work of the Italian critic, Cesare Garboli, realises the possibility of conceiving the essay as a form of embodied comprehension. Indeed, the closeness of Garboli’s critical writing to the primary text, often strengthened by a biographical knowledge of the author, is a way to recreate the very experience of writing. Garboli’s essays can be interpreted as a deep form of rewriting, insofar as they literally narrate the creative processes experienced by writers. Exploring the biographical, cognitive, and even biological roots of creativity, Garboli rewrites the mental genesis of the author’s style, in order to explain his/her work.

Heidegger and Nietzsche: On the Need for Criticism and its Critique
Jack K. Rasmus-Vorrath
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b348b

In the digital age, when interpretation of textual significance is oriented no less by a text’s modes of preservation, reception, and proliferation than it is by the workings of authorial intention, what determines the criteria for its criticism? The following essay addresses these matters with respect to recent discussion in the digital humanities on textuality and interpretive methodology, and to Martin Heidegger’s philosophical confrontation with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche – Heidegger’s primary interlocutor in elaborating the question concerning the artwork’s origin and originality as understood in the technological epoch. Such an approach situates these apparently disparate discourses within the optic of their mutual consideration of technology’s influence on the determination of criteria for a work’s aesthetic judgment, and on the critic’s role in the interpretive process of transmitting its truth. Registering a diffusion of its sources and channels of communicative power, both of these discourses are engaged in questioning the measure of critique’s authority – invested in inquiry into the reproducibility of its judgment, and into what first constitutes truthful appropriation of interpretive tradition. A weighing of such questions involves both discourses in attempts to formally posit and algorithmically or world-historically extrapolate ahistorical vantage points from which to evaluate what is entailed in an original relation to the possible future of interpretive tradition. Orienting these interpretive strategies is an analytical notion of the phenomenology of critical activity, conceived as a function of self-determining intention. With regard to this notion especially, the developing terms of the Heidegger-Nietzsche confrontation reflect those of trending debate in digital humanities scholarship on the ‘subject’ of critical authority. A discussion of these affinities and their logical consequences results in a critique of authorial intentionality that understands textual significance as an expression of the respective needs of those for whom a text’s meaning is at stake – needs which are often first articulated and identified in the course of interpretation. For as authorship, critique itself testifies to an always antecedent discussion to which it responds whatever its original intentions, expressing its belonging to an interpretive tradition in relation to which the criteria of criticism, and of the question concerning its necessity and authority are derived – a tradition whose proper understanding in this way remains at issue.