Doing Criticism Across Literary and Screen Arts

Not only an accessible, hands-on guide to reading and writing criticism across the literary, dramatic, and cinematic arts, but a book that makes a passionate case for how and why criticism matters today

In Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts, renowned scholar James Chandler teaches readers how to engage actively and productively with a critical object, whether a poem, a novel, a film, a play, or a television series. Updating and broadening an older understanding of “practical criticism” for our own moment, Chandler shows students at all levels how to ask the right questions and how to pursue those questions effectively. This is an invaluable book that not only explains what makes criticism interesting and compelling but also offers concrete illustrations of what it looks like on the page. It argues that doing without criticism is not only unwise, but perhaps simply impossible.

Divided into two parts, Doing Criticism first traces the changing functions of criticism over time, reviewing the specific issues, forms, and practices that bridge the literary and screen arts and making a case for the essay form as a vital medium for criticism in both Anglo-American and Continental contexts. The second part of the book features a variety of case studies of criticism across media, including works by canonical authors such as Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, and Seamus Heaney; films such as Coppola’s The Conversation, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven; screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, as well as Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park. A concluding chapter on filmmaker Spike Lee brings several of the book’s central concepts to bear on work of a single auteur.

Designed to help students write well and make sophisticated arguments, Doing Criticism:

• Describes how the bridging of certain arts can help criticism flourish in the present day
• Shows how criticism can become in practice a particular kind of writing
• Considers how to generalize the consequences of criticism beyond personal growth and gratification
• Addresses the ways the practice of criticism matters to the practice of the arts
• Demonstrates a mode of “relational criticism” to supplement attention to individual works
• Features original critical essays under five “relational” rubrics: conversation, adaptation, genre, authorship, and seriality

Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts is an ideal text for students in introductory courses in criticism, literary studies, and film studies, as well as general readers with interest in the subject.