The challenge is to meet the text with generosity

July 6, 2024 12:58 AM

Generosity, commensurability, conversation—how calm, how dispassionate these words can seem. They do not, however, mean that the critic must be uncritical or mild-mannered. Far from it. It would be wrong to confuse generosity with approval, or commensurability with inattention. Being generous does not mean ignoring a friend’s lapses. Nor does it mean maintaining a perfect equanimity, a composure so thoroughgoing that it shades into neutrality or indifference or, worse, into a laissez-faire injunction to simply let people enjoy things. from The Critic as Friend by Merve Emre [The Yale Review]
posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

everybody's a critic...
posted by HearHere at 6:30 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]

Emre is--how to say it?--maybe a little too generous to Pope here. "I am going to tell you--at interminable length--what makes good judicious criticism," Pope says, "and then I am going to spend the rest of my career burning the world down because I hate EVERYBODY." Like, it's really difficult to make the argument that a critic is a friend to a work, when one of your examples wrote The Dunciad! (Other than that, I was delighted to see another Emre post here, especially as it reminds me that I never got around to reading her book! I am a bad friend to books!)
posted by mittens at 9:29 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

how to say it?
mittens, Virginia Woolf's hope for a critic therein, as opposed to a simple reviewer, is key, i think. Woolf's Pope too is, significantly, both a critic & friend of Addison (in another piece anthologized within the work where the referenced essay is a coda [the common reader, gutenberg]:-)

critically (please pardon the pun) consider; there may be different kinds of friendship [Dr. Anika Prather, via Antigone]
posted by HearHere at 7:34 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]