By George Watson
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Extra resources for The Discipline of English: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice
Sample text
The touchstone is emotion, not reason', as D. H. Lawrence had put it in his essay on Galsworthy: 34 The Discipline ofEnglish We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon .... The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
And this is true in practice as well as in theory, and it suggests an instant paradox: that there are those teaching and studying English in schools and universities, or claiming to do so, who do not in truth believe it to be an object of study. That state of affairs is plainly too precarious to last. Why, many will ask, if it is not an object of study, should it be pursued at all in a place of study, and at the public cost? In this chapter I shall present reasons for thinking literary criticism objective, and for accepting the study of English and other literatures as a cognitive activity governed by rational procedures.
But then literary subjectivists plainly do not think literature a life-anddeath matter. They think it little better than a game, albeit a highly sophisticated game. As Wordsworth put it in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, they 'encourage idleness and unmanly despair': It is the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or frontiniac or sherry, whereas 'its object is truth ...