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The Critical Practice
03 January 2007Sharlet: I've started a blog, Call Me Ishmael. It's a reading journal, with "reading" broadly defined to mean thinking about all kinds of texts -- not just books, but movies, music, landscapes, etc. The lure, for me, is that nobody is paying me for this one -- it's purely recreational. Which is to say, kind of half-baked ideas about things I don't know too much about: Primo Levi, Daredevil, Children of Men, the death of Ford narrative, and steamwhistles. But they're inspired by some fully-formed ideas, particularly those found on a reading journal-blog by the novelist and literary scholar Jenny Davidson, and this from Charles Baudelaire, by way of Susie Linfield's Boston Review essay on "Why photography critics hate photography": In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”
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