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Monday, June 6, 2016

2 modes of criticism

2 modes of criticism that used to bother the heck out of me when I was coming up in the field, mostly practiced by Spanish-language critics:

Planteamiento de la cuestión. In this mode the entire critical effort went into the definition of what the critical problem under examination would be. Lots of sentences with a lot of left-elements (syntactically speaking) before we could get to the point under consideration.

Altamente poético. The critic would write in a poetic mode that seemed to echo the poet's own discourse, but added little to it. Terms were vague. We would hear about primores líricos.

What was frustrating was that so much fell into these two categories. Neither offered any real insights.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

These vague poetic essays in literary criticism feel so quaint and old-fashioned. Also very annoying in anything but minuscule doses because they never manage to make a point.

Anonymous said...

Tengo a la mano un libro de 2014 cuyo autor es, por más señas, altamente respetado ... y que está escrito así.