A Dissertation on Invective

Archives for July 2007

‘Polemic: Critical or Uncritical’

24 July 2007 | Uncategorized

When did critical reading, criticism, and critique begin to be discussed? Is there such a thing as “uncritical reading”? Hypercritical reading? (Viewing?) Is this (mere) entertainment?
Is there room in scholarship for discussion of “character”? Amanda Anderson:
We have become accustomed to hearing pragmatists called smug, or rationalists depicted as defensive and uptight. The hermeneut of suspicion [...]

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Morini on Invective

19 July 2007 | Uncategorized

In her preface to L’invective: Histoire, formes, stratégies (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006), Agnès Morini writes:
All the contributors to the colloquium whose proceedings we’re publishing here ran up against the same paradoxical reality: namely, the great bibliographical poverty surrounding this “genre of discourse designated as invective [...] without ever finding attached to this term a [...]

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Zola, Mes Haines

18 July 2007 | Uncategorized

Here is a piece Zola published in May 1866 in Le Figaro, which became the preface to his 1866 collection Mes Haines, tr. Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Yashinsky, My Hatreds (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. ix-xiv:

Hate is holy. It is the indignation of strong and determined spirits, the militant disdain of those angered by [...]

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“What’s Good About Bad Reviews?”

9 July 2007 | Uncategorized

[According to this source, Joan Acocella's piece below "originally appeared in the now-defunct Dance Ink in the spring of 1992."]
Criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by [...]

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“Invective” by Desmond McCarthy

9 July 2007 | Uncategorized

“THE late Lord Morley, when he was editing the Pall Mall, was amused by a young journalist who, when asked his particular line, replied `Invective.’ `Invective? May I ask against what?’ `Oh … anything—general invective.’ One recognizes that impartial faculty for getting angry. It can produce sneers, tropes, tremendous metaphors; out of it some pages [...]

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Delacroix on Bitter Critics

7 July 2007 | Uncategorized

“What becomes of the unhappy critic when everything is reduced to uncertainty [by an innovative artist]? His task is the hardest and the most ungrateful in the world. That new sun which is rising has too blinding an effect on eyes accustomed to a different light. Looking tenderly and fixedly to the past, the critic [...]

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The Fine Art of Reviling

7 July 2007 | Uncategorized

Before moving on to nineteenth-century art criticism, the heart of this dissertation, it seems worthwhile to round up a few more perspectives on invective that I’ve come across in recent months. For example, The Fine Art of Reviling, which was written around 1925 by Ling Shih-ch’iu according to Paul A. Bennett, who cites A.G. Beaman [...]

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19th Century Literary Polemics

5 July 2007 | Uncategorized

We move now into the 19th century, well-known for its polemics in print.
From Daniel Madelenat’s “Enfances polémiques de l’histoire litteraire,” in Le Discours polémique: aspects théoriques et interprétations:
Beginning in the First Empire, even more so in the Restoration and the July Monarchy, daily journalistic literary criticism emerged as one of the favored sites for polemic. [...]

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