Review of Roger Sell's MEDIATING CRITICISM: LITERARY EDUCATION HUMANIZED more

1 Review of Roger Sell, Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized From Language and Literature 12.3 (2003): 283-85. Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized by Roger Sell, 2001, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. vii + 431, ISBN 90 272 2582 6 (Eur.) / 1 58811 103 0 (US)—Hb; 90 272 2583 4 (Eur.) / 1 58811 105 9 (US)—Pb. José Ángel García Landa Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) garciala@unizar.es http://www.garcialanda.net As this is going to be a frankly positive review, I should perhaps make clear from the start that I only know Roger Sell through the very enjoyable reading of his books. Mediating Criticism is a companion piece to Literature as Comunication (hereafter LC, reviewed in L&L 11.2 [May 2002] and by myself in Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 25). Unlike the previous volume, Mediating Criticism (hereafter MC) incorporates much previous material from Sell’s books and articles on Andrew Young, Fielding, Dickens, Vaughan, William Gerhardie and T. S. Eliot. Still, those earlier versions have been retroactively reworked in the light of the theory of mediating criticism expounded in LC. That volume expounded Sell’s extended politeness theory, a theory of literature as communicative interaction, with reference to theoretical and critical issues and approaches. Here we find the application to the criticism of poetry and fiction. This second volume is more ‘literary’ than linguistic or theoretical, and while it preserves a clear continuity with LC, it has not been published in the “Pragmatics and Beyond” series—perhaps because it really goes far beyond the more conventional view of pragmatics. Sell reacts against the ‘critical scholasticism’ of the past century and its tendency to rely on a few authorities and ready-made responses. He analyzes the ways literature is (and has been) used, and provides a well-articulated and coherent critique of 20th-century literary practices, ranging from academic professionalization and sociological changes in audiences to the analysis of different conventions in ways of reading and writing. His is a proposal for a pragmatics of language which does not lose its grounding in general human action and wider social interaction—a pragmatics which, instead of growing a 2 hard shell of method, seeks to interact with other dimensions of human experience, answerable to aesthetics and ethics. “To communicate is to hope” (p. 16)—both MC and LC are in the last analysis a justification of hope in/through literature and criticism, against the grain of much recent theory and of the ‘painful’ literature most favoured in the 20th century. They articulate, then, a humanist reaction against the Modernist and Poststructuralist ‘orthodoxy of gloom’, but an intelligent and constructive reaction rather than the knee-jerk kind of polemics which have long been commonplace in humanist circles, especially in the USA. Part of the project of Sell’s mediating criticism is, indeed, the appropriation of the insights of twentieth-century literature and theory (the ‘resisting reading’ of political criticism, feminism, cross-cultural criticism) within an ongoing humanist project. The continuity with ‘pre-theoretical’ humanist preferences can be seen in his desire to revaluate Dickens or Frost, or in the recognition of authors’ individualities as relevant elements in criticism. The three sections of the book deal with the three hallmarks of mediating criticism: empathy, recognition of past achievement in its own context, and “a responsiveness to literature’s underlying hopefulness” (MC, pp. 28-29). Literature and criticism are shown here in their interactive dimension, as theorized in LC. Sell’s notion of interaction is far more profound than the approaches usually found in literary stylistics (for instance, in Hoey’s recent Textual Interaction, to name a volume published the same year), inasmuch as he provides a fuller engagement with critical practice and with hermeneutic issues. Part of Sell’s reaction against modernism is his will to enter “into a two-way dialogue with the past in its full complexity” (MC, p. 10)—a dialogue which does its best to avoid the hindsight bias. In this respect Sell’s humanist pragmatics is akin to the hermeneutic project of Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom, and might benefit from a synthesis with it. Among the theorists consonant to his project that Sell does cite we find Lionel Trilling, Raymond Tallis, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Part I: Empathizing includes chapters on “William Gerhardie’s Chekhovism” and on “Andrew Young’s poetic secretion.” These are two interesting writers who did not achieve canonical status, which Sell explains as their being out of step with their audience, or as the audience’s failure to contextualize their work in a tradition (a Russian, Chekhovian one in Gerhardie’s case, and the tradition of meditative verse, of Vaughan, Wordsworth or Clare rather than modernist poetry, in Young). Sell reminds us 3 that empathy, while a necessary step in criticism, does not necessarily lead to sympathy—although it does in the instances he chooses to deal with, to the extent of occasionally showing some insufficiently reworked ‘consonant criticism’ (more specifically Christian humanism) from Sell’s original papers. Part II: Recognizing Achievement includes chapters on “The impoliteness of The Waste Land,” “Henry Vaughan’s unexpectedness,” Victorian “Decorum versus indecorum in Dombey and Son” (one more instance of Sell’s cultural extension of politeness theory), and the first of two chapters on Frost, “Robert Frost’s hiding and altering.” The Eliot chapter is a useful and intelligent study in critical reception, with Sell’s extended politeness theory (from LC) providing the guidelines. The theory also proves its viability as a critical paradigm capable of bridging the gap between pragmalinguistics on the one side and cultural and historical criticism on the other. The stylistics of Vaughan’s unexpectedness, too, is analyzed with the poet’s historically situated communicative interaction as a backdrop, in a chapter that bridges most convincingly the space between humanist criticism and linguistic pragmatics. Here and elsewhere, Sell provides a lucid rereading of much 20th century criticism and pragmalinguistics, showing that they should not go on ignoring each other (or him, I would add). Part III: Responding to Hopefulness begins chiastically, with the other Frost chapter, “Robert Frost and Childhood” being followed by “The pains and pleasures of David Copperfield” ; it closes with ch. 9, on “Fielding’s reluctant naturalism.” If the earlier chapter on Dickens showed that Dickens paid allegiance to the Victorian Mrs. Grundy in his contemporary audience only to dethrone her, the chapter on David Copperfield is a fascinating study in the theory of characters as the projection of possible personalities, with psychoanalytic criticism and reader response studies being once again beautifully integrated with Sell’s theory of interaction. But really, there are too many good insights in Sell’s book(s) to attempt an enumeration—I warmly encourage readers to see for themselves. Very few mistakes have crept in: e.g. in the title of Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (p. 6), or, in a header, one of those typos which run through the whole chapter and make authors want to bang their heads against the wall a corresponding number of times (I empathise and sympathise). Minor blemishes of a more significant kind remain sometimes, when the materials reworked, especially those on Frost and Young, are dealt with in 4 excessive detail for the overall aims of the present book (though not, perhaps, for the aims of each individual chapter). Again, Sell does not always, in spite of his best intentions, avoid the inherent danger in polemical or critical writing: that of simplifying the other’s position, or of drawing a sweeping generalization from a theoretical point. But these are faults he tries hard to fight, on the whole quite successfully, being much aware that they might compromise the very essence of his mediating project. Each part includes a summary, which together with the Introduction and the Epilogue (“Mediating critics and common [sic] readers [sic]” [sic]) provides much of the theoretical glue holding the work together. But if the earlier papers have been reworked to bring out the critical concerns more clearly, it is also clear that these concerns have been there, to some extent, all through the author’s career. Roger Sell’s excellent criticism makes us see critical interaction in a clearer theoretical light. Which makes the whole project, to some extent, self-defeating, or self-dismantling—in the sense that maybe all criticism, or at least the best criticism, has been ‘mediating criticism’ all along? This is not to detract from Sell’s originality—but merely to emphasize the centrality of his project for an adequate theorization of literary and critical discourse, and for a fuller integration of linguistics and literary theory. Both Literature as Communication and Mediating Criticism are books which should be read by every scholar concerned with literary theory and with linguistic criticism, and by every linguist interested in the outer reaches of pragmatics and interactional discourse analysis—or by anyone who won’t choose sides between literature and language. References Hoey, Michael. (2001). Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge Morson, Gary Saul. (1994). Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale UP. Sell, Roger. (2000). Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.