Decolonize Practical Criticism?

This article reflects on what it might mean to decolonize practical criticism in the current moment by considering previous responses to the same imperative. It discusses critical and institutional interventions by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Mervyn Morris, Chidi Amuta, and, more recently, Harry Garuba and Benge Okot. In this way, the article demonstrates that the antidote to colonial paradigms of literary criticism has not been a pedagogy that prioritizes context over text but a critical practice oriented to a work’s formal and technical context of intelligibility. Such a practice demands that readers inhabit the literary constraints and possibilities encountered by postcolonial or otherwise peripheral writers.

Don't Say Practical Criticism, Say Fuck the Police

This article responds to John Wilkinson's piece, ‘Moreover: Reading Alfred Starr Hamilton’. Opening with a consideration of the connections between language, law, economy, and freedom, it draws attention to Wilkinson's discussion of letters Hamilton wrote to the Montclair Police Department in 2020. These letters suggest that Hamilton's work might be usefully read as emerging from the economy of racial capitalism, and indicate the limits of his poetic search for freedom.

КОНФЛІКТ ОБИВАТЕЛІВ І ТВОРЦІВ У РОМАНІ ДЖ. ФАУЛЗА «КОЛЕКЦІОНЕР»: ПРОБЛЕМНО-ТЕМАТИЧНИЙ АНАЛІЗ

The article deals with the confrontation of two worlds – the world of ordinary people and creators in the novel "The Collector" by the English writer-postmodernist J. Fowles. The aim of this study is to prove that the conflict between consumers and enthusiastic creators is one of the main themes of the novel "Collector", as well as to emphasize the writer's hidden appeals and warnings about the need to protect the vulnerable and vulnerable world of creators from the external correct and mechanistic world. consumers. Within the topic, it is important to generalize and adapt scientific and theoretical material on this issue for students of philology. The research technique consists in extrapolating the method of "practical criticism" (A.A. Richards, S. Johnson, M. Arnold, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Lewis) to the literary text of J. Fowles' novel "The Collector". In particular, it is assumed to read the text in accordance with the moral criteria and analyze the problems of content (clarification of the moral guidelines of the author). Results of the research. It is proved that J. Fowles in the novel "The Collector" depicted two opposite worlds – ordinary people and creators. The world of creative enthusiasts symbolizes a full life with all the richness of ideas, emotions, contradictory and complex feelings inherent in human search, and the world of ordinary people embodies a dim imitation of real life, "mechanized" existence, in which there are no creative impulses, creative initiative. Miranda is found to represent the world of creators, she is a man of search, she lives, choking on emotions and feelings, intuitively realizing that this is the meaning of life. Clegg summarizes the world of the townspeople. He is an ambitious, limited tyrant, full of hidden malice and hatred for those who are spiritually richer and smarter. At the same time, the writer showed the vulnerability and insecurity of the world of beauty and culture, recalling the eternity of the confrontation of love and hate, good and evil, creative living beginnings and hard, mundane existence. The practical significance of the research results lies in the possibility of their use in the further study of the literary heritage of J. Fowles, as well as in the preparation of students of philology for practical and seminar classes.

Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing

Chapter four focuses on Robinson’s five-letter series on German literature, in particular Goethe and Schiller, in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03) that accompanied his transmissions of Kantianism to England, as well as his articles on Lessing in the Unitarian Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1806). Read against the backdrop of Robinson’s explications of Kant and informal discussion of August Wilhelm Schlegel, all of these writings emerge as erudite, autonomous attempts at resolving the impasse between aesthetic autonomy and literature’s moral relevance detailed in the preceding chapter. These attempts are further characterized by an experimental oscillation between Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to art, and demonstrate that Robinson was increasingly regarding literary form as those universal parameters that may facilitate moral discourse across national, cultural, and historical gulfs. The letters on German literature, and afterwards the appreciation of the ‘free-thinking spirit and love of humanity’ (Diana Behler) in Lessing’s cosmopolitanism, hence enabled Robinson to establish in terms of practical criticism his ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of full aesthetic autonomy and towards his critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’.

Qital Dalam Alquran dan Hadis: Tinjauan Historis dan Praksis

This paper aims at responding a critical accusation of qital concept in the Qur’an and hadith and providing analyses by using historical and practical approach. It can be argued, then, that the purposes of qital can be explained correctly as directed by both sources. At the very practical of interpretative approach, this study employs the historical, eidetic, and practical criticism. The research argues that qital or war can be applied with some criterias and ethics based on the Qur’an and hadith instruction. These criteria are (1) The nature of qital should be directed into God (fi sabiillah); (2) The qital should be first caused by the war of the enemy, (3) The qital is not permitted in the sacred worship places, (4) It aims to relieve the slander, (5) It is not allowed to sacrifice of other Muslims. The ethics of qital are: (1) It is not permitted to overreach, (2) Moslems must end the war if the enemy are surrender, (3) it is obliged to do based on the regulations and the aggrement, (4) it is not permitted to destroy.

Modernist Close Reading

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itself

Sentiment

“Sentiment” is a term that signifies differently in its different English forms (sentiments, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalism), and these forms themselves signify differently at different times and in different languages. In French, whence it derives, the verb sentir means “to feel” or “to sense,” and a relatively clear distinction can be made in that language between sentir and penser (“to think”), and likewise between un sentiment and une pensée. In English, however, especially in the 18th century when the notion of the sentiment became central to empiricist moral philosophy, the term tends to straddle thought and feeling. In the accelerated development of the concept in the work of David Hume and his friend Adam Smith, sentiment might best be understood as feeling reflected in thought, which later figured centrally in William Wordsworth’s account of the poetic process. Even before Wordsworth, Laurence Sterne had deployed the recently coined English adjective sentimental, and he exploited this new understanding to develop a new and massively influential mode of ambivalence in fiction. Such an understanding also helped to underwrite the fully elaborated 1795 theoretical intervention of the Anglophile German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had to invent the German adjective sentimentalisch from the Anglo-French term. Schiller distinguished the sentimental mode in poetry from the naive on the dual grounds, already established in British writings on the subject, that the sentimental involved “mixed feelings” born of an act of “reflection.” Even as this more technical understanding of the sentimental mode was being developed, however, critique of “sentimentality” in a strictly pejorative sense was underway. In modernist literary theory, certainly, much energy is mobilized around this critique, as is clear from a foundational work in the institution of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards at Cambridge, who produced a full taxonomy of the forms of sentimentality, a deviant kind of emotional responsiveness he opposed to another, which he called “inhibition.” The modernist intolerance of what it called “sentimentality” would be taken up as part of a broader and more programmatic critique of commercialized culture under capitalism in later work by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno and by Jean Baudrillard.

Hate Speech dalam Masyarakat Post Truth

Hate speech is increasingly becoming a serious threat to the unity of the Republic of Indonesia which is very diverse. The characteristics of people in the post-truth era that are more influenced by personal opinion than reality cause their emotions and sentiments to be easily ignited which results in intolerance and strife. How bad is the Qur'an which in some verses forbids the utterance of hate speech, one of which is through verse 1 of Surah al-Humazah, which strongly denounces and cursing. This study aims to analyze the behavior of hate speech through thematic studies of the Qur'an by applying the thematic interpretation method offered by Hasan Hanafi. The reading of the text according to Hanafi needs to go through three phases namely historical, eidetic and practical criticism. From this research, it was obtained that historically the Al-Qur'an was an authentic book since it was revealed until now, its truth was believed and used as a guide to Muslim life. Through eidetic criticism, the Qur'an reveals the prohibition of hate speech even condemns it. To overcome this, synergy efforts between the government, consumers and information producers must be done in combating hate speech by adapting values ​​in the Qur'an such as the tabayyun attitude for the community, the principles of honesty, accuracy, fairness, and others for information producers.

I. A. Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards (b. 26 February 1893; d. 7 September 1979) is among the most and influential theorists and critics of literature in the 20th century. A student of Moral Science at Cambridge University (1911–1915), he was the intellectual offspring of the Age of Principia. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead, among others, were completing a philosophical revolution by rejecting varieties of 19th-century idealism, seeking to ground philosophy in first principles, and reasserting a native empiricism with an emphasis on language, logic, and analysis. The Newtonian term is apropos because there had been nothing so sweeping in British philosophy since the 17th century. Richards taught in the new English School at Cambridge from 1919 to 1939, where he developed his ideas and conducted his famous experiments in reading, resulting in Practical Criticism, thereby becoming one of the founders of New Criticism. The interdisciplinary play of his writings has led to his being labeled a linguist, a psychologist, or a philosopher. Yet the deepest vein of his interest lay in the theory and practice of criticism. He best belongs in an anthology together with Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot; not in one with De Saussure, Jakobson, or Chomsky; nor in one with Skinner, Piaget, and Allport; nor in one with Dewey, Ayer, and Quine. The peaks of his achievement in the 1920s are The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden) (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929). His ideas were widely disseminated in his compendium Science and Poetry (1926). Richards’s involvement with Basic English, which was the creation of C. K. Ogden, grew throughout the 1930s, becoming almost a second career. Basic English is a technique of learning the language based on 850 key words, the ones that could do the most work with the least effort (there are only sixteen verbs). He wrote four books on Basic in the 1930s alone, spending three years in China in the hope of creating a national experiment. Meanwhile, these studies in language learning (and second-language learning) alternated with theory of criticism: Coleridge on Imagination; The Philosophy of Rhetoric, with its revolutionary theory of metaphor; and Interpretation in Teaching, which attempted to perform for prose what he had done with poetry in Practical Criticism. Thus, there were the two careers, like parallel corridors, at times crossing each other’s path, or at the least with windows open between them. From 1939 to 1974 he taught at Harvard University, becoming University Professor in 1944. Basic English and Its Uses (1943) remains his most useful introduction to the subject. The Pocket Book of Basic English: A Self-Teaching Way into English (1945), coauthored by Christine M. Gibson, led to his Language through Pictures series, eventually including eight languages, some of which went into film-strip and other media as the technology became available. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1964 and was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal in 1971. His testamentary Beyond (1974) explores the Book of Job, Plato, Dante, and Shelley.