James Wood: Reflections on the Practice of Literary Criticism скачать в хорошем качестве

James Wood: Reflections on the Practice of Literary Criticism

Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 27, 2025 I shall consider two types of judgment, in relation to my work as a critic and book reviewer. The first type of judgment is what we might think of as the arsenal of any decent project of good reading—searching for meaning; accruing and then learning how to use a kind of hermeneutic wisdom; looking for patterns; learning what to look for in a work of art. We might call this first type secular judgment. The second type of judgment is closer to religious judgment: judging, choosing, selecting, casting in and casting out, a process strongly associated, of course, with that terrifying apparition, the critic. I will examine the relations between these two types, and the ways in which, in literary studies, the first kind of judgment has steadily come to eclipse the second.