Robert Tally, "Critique"

But not in a stupid or cynical way...

In this seed Robert Tally dips his toes into the criticism wars of the last decade, arguing against a view of critique that treats it as a negative or cynical approach to the weaknesses of a text. Critique, Tally says, is as much a matter of joyous engagement with a text as it is a matter of analyzing something critically. To take something apart (as in the Greek root of “analysis”) or to “deconstruct” it is not to damage it, to ruin it, but to, at least potentially, grasp it in all its contextual and constructed complexity. There’s joy in that, Tally says, and joy in engaging with artifacts that matter to us.

We all know folks who do things the wrong way — who enjoy looking down on something, who are excited to show us once again that everything is bullshit and compromised. Maybe we sometimes do things the wrong way ourselves. The possibility of being an unsympathetic critic (the wrong kind, the suspicious reader) is latent in all of us; it is latent, I think, in criticism itself. So is the joy. But it’s that double latency, the necessary presence of those two emotional and intellectual modes, that makes critique what it is, and explains, probably, why the criticism wars will never find a resolution.

Bio

Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University, where he teaches American and world literature, literary theory, and criticism.

Tally is the author of eleven books: The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (Bloomsbury, 2024), The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (Anthem, 2023), J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: Realizing History Through Fantasy (Palgrave, 2022), For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books, 2022), Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2019), Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Pluto Press, 2014), Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (Bloomsbury, 2014), Spatiality (Routledge, 2013), Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-System (Palgrave, 2013), Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (Bloomsbury, 2011), and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer (Bloomsbury, 2009).