The Birthday Party School of Literary Criticism

The Birthday Party School of Literary Appreciation

          Have you heard enough of deconstruction, narratology, semiotics, transgresssive transgendering, flatulitics?  It’s much worse than the older labelling terms and rules—comparatively simple nonsense like iambs and trochees, sonnet forms, heroic couplet

—which were used as a substitute for engaging with literature.  But both the new “theoretical” nonsense and the older formalist labels are worthless, and worse:  they distract us.  We should forget all the old literary arithmetic stuff, and we must refuse, abjure, denounce, and in the future simply ignore all literary “theory” and the literary criticism that uses such.  Literature has value—and neither it nor its readers need literary theory or literary criticism—or rules.

          The world was much better—and we were much better and more useful—when the study of literature meant reading for understanding and appreciation.  Our aim was modest and respectable then:  we served art, rather than shit on it, and we read literature in order to learn more about life.

          Literature has value, and there are good reasons why we should study it.  Criticism has its place, of course:  we should all read critically, thoughtfully, analytically.  But what most literary critics do is—at best—an irrelevant elaboration of the footnote, a sort of self-important distractionism
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          There was once an important footnote—and it is a most important bit of Keats criticism.  Douglas Bush wrote—in a footnote to the old Riverside edition of John Keats—“When Keats writes about ‘thinking,’ he means a sympathetic understanding of the human condition.”

          The Birthday Party School of Literary Appreciation is dedicated to reading poems, novels, stories, and plays.  And essays, biographies, and autobiographies.  You can attend—or start your own branch.  Why not begin with Keats?  Friday, 31 October 2014 will be the 219^th birthday of John Keats.  Call a meeting—or just invite your friends.  Read and talk about some of Keats’s poems.  You might even refer to his letters.  And celebrate—with perhaps “a draught of vintage”—those poems, and their author.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Bert Hornback