April 2023 MBR The Literary Studies Shelf

The Literary Studies Shelf

Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts
James Chandler
Wiley-Blackwell
www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell
9781405177795, $59.95, PB, 320pp

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Criticism-Across-Literary-Literature/dp/1405177799

Synopsis: With the publication of "Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts", James Chandler presents a practical guide to engaging actively and productively with a critical object, whether a film, a novel, or a play. Going beyond the study of lyric poetry and literature to include motion picture and dramatic arts, "Doing Criticism" offers a unique text that provides specific advice on how to best write criticism while offering concrete illustrations of what it looks like on the page.

Divided into two parts, "Doing Criticism" first presents an up-to-date account of the state of criticism in both Anglo-American and Continental contexts by describing both the longstanding mission and the changing functions of criticism over the centuries and discussing critical issues that bridge the literary and screen arts in the contemporary world.

The second part of "Doing Criticism" features a variety of case studies of criticism across media, including works by canonical authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and W. B. Yeats; films such as Coppola's The Conversation and Hitchcock's Vertigo; screen adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day; and a concluding chapter on several of Spike Lee's film "joints" that brings several of the book's central concepts to bear on work of a single film auteur.

Helping students of literature and cinema write well about what they find in their reading and viewing, "Doing Criticism": Discusses how the bridging of the literary arts and screen arts can help criticism flourish in the present day; Illustrates how the doing of criticism is in practice a particular kind of writing; Considers how to generalize the consequences of criticism beyond personal growth and gratification; Addresses the ways the practice of criticism matters to the practice of the critical object; Suggests that doing without criticism is not only unwise, but also perhaps impossible; Features case studies organized under the rubrics of conversation, adaptation, genre, authorship and seriality

Critique: Comprised of six informative chapters (Doing Criticism/Doing without Criticism; Making of the Critical Essay; Conversations; Adaptations; Genres; Authorship and Seriality) "Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts" is especially recommended as a curriculum textbook for students in introductory courses in criticism, literary studies, and film studies, novice book/film/theatre reviewers. Highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Literary Criticism collections, it should be noted for students, academic, professional reviewers, as well as general readers with interest in the subject, that "Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $48.00).

Editorial Note: James Chandler (https://english.uchicago.edu/people/james-chandler) is William K. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago, USA. He has written widely about Romanticism, British and Irish literature since the early Enlightenment, American cinema, and the relationship of literary criticism to film criticism. He is the author of several books including England in 1819 and An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema.

Best Minds
Stevan M. Weine
Fordham University Press
www.fordhampress.com
9781531502669, $34.95, HC, 304pp

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Minds-Ginsberg-Revolutionary-Madness/dp/1531502660

Synopsis: Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "Howl" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.

With the publication of "Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness", psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.

Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg's showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain.

Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization.

In "Best Minds", with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Dr. Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness.

"Best Minds" examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy -- using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Dr. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.

In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.

Critique: A masterpiece of original and seminal scholarship, "Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness" is informatively enhanced for the reader with the inclusion of a two page listing of Acknowledgments, nineteen pages of Notes, and an eighteen page Index. An inherently fascinating study, "Best Minds" is especially commended to the attention of the legions of Allen Ginsberg fans and an important, unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library 20th Century American Literary/Poetry Studies collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Best Minds" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $16.99).

Editorial Note #1: Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 - April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg)

Editorial Note #2: Dr. Stevan M. Weine (https://www.psych.uic.edu/profile/stevan-m-weine) is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. He is the author of two books: "When History Is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina" and :Testimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence".

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