I've been among those opposed to or at least uncomfortable with the use of evaluative terms in criticism. In fact I recently wrote on another list as follows:
***** Actually, "great" is at best a seriously useless critical term. It makes sense only in such contexts as "what a great day," "that was a great pass interception," "Wow, what a great chocolate cake," or "that was really great sex."
If one were to pretend that it was a useful term in talking of writers, perhaps it could be confined only to those few writers whose work is of such importance as to make learning their language a deeply felt need. If we consider writers in English in this context, perhaps there are three writers we could apply it to -- Shakespeare, Milton, Austen. But applied to them it is redundant and sounds silly.
The term probably should be avoided in speaking of literature.*****
I think a recent post on that same list illustrates the redundancy of "great" in all the context in which it makes any sense. I had inquired about a sentence from Austen's Persuasion:
"And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor nurserymaids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgments, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest." (Chapter 23 or 2/11)
I had been listening to a recording of Persuasion from Readers Service to the Blind, and this sentence had leaped out to me. I downloaded Persuasion from Gutenberg & had ZoomText read me the chapter. I thought perhaps Donald Davie's Articulate Energy would help & queried a list if anyone could scan the passage on "sweetness" and "strength" in that work. No one could but I got the following help:
*** I don't have Davie, but the effect is a combination of specific kinds of parallelism: an opening adverb clause in asyndeton (a series with no conjunction) and in this case a series of participial phrases about the outer world that moves from the presumed important (sauntering politicians) to the presumed unimportant (nurserymaids and children); and it then moves inward to something deeply personal. This clause is also a series that moves from shorter to longer phrasing (so it is a gradated colon), and the whole sentence closes in another parallelism of adjectives that draw all together as "poignant and ceaseless in interest"--it becomes a world.
That is a dryly technical rhetorical analysis, but it is the use of those ancient Greek patterns, so loved by the 18th century, in just the exactly right pattern.****
Indeed. Not dry at all. And it would be inanely redundant to add to that analysis such empty terms as "great," "wonderful," etc. Critics use "great" to fill in when their description of a text is inadequate.
Carrol
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