ABOUT THIS BOOK

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us.

Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli argues, criticism involves three moments: Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don’t know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us.

We tend to associate criticism with scholarship and journalism. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism, but what he calls “poetic criticism”—a staging ground for surprise, dread, delight, comprehension, and incomprehension. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me draws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Kant and Schlegel to Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Barthes, and Cavell. Reflecting on these dimensions of poetic experience, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than communicating the urgency of criticism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Michel Chaouli is professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities. His recent publications include Thinking with Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” and the coedited volume Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature.

REVIEWS

"Inviting us to look afresh at the experience of reading, Michel Chaouli fuses the poetic and philosophical to stunning effect. To read his words is to be arrested by revelatory turns of phrase and ambushed by insights. Chaouli’s luminous prose deserves the widest possible audience."

— Rita Felski, University of Virginia

“If, as Michel Chaouli suggests, there is no greater compliment to pay a work than ‘to credit it with the power of arousing the urge of making,’ then this book deserves that high praise. I left its pages grateful to the author for articulating things I’ve thought but didn’t yet have words for, as well as for articulating ideas that hadn’t yet occurred to me. Chaouli’s prose is patient and pellucid at every turn without ever sacrificing passion or complexity. His book renews my excitement about—and dedication to—poetic criticism, not to mention the sustaining arts of connection and conversation.”

— Maggie Nelson

“Chaouli’s passionate, brooding exploration of poetic criticism should be essential reading not for literary critics alone but for anyone who has fallen under the spell of a powerful work of art and feels the mysterious compulsion to speak about the experience.”

— Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University

“In this startlingly original and elegantly constructed book, Chaouli enacts the very sort of practice which his phenomenology of poetic criticism so brilliantly describes. Something Speaks to Me extends the legacy of Barthes, Baldwin, Sontag, and Adorno, writers for whom criticism meant ‘making new sense’ as much as ‘understanding [existing sense],’ and whose passages are read with unprecedented attention throughout. It is also a unique work: a phenomenology of intimacy, urgency, and opacity. This triad of terms enables Chaouli to explore the philosophical depths of what happens when criticism and participation are seen as interlocking rather than opposing activities, disclosing the seriousness of an underexamined and often unloved practice but also highlighting its everyday joys.”

— Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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