Eli Mandel on Literary Criticism

      Eli Mandel Criticism: the Silent Speaking Words (1966) A transcript of eight CBC talks given by Mandel (then a professor in the English Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton). He explores the central problem of literary and other arts criticism: What good is it? Does it have a legitimate purpose? His answer asserts that criticism is as legitimate an intellectual pursuit as any other

     This was a time when English Departments were attempting to reconstruct criticism as an objective analysis of literary works. In 1957 Northrop Frye had published his Anatomy of Criticism,  which argued that literature could be classified in terms of it content or “matter”, and its form or “plot”. Since these are objectively observable aspects of any work, Frye’s analysis liberated criticism from the subjective shackles of biography, sociology, psychology, and so on, which had dominated literary scholarship since the 18th century and had made criticism a matter of opinion and schools of thought.
     Mandel finally agrees with Frye, but takes a long and roundabout route to get there. His agreement is qualified by his admiration for Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, both of whom urged that literature is speech from one generation to another: that the “silent speaking words” on the page convey to us another mind, a person, and therefore create, preserve, and even enrich relationships with the dead.
     I think that Frye’s anatomy is accurate: it is a theory of literature that can be tested by examining and comparing different works. I think Mandel is also right: a piece of writing is made by a human, and to whatever extent the writer’s honesty and skill can do so, it records that person’s mind, that person’s experience. By reading their words, we encounter that person.
     Or as someone has said: The imagination is the only method we have to understand each other. I would add ... and the world in which we live.
     Eli Mandel was my teacher and then my colleague at U of A, Edmonton. He was man who never let a good idea stop him from exploring another one. I remember him with respect and affection. See the Wiki entry.
    On the Poetry page you’ll find a poem I wrote during and after listening to Eli at a workshop put on for high school teachers in Ontario.
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