Another fine article to read. Let me assure those who, like me, start to read
it and then notice that it is 67 pages long: the article is only about 25
pages, and the rest is a fine scholarly bibliography of the Tolkien critical
literature.
Drout and Wynne are very obviously rehearsing their arguments for starting
their own Journal of Tolkien Studies, which was finally inaugurated in 2004
(and is linked by 'our' Wynnie in another post in this current TORn thread).
In that Journal (it's the first issue), Drout has an article of his own showing
exactly what he means by championing the necessity and value of analyzing
Tolkien's style sentence by sentence, and even word by word -- that is the
article about which I commented last night (see "Oh Wow"). It is quite
fascinating, and of course it's staggering to contemplate Drout and his
colleagues performing the same detailed analysis on every scene in Tolkien's
writings in the years and decades to come...
But to get back to this article here (Drout and Wynne, 2000), they also get in
a few licks at the current literary establishment, even while knocking on its
door. One wonders if they really care -- since they do say they expect the
current theoretical generation of "gender, race and class" addicts to die
off rather than come around to stylistic analysis, and conclude with the
observation that
Tolkien fans who dress up at their conventions seem to have more fun than those
who suffer through Modern Language Association meetings!
Hoo, hoo!
Well, as with everything else being brought to our attention with this
Marquette thread, I recommend this essay to everyone here. Modtheow gives you
the opening paragraph, so let me post part of their conclusion:
QUO VADIS?
A criticism that avoids most of the more commonly discussed issues in
contemporary literature is simultaneously refreshing and frustrating. One
breathes an enormous sigh of relief at being able to read article after article
without hearing repeated the litany of "race, class, and gender" (or additional
items added to this familiar laundry list). On the other hand, Tolkien's work
is ripe for some of the historico-literary analysis opened up by the burgeoning
of theoretically complex and self-conscious scholarship in the 80's and 90's.
Furthermore, Tolkien's works challenge many of the comfortable assumptions made
by "theory" and its practitioners, and can be used to debunk many of the
sprawling truth-claims of theoretically centered critics.
Tolkien critics should continue to remedy the flaws in contemporary criticism
by addressing issues that it ignores. It seems that the world hardly needs more
articles on race, class, and gender, but ignoring these topics creates a
situation where Tolkien critics and other literary scholars have nothing to
talk about. Tolkien critics thus marginalize themselves and their subject
(intentionally or otherwise) when they ignore issues important to contemporary
literary studies. Truly the lack of serious, informed discussion of Good and
Evil in contemporary mainstream literary criticism is a serious blind spot, but
the metaphysical discussion of Tolkien's works seems to have taken on a life of
its own, to the detriment of literary study.
The biggest failing in Tolkien criticism, however, is its lack of discussion of
Tolkien's style, his sentence-level writing, his word choice and syntax. For
while it is certainly true that much of the animosity directed towards
Tolkien's work is due to its presumed political content or its subject matter,
it seems to us (through many informal discussions and by reading nearly
everything written about Tolkien over the past twenty-five years) that a major
reason that modernist and post-modernist critics reject LotR is that they see
Tolkien's sentence-level writing as being inferior to that of many of his
contemporaries. Yet the great mass of literary criticism over the past fifteen
years can only be described as political exegesis: the interpretation of texts
for the political allegories assumed to be encoded (generally unconsciously
encoded) within them. Such criticism avoids completely the necessity of
articulating a theory of style, and in fact it seems logical that prose style
would be a totally unimportant criterion for politically focused criticism.
Again, Tolkien brings out the contradictions in current critical practice, for
he is rejected due to prose style, yet none of his detractors can make a very
good case for any one theory of political exegesis or ethical poetics that
would justify this
rejection.
"Wake up and smell the coffee."
squire online:
Footerama: "Tolkien would have LOVED it!" (improved!)
The Valaquenta discussion
