criticism

criticism Click here for more free books!

1. The act of criticizing, especially adversely.
2. A critical comment or judgment.
3. 1. The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works.
   2. A critical article or essay; a critique.
   3. The investigation of the origin and history of literary documents; textual criticism.

noun

1. A comment expressing fault: blame, censure, condemnation, denunciation, reprehension, reprobation. Informal pan. Slang knock. See praise/blame.
2. Evaluative and critical discourse: critique, notice, review. See opinion, words.

Definition: interpretation, analysis
Antonyms: estimation, guess, supposition

n

Definition: verbal disapproval
Antonyms: approval, compliment, praise

The expression in words of judgments on aspects of the art of music. It embraces many kinds of writing about music, from historical and analytical discussion in books and periodicals to reviews in daily newspapers. The place of criticism (in the evaluative, as opposed to the style-analytical or historical, sense) in musicology is a vexed issue. Many scholars argue that an awareness of music as a vehicle of human expression is fundamental to the study of music and that evaluative criticism should accordingly have a place. Others prefer to limit their role to textual criticism, the preparation of faithful and accurate editions in which alternatives are considered and assessed and choices are made. At its best, scholarly criticism may communicate a view of a work or a repertory in a wide historical and social context, to show why it came into existence, how it relates to earlier and contemporary works, what techniques it uses and how effectively it uses them, and how it functions as a coherent work of art (this may involve some use of analysis) etc.

Criticism of the written text, the scholar's chief task, is different in many respects from criticism of the heard performance, the task of the journalist-critic, who may write for a magazine, a newspaper or a radio station. He is subject to certain editorial disciplines of space and time, imposed by his editors and arising from economic factors. He has to be aware of the public he is writing for and its degree of cultural sophistication. Nevertheless his first duty remains to the art of music itself, to encouraging the good and discouraging the bad (as he sees it) by bringing to it sympathy, receptiveness and a proper basis of knowledge. His second duty is to his readers, to attracting and holding their interest, to informing them, perhaps to entertaining them. Only after that does the critic have a duty to the performers he is reviewing: he should treat their work responsibly and take it seriously, but he is not their instructor. Any critical judgment is likely to include a subjective element and it is part of the critic's job to convey which elements are personal and which are not, so giving the reader some scope for forming his own opinions or at least for establishing limits within which his taste and judgment might lie. The critic should see his role as embodying some element of description and evaluation, when he is considering new music (for which he may wish to prepare himself by prior study of the score or attendance at rehearsals), or when he is not, as describing the style, the technical adequacy and the musical insights of a performer (whose performance he may instinctively measure against some ideal of his own, possibly based on experience of previous performances). Extremes of approach in music criticism are represented, on the one hand, by what has been called the ‘sensitized palate’ approach, whereby the critic responds on an intensely personal plane by reporting his own reactions, which may say much more about the critic than about the music and whose value must depend upon his response to any particular musical experience and the degree of interest attached to his subjective impressions; and on the other, by the critic who diligently describes, in terms as objective as possible, any work or performance while minimizing his personal response, which is apt to produce dull, objective writing. Unless the critic possesses a musical mind of exceptional interest and the capacity to express it felicitously, he will normally do best to steer a course between the Scylla of extreme subjectivity and the Charybdis of objective description. He may do best to regard himself as a professional, well-informed listener, drawing on his training, experience and love of music to arouse the enthusiasms and widen the experiential horizons of his readers.

The earliest criticism of Western art music is found in the work of late medieval theorists who criticized the innovations of their time; but it was only with the Renaissance that the discussion of music moved on to the question of the effect that music might have on the listener - a topic of concern to the humanist thinkers and religious reformers and counter-reformers of the time. The Baroque theory of expression, with its preoccupation over music as the provider of affective experience, also gave rise to a music-critical literature.

In the late 17th century, with the rise of periodicals and newspapers, the criticism of musical works and events could move into a wider arena. Some discussions in pamphlet form, however (always beloved of the French), may be ranked as music criticism, for example the early 18th-century disputes between the supporters of Italian opera and those of French. The writings of Addison in The Spectator in the second decade of the century inaugurated music criticism in England and greatly influenced that in Germany, when Mattheson imitated the style of Addison and Steele and then founded the first periodical wholly devoted to writings about music, Critica musica (1722-5). Others followed, including Scheibe's Der critische Musikus (1737-40) and the Berlin papers edited by Marpurg. It was no coincidence that music criticism appeared and flourished just at the time when concert life was starting, and in the same places: a middle-class public, eager to hear music, was also ready to read about it. French pamphlet wars continued during the 18th century, characteristically linked to operatic disputes, like the Querelle des Bouffons and the Gluck-Piccinni controversy, in the 1750s and 1770s. By this time specific criticism of new music publications, and discussions of other musical matters, were beginning to appear in general cultural journals, in London, Paris, Vienna and elsewhere. J.A. Hiller's weekly publication, issued in the late 1760s in Leipzig - rapidly becoming an important centre of musical commerce - was an early music periodical designed to appeal to a wide readership.

It was also in Leipzig that the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was founded, in 1798; in the ensuing years this was to be the leading periodical for the coverage of the Viennese Classical composers. Literary figures such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, as well as its founder J.F. Rochlitz, wrote in this journal, inspired by idealistic notions linking the arts with social and political issues. Heine, too, wrote for a music periodical. Up to around this time, the daily press had carried reports on concerts and other musical events, though not reviews; but before the end of the 18 century critical comment had begun to appear. The first regular music critic on a daily paper is thought to have been appointed (to The Times, London) in 1845. Yet for the sheer quantity of published music criticism Paris prevailed, with such periodicals as Fétis's Revue musicale (1827), the publisher Heugel's Le ménestrel (1833) and the publisher Schlesinger's Gazette musicale de Paris (1834), which provided a platform for composers.

In its first issue, Liszt attacked critics as shallow and ignorant, and pressed the claims of composers to serve as critics. Many of the most interesting critics of the 19th century were in fact composers, which is not surprising since the holding of strong opinions about new music and the lack of need for judicious balance are bound to lead to interesting writing. Weber was a forceful and controversial critic, Berlioz a fine literary one with a command of the striking phrase, with keen insights on subjects that appealed to him even if purblind on others, and Schumann, who founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 and edited it for ten years, showed himself a keenly discriminating writer, interested in aesthetic questions, acutely perceptive on promising young composers (he was the first to hail the genius of Chopin and Brahms, though also that of several now forgotten composers) and both equipped and ready to write long, detailed analysis-criticisms when necessary (for example on Schubert's Symphony no.9).

One leading and influential critic who was not a composer was Eduard Hanslick, the dominating figure in Viennese criticism for much of the latter part of the 19th century. A cultivated man, graceful writer and penetrating critic, he has been widely vilified for his resistance to Wagner (who was himself a prolific critic, though chiefly as a propagandist for his own thinking). London criticism in the mid-19th century was mostly conservative, ready to accept Rossini and Mendelssohn but not Verdi or Wagner, who were found vulgar and noisy. It was left to an Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, to counterbalance them with his eager advocacy of Wagner and his deprecation of Brahms, expressed trenchantly and wittily. Hugo Wolf, in Vienna, attacked Brahms and supported Wagner, in strongly polemical tones. In Prague, Smetana espoused the cause of Slavonic nationalism, as in St Petersburg did Cui and Stasov (in which he was opposed by the influential Serov). Tchaikovsky, a critic during the 1870s, found neither Brahms nor Wagner to his taste. In France the most important composer-critic was Debussy who was impatient of trivia (he called Grieg's piano miniatures ‘pink bonbons stuffed with snow’), saw the danger of Wagner as a model (preferring Musorgsky) and stressed the need for French composers to be true to native tradition.

Debussy's criticism was written in the early years of the 20th century, but composer-critics have, in this century, generally been less prominent, partly no doubt owing to the changing nature of music criticism in an age of specialization and intense activity. The need (or perhaps simply the custom), in the English-speaking countries particularly, for newspaper criticism to be published the morning after a performance, which has prevailed for most of the 20th century, led to the development of a new form of journalism, which at its worst could be vacuous and inaccurate but at its best could convey the essence of an event judiciously, with immediacy and conveying a kind of enthusiasm that would he appropriate only to an instant) product designed for instant consumption.

Distinguished practitioners of this medium in the USA have been W.J. Henderson, who wrote in New York between the 1880s and the 1930s and brought a fine knowledge of music and history to his reviews on the New York Times and later the New York Sun; he saw Wagner in a true perspective (though was disturbed by the morality of some of his operas), was conservative in taste yet had a ready sympathy for the best in new music, for example admiring Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Among his successors was Olin Downes, a critic first in Boston and then for the New York Times, who despite a lack of traditional academic training formed a writing style of his own that conveyed his vigorous and unorthodox enthusiams for then-unpopular contemporary causes, such as Sibelius, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, as well as jazz. With Virgil Thomson, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, the tradition of the composer-critic was revived; though a believer in critical objectivity, and possessor of a cool, elegant and witty style, he could not always conceal his particular likes and dislikes. The most influential New York critic later in the 20th century has been Harold C. Schonberg, whose professional pianist's training and broad culture informed his writing for two decades. Criticism of a more scholarly kind is represented by the work of Joseph Kerman, in monthlies, quarterlies and books, who has endeavoured to use musicological method to serve critical ends and has brought a keen analytical and historically informed equipment to the task.

In England, the leading figure in criticism in the early 20th century was Ernest Newman, who was also a great Wagner scholar; his objective as a critic was complete scientific precision in the act of evaluation, involving closely reasoned argument based on a well-stocked mind and a readiness to respond to new stimulus. He wrote for daily newspapers in Manchester and Birmingham and for the London Sunday Times. Although not a newspaper critic, Donald Tovey has a place in any discussion of criticism for his brilliant series of analytical notes, with their numerous insights (those of a moderately successful composer) into the compositional process. Later noteworthy critics have included Frank Howes, critic for The Times, strongly in the tradition of English conservatism in his reactions to (for example) Stravinsky and Schoenberg but a keen champion of English music. The criticism of the Handel, Bizet and opera scholar Winton Dean, usually written for monthly journals, has led to an increased awareness of the interplay between literary and dramatic factors with musical ones. An outstanding practitioner of daily criticism in England was Andrew Porter, who through his work in the Financial Times was largely responsible for a change in the character of English criticism during the 1960s, whereby critics were assigned more space and thus encouraged to adopt a more literary manner; from the 1970s he was music critic of the New Yorker, where his elegant style, underpinned by sound scholarship and keen perception, exercised a substantial influence on American critical standards. English-language criticism has, broadly speaking, avoided the element of politicization that is found in much musical criticism in the European continent.

criticism, the reasoned discussion of literary works, an activity which may include some or all of the following procedures, in varying proportions: the defence of literature against moralists and censors, classification of a work according to its genre, interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which literary works (individually, in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated and understood. Contrary to the everyday sense of criticism as ‘fault‐finding’, much modern criticism (particularly of the academic kind) assumes that the works it discusses are valuable; the functions of judgement and analysis having to some extent become divided between the market (where reviewers ask ‘Is this worth buying?’) and the educational world (where academics ask ‘Why is this so good?’). The various kinds of criticism fall into several overlapping categories: theoretical, practical, impressionistic, affective, prescriptive, or descriptive. Criticism concerned with revealing the author's true motive or intention (sometimes called ‘expressive’ criticism) emerged from Romanticism to dominate much 19th‐ and 20th‐century critical writing, but has tended to give way to ‘objective’ criticism, focusing on the work itself (as in New Criticism and structuralism), and to a shift of attention to the reader in reader‐response criticism. Particular schools of criticism also seek to understand literature in terms of its relations to history, politics, gender, social class, mythology, linguistic theory, or psychology. See also exegesis, hermeneutics, metacriticism, poetics.

The term can mean, and has meant in France, many different ways of writing or talking about literature. It is not so much a literary genre as a set of practices, often at odds with each other. French literary history shows striking changes in the dominant functions assumed by criticism, the institutions where it is produced, and the value placed upon it, from the Romantic scorn for the critic as uncreative parasite to the extraordinary respect shown to certain maîtres à penser of the late 20th c.

1. Medieval and Renaissance

The words ‘la critique’ (criticism) and ‘le critique’ (critic) did not have their modern meaning until the late 16th and 17th c. Medieval France, however, was familiar with several kinds of criticism, practised mainly in the universities in relation to Latin texts, both biblical and classical. There were biographies of writers, some in the vernacular [see Vida], but above all there was a highly developed art of commentary. This paid attention to the intention and genre of works, their moral value, their usefulness as a source of expressions and rhetorical devices, and to their often hidden meaning, interpreted according to sophisticated allegorical schemes. The latter continued into the Renaissance period and beyond; they are mocked in the prologue to Rabelais's Gargantua.

The Renaissance saw a great flourishing of philology, as practised by such humanist scholars as Dolet or Dorat. This was applied first and foremost to ancient texts [see Classical Influences], but also to difficult writings in French, as in Muret's commentary on Ronsard. At the same time, there was criticism of a more polemic nature in various prefaces, and particularly in the arguments about the value of the new programme of the Pléiade, which was carried on in Sébillet's Art poétique français and Du Bellay's Défense et illustration. This overlapped with the development of formal criticism or poetics. Late medieval rhetoricians (e.g. Jean Bouchet) had produced manuals of poetic devices, but the 16th c. saw the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Ars poetica and the publication of commentaries and treatises on poetics in Latin (Castelvetro, Scaliger) and increasingly in French (Ronsard, Peletier du Mans).

2. 17th and 18th Centuries

Such theoretical works, sometimes polemic in nature, are a major feature of 17th-c. literary history [see Classicism]. They include the works of Chapelain, La Ménardière, Colletet, Rapin, Le Bossu, and Boileau. Boileau, however, is much less the dogmatic lawgiver of legend than the committed and often prejudiced critic, passionately concerned with evaluating and promoting the literature of the present. A related mode of criticism in this period is the fault-finding commentary, concentrating on questions of language and decorum. Malherbe's commentary on Desportes is the classic example, together with Chapelain's Sentiments de l'Académie sur le Cid.

More entertaining than pedantic discussions of this kind were the relatively informal discussions of French and foreign literature in fashionable society and the writings read there. Montaigne may be seen as a precursor; his Essais abound in agreeably personal discussions of his reading. In the 17th c. the salons provided a new venue for literary conversations (the Académie Française itself was originally a kind of salon). The honnêtes gens of the salons were the public for the numerous essays, letters, dialogues, reflections, and the like which contain the best of 17th-c. criticism—one may cite the writings of Balzac, Sarasin, Méré, Bouhours, La Bruyère, and Saint-Évremond, together with the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry and the prefaces of writers such as Corneille, Racine, and Boileau. This ‘amateur’ critical tradition, whose aim is to create, consolidate, or revise the literary norms of polite society, continues throughout the 18th c. in innumerable writings, including those of La Motte, Bayle, Fénelon, Marivaux, Diderot, Voltaire (who also practised the more pedantic mode in his commentaries on Corneille), and Chamfort. Of the more theoretical works produced in the 18th c., the most important are probably those of Dubos and Marmontel.

In the ancien régime, as in more recent times, literature was often a place of controversy. In the 17th c. there were violent onslaughts by Bossuet, Nicole, and others on the immoral tendencies of imaginative writing, and the use of religious subjects in profane literature was defended by Desmarets in the face of Boileau's attacks. The turn of the century saw the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, in which first Boileau and Perrault, and then Madame Dacier and La Motte took leading parts. In the 18th c. literary quarrels came to have an increasingly political nature (for or against the Enlightenment). An important new development was the appearance of book-reviewing periodicals such as the Journal des Savants, the Mémoires de Trévoux, Fréron's Année littéraire, Linguet's journals, and Grimm's less public Correspondance littéraire. This was the birth of the professional journalist-critic, who was to flourish in the following century.

3. 19th and 20th Centuries

During the 18th c. French literature had begun to be systematically studied in the rhetoric classes of secondary schools. This normative teaching is enshrined in Batteux's Cours de belles-lettres; from now on the criticism of modern literature and pedagogy were to become ever more closely entwined. La Harpe continued in the same vein for the adult audiences of the Lycée. His Cours de littérature is a culmination of the old tradition of dogmatic evaluation, but at the same time it is a history of European literature. Literary history in its modern sense, however, makes its appearance in the works of de Staël and Chateaubriand. And it was the historical approach which was to dominate the criticism and eventually the teaching of literature in the following century or more with the voluminous writings of Villemain, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Brunetière, Lanson, and many others. [For this development, and the subsequent conflict between literary history and ‘la nouvelle critique’, see Literary History].

Meanwhile, evaluative, essayistic criticism remained vigorous and often combative, as in the work of Stendhal, Nodier, Nisard, or Saint-Marc Girardin or the prefaces of most of the major writers of the 19th c. Sainte-Beuve, for all his ‘scientific’ biographical ambitions, was above all an opinion forming journalist, and periodicals such as the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux mondes provided a forum for critical debate. In the later 19th c., in reaction to positivistic literary history, there was a flourishing of ‘impressionistic’ criticism, exemplified by the work of Jules Lemaitre. After 1909 the Nouvelle Revue Française in particular provided a home for creative criticism by writers such as Du Bos, Thibaudet, Rivière, and Paulhan. In modern times, moreover, some of the best personal criticism has been written by those who are better known as poets or novelists: for instance, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Valéry, Blanchot, Butor, and Bonnefoy. Sartre is a special case, pursuing the same type of investigation into human motives and actions in his fiction and drama and in his writings about literature.

4. ‘La Nouvelle Critique’

The second half of the 20th c. is marked by the emergence of a varied set of tendencies sometimes grouped together as ‘la nouvelle critique’. These are united principally by their opposition to traditional university criticism (‘l'homme et l'œuvre’) on the one hand, and to essayistic impressionism on the other. Most refer explicitly to some theoretical foundation and subvert ‘common-sense’ readings of texts based on philological and historical information or authorial intention. The first group to be given this label were the critics sometimes known (rather inaccurately) as the Geneva School (Raymond, Poulet, Richard, etc.), who used a thematic analysis largely inspired by Bachelard to illuminate the ‘moi profond’ of the writer. A second group were the revisionist Marxist critics such as Goldmann, who attempted to go beyond the simple reflection model of classic Marxism. A later development of Marxist criticism is that of the Althusser school, notably Macherey, who made use of some of the ideas of Structuralism to stress the contradictory positions that go into the ‘production’ of literary works. Around 1968 the group associated with Sollers, Kristeva, and Tel Quel also attempted to bring together Marxism and late Structuralism.

It is no doubt Structuralism that has had the greatest impact on the study of literature. This is described in a separate entry, but it should be stressed here that Structuralist theory and criticism were intimately bound up with new movements in creative writing such as the Nouveau Roman. Such a commitment to the new is seen at its best in the work of Barthes, probably the most constantly rewarding critic of recent decades. He, like many of his colleagues, made the move from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism around 1968, abandoning hopes for a ‘science of literature’ in favour of approaches stressing the openness and contradictions of the text, which thus becomes the ground for the creative activity of the reader. Two dominant features of criticism between 1970 and 1990 were the impact of feminism, particularly in the 1970s, and the massive influence on literary interpretation of psychoanalysis. This was a period in which the intellectual leaders of French modernity (Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lyotard) exerted a powerful influence well beyond the frontiers of France.

It should not be thought that these developments have meant the end of more traditional modes of criticism in France. Much journalistic criticism is relatively unaffected by such ideas, although journals such as Critique, Littérature, and Tel Quel have been among the centres of new critical activity. And the universities, while their attitude to various types of ‘nouvelle critique’ is warmer than in the 1960s, have continued to produce much-needed philological and historical work. Indeed, one of the most hopeful signs of the early 1990s is the development outlined at the end of the entry Literary history.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• R. Fayolle, La Critique littéraire (1964)
• G. Poulet (ed.), Les Chemins actuels de la critique (1968)
• J. Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since (1979)
• A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism (1988)

The analysis of a performance. The term is often used in the pejorative sense of making an unfavourable or severe comment, but criticism of athletes can be a useful motivational strategy if used sensitively, for example, when combined with praise and followed with suggestions as to how to improve. It is generally agreed that criticisms consisting only of unspecific exhortations to try harder are not very effective.

Common misspelling(s) of criticism

• critisism

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kritik

Nederlands (Dutch)
kritiek

Français (French)
n. - critique, blâme, étude critique sur, analyse critique, critique littéraire

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kritik

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κριτική, αξιολόγηση, επίκριση, κατάκριση

Italiano (Italian)
critica

Português (Portuguese)
n. - crítica (f), censura (f)

Русский (Russian)
критика

Español (Spanish)
n. - crítica, observaciones y reparos, censura, comentario crítico

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kritik, klander

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
批评, 非难, 评论

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 批評, 非難, 評論

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 비평 , 비판 능력, 원전연구

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 批評, 批判

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) نقد, انتقاد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ביקורת, ביקורתיות‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.