Customer Reviews

A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing

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Fry's philosophically erudite book places challenges on its readers, but no more than those of many of the thinkers with whom he wrestles, e.g., Heidegger. Mounting a defense of poetry means, more often than not, defining poetic language or practice as phenomenologically distinct, a project which Fry's book pursues with subtlety and great intellectual power. Future claims about the nature of the literary must take into account the position Fry takes here.

This isn't a book you can breeze through. However, like Fry's _The Reach of Criticism_ (which I recommend as a sort of intro to this book as well), it is a book you will keep coming back to, because it outlines one of the most coherent, nuanced, and yet forceful positions on the role of literature and the role of criticism--a position that is probably more relevant now than the time that it was written. It's easy to dismiss tough, sometimes turgid formulations as just more deconstructive drivel, but anyone who is familiar with Fry (or with deconstruction) knows that he distances himself from that "school" and their ("pretty") style, all the while extracting their most relevant and penetrating theses and putting them to use. In fact, most of the time Fry's style is light and nimble, shifting from insight to insight quickly: unlike the overdrawn formulations of most high theory, which, once unlocked and de-jargoned, contain little (a sort of twisted version of ordinary language philosophy, as Frederic Jameson puts it), it is something you grow impatient with only if are unwilling to keep up with the pace of the thoughts and really reflect on the matter involved--this being some of the deeper problems of literary critical practice, the stuff Wimsatt or Frye dealt with, and not abstract, one-bite issues one can sweep away on principle (this, by the way, would explain some of the more dismissive and unfair reviews here). It is a style, in short, that encourages rereading, not for sense but for the reach and power of its formulations.

As to those formulations themselves: the book is the culmination of years of research into the history of criticism and the role of interpretation, and takes for its subject the--quite odd, as Fry makes you realize--desire to *defend* literature or poetry (in the sense of poesis--not verse). Moreover, it considers the particular *type* of defense that has emerged over the years, especially since the emergence of literary criticism as a proper field of academic study, and concludes that it has gone down a strange path. Since Richards, these defenses have defended poetry against the objectivity of sciences: but Fry asks why this sort of objectivity seems so threatening in the first place. This is not in order to dismiss that objectivity (like postmodern theorists), but to wonder why the defense hasn't gone down different lines. The effect of this type of defense, in contending with the sciences, ultimately seeks to make literary criticism into something comparable to a science as well. The theoretical parts of the book are aimed at showing why this is misguided, and at attempting to construct a different sort of defense--Fry's own--as well.

"It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness--rather than the will to power--of its fall into conceptuality."

That is pretty much the kind of thing you can expect from this book--formulations that follow the meandering course of Paul Fry's thought, as he stumbles flailing after his own pretty, fluttering reflection on the "occasion of reading", which--alas--escapes both him and us. Paul Fry stands blinking in the sunlight, his butterfly net empty and his tongue unloosened.

A Defense of Poetry is possibly the most irrelevant book I've ever read or even looked at. Paul Fry needs to rouse himself from his stupor and realize that his entire career has been a very long waste of time.

The "occasion" of writing: how pretty!