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01/21/03

Everyone's a Critic 

7:35 PM

"Yet poetry has constantly the air of making statements, and important ones; The acceptance which a pseudo-statement receives is entirely governed by its effects upon our feelings and attitudes.  Logic only comes in, if at all, in subordination, as a servant to our emotional response.  The remedy, is to cut our pseudo-statements free from that kind of belief which is appropriate to verified statements."  - I.A. Richards

Ok, so why all the importance placed on 'pseudo-statements'?  Logic may not always change our emotions, but we are able to temper our emotions or, at the very least, are actions according to logic.  Literary theorists kill me.  They are always skipping lightly over certain truths in order to create some sense of the extraordinary.  They have to I guess - after all, written criticism is an art in itself.  

So we have a critic, creating a work of art about how to critique art.  Is this where we got the phrase "crawling up your own ass?"

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