Something Speaks to Me

"Everyone's a critic-in the best way. Criticism is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. We're motivated to criticism by a series of realizations: Something speaks to me, I need to tell you about it, I don't know how. This, Michel Chaouli argues, is the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement. Criticism arises fundamentally from the need to share what overwhelms us. This is not how we usually think of criticism, which we tend to associate with the worlds of scholarship and journalism, with professionals careful not to show themselves being bowled over. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism per se, but what he calls "poetic criticism." At the same time, he holds that even the stiffest professional criticism "holds somewhere within it, often well hidden, a vulnerability to being jolted by what speaks to it." For Chaouli, the point is not to set poetic criticism against non-poetic criticism, but to encourage more criticism to be done poetically. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than with communicating the urgency of criticism in ways that transcend scholarly argument and appeal to readers unschooled in theory"--