{"product_id":"the-music-of-what-happens-poems-poets-critics-9780674591530","title":"The Music of What Happens: Poems  Poets  Critics","description":"\u003cp\u003eEssential Vendler. Chicago Tribune  A leading partisan of close reading defends aesthetics as the beating heart of criticism.  The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a sea change in literary criticism. As deconstruction  Marxism  feminism  and other currents dethroned the New Criticism in the American academy  those who held fast to formalist approaches appeared increasingly outmoded. Critics  as Helen Vendler put it  had been put on notice by literary theory.  Fortunately  Vendler was up to the challenge. The essays and reviews collected in The Music of What Happens make a defiantly unfashionable case for her stalwart aestheticism. According to Vendler  the critics job is neither to interpret the poem  uncovering the secret meaning lurking beneath its surfaces  nor to unmask its ideological underpinnings  but to describe how the interplay of form and signification creates a unique and cohesive aesthetic experience. Good criticism illuminates the qualities that make each poem unlike any other: it explains not only what happens in the text but also  as Seamus Heaney once wrote  the music of what happens.  Including magisterial assessments of her fellow critics and literary theorists  from Roland Barthes and Geoffrey Hartman to Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling  as well as characteristically acute appraisals of a wide range of contemporary and canonical poets  The Music of What Happens shows the rich dividends that accrue when we treat literature as a fine art like painting or sculpture rather than a discourse to be decoded and evaluated in social and historical terms. Above all  we become more attuned to the pleasures of readingand even the pleasures of criticism itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646909538357,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674591534","price":23.56,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674591530.jpg?v=1781681264","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-music-of-what-happens-poems-poets-critics-9780674591530","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}