It is hard to imagine two critical books more different from one another. Michel Chaouli's Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins recounts a very intense classroom experience of talking about a text—or failing to talk about a text—and the thoughts that he develops out of that experience. Jonathan Kramnick's Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies homes in on conventions of literary critical writing to capture the fluency and virtuosity with which literary critics deploy such techniques as in-sentence quotation and narrative summary to fit their words to particular texts they're describing and demonstrate that they've caught what those texts were saying.
Chaouli reports on and repeatedly describes a moment in class in which he read out a passage from Kafka's The Trial, only to find that he had nothing to say about it. First embarrassed at having suddenly fallen mute, he rehearses the moment to suggest...
