Language and Literature

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Book Review: Roger D Sell, Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature

as Dialogue
Tony Bex
Language and Literature 2013 22: 98
DOI: 10.1177/0963947012469749

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98 Language and Literature 22(1)

be explored, providing useful case studies which can be adapted for the classroom or
given as background reading. If the aim of stylistics is, in Carter’s words, ‘to provide a
systematic set of analytical tools … that can foster insights into the patterning of literary
texts in ways which allow those insights to be open, evidenced, and retrievable’ (p. 68),
then Language and Style demonstrates exactly this.

Reference
Jeffries L (2010) Critical Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue

by Roger D Sell, 2011. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. vii + 392.
ISBN 978 90 272 1028 9 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Tony Bex, University of Kent, UK

In this book, Sell argues that we are living in a post-postmodern world which is becom-
ing increasingly globalised, and that the critical disputes which characterised postmod-
ernism need to be set aside and replaced by a mediating criticism which he calls
‘communicational criticism’.
The opening chapter describes the reasoning for this new kind of criticism and hints
at the kinds of practices it involves. The ensuing chapters proceed to offer us examples
of its application to such diverse texts as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a selection of poems
from Pope and Wordsworth, Dickens’s Great Expectations, The Waste Land, Churchill’s
My Early Life, Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Lynne Reid Banks’s Melusine: A Mystery,
and the plays of Harold Pinter before concluding with a reprise in which Sell reasserts
the potential values of his critical stance.
Further, he argues that what makes the work ‘literary’ is that it leaves spaces in which
the reader can enter and compare notes both with the author and with those other readers
(or critics) who find the same kind of openness within the work. This openness, Sell sug-
gests, is the result of a ‘negative capability’ which allows the text to operate in a non-
coercive way. As a result, the author, the text and its readers come together to form a
community in which communicational criticism can be fostered.
Of course, I cannot explore the various subtleties of Sell’s argument, but there are
features of it that I find deeply problematic. At its most banal, communicational criticism
would appear to involve the collegiate activity of people of goodwill. However, such
people are necessarily ‘situated’ and, while Sell’s vocabulary is that of western liberal
humanism (and there are frequent references to Gadamer), it is difficult to ascertain pre-
cisely what his position is.
In practice, communicational criticism is more subtle than this but it does lead to
some rather surprising judgements and re-evaluations. The chapter on Henry V is both
insightful and revealing. Sell makes the point that, although historically Henry was an
active and a warlike king, Shakespeare shows very little of this activity on stage.
Our views of Henry, therefore, are constructed largely through observing his verbal
behaviour and by listening to the ways in which he is described by others. But because

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Book Reviews 99

these voices are often in conflict, the audience is left with no certain interpretation of the
‘meaning’ of the play. The locus classicus of this indeterminacy is, of course, Henry’s
rejection of Falstaff. Sell argues convincingly that this is an example of Shakespeare’s
‘negative capability’ in that he allows the audience in. Rather than by foreclosing on the
argument and asserting that Henry’s action is an act of necessary cruelty, Shakespeare
leaves the issue open. Thus, the play engages in a dialogue with its audience in which
particular interpretations are mediated through the various uses to which language is put.
And because the whole play is largely about the uses of language, Shakespeare invites us
to consider with him and each other how language both creates and shapes different
‘realities’.
The chapter on Pope, though, is an altogether different matter. Sell recognises that
Pope’s writing ‘did, and does tend to create communities around itself’ (p. 83) and that
these communities are often in conflict. Sell’s aims in this chapter, then, are to show how
Pope brought these communities into being and to mediate between them. He does this
by asserting that Pope was both England’s last great Humanist poet and its first great
Romantic. I have no serious qualms about the first claim. However, the second claim
needs severe qualification.
While Pope’s poetry is overtly didactic, Sell recognises this by admitting that ‘[h]is
frequent appeal to a shared grounding in the classics was the main ingredient in a charm-
ingly coercive social cement, which tended to bind him and his readers together into
what he was proposing as the moral consensus’ (p. 92). Sell goes on to argue that this
coercion is charming because it shows that Pope was politely suggesting that his readers
were capable of reaching the same ‘ethical and cultural high ground’ that he occupied.
But ‘The Dunciad’ suggests quite the reverse. Here, the dunces are characterised, among
other things, as those who write for money more than fame with the clear implication that
the growth of a commercial marketplace in literature was a threat to the old order. In fact,
his coercion is more aggressive than charming.
For similar reasons, I believe Sell to be wrong about ‘Windsor Forest.’ Pastoral and
georgic poetry had precise ideological functions in the 18th century which were often
contradictory. An ethically responsible criticism would surely recognise this and attempt
to investigate the social tensions which led to such contradiction before assessing whether
the poem manages to incorporate such contradictions in an aesthetically satisfying whole.
Sell does this up to a point when he claims that Pope achieves an equilibrium between
opposing points of view through his use of the heroic couplet (p. 96) but to claim that
Pope is advocating the ‘spirituality and ethics of the classical via media’ is to ignore the
partisan politics of most of his poetry.
Sell justifies his claim that Pope was the first great Romantic by appealing to such
works as ‘Eloisa and Abelard, Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Epistle to a
Lady’ and, rather surprisingly, ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.’ These, he argues, are all poems
that explore the place of emotion in society and, more particularly, reveal a sensibility
towards suffering (including Pope’s own) which can be taken as an index of his own
sensitivity and feelings. They are thus personal in the same way that the great romantic
poems are personal. This seems to me a difficult position to sustain. What is at issue here
is not so much the intersection between personal feeling and public statement but the
voice through which it is mediated. My own take on such poems is that the personal

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100 Language and Literature 22(1)

references are rhetorical tropes, which Pope uses to demonstrate his skill both as versifier
and public poet. Unlike the great Romantics, Pope’s apparently personal voice is in fact
a disguised public voice.
Sell’s chapter on Wordsworth is far more satisfactory. Although I am inclined to
disagree with him about Wordsworth not manifesting the ‘egotistical sublime’, his
great poems do indeed invite us to contemplate our own psychological experiences and
compare them with those explored in the poetry. Whether this should be regarded as an
example of Wordsworth’s ‘communicational good will’ (p. 174) is more of an open
question. It is true that Wordsworth is rarely oppressively didactic and to that extent we
rarely feel that his poetry has a design on us. However, this could derive from the fact
that Wordsworth often seems oblivious of the feelings of others (for example, in his
communicational indifference to the speech of the old leech gatherer in ‘Resolution
and Independence’).
A somewhat queasy note is struck in Sell’s discussion of TS Eliot. Responding to
modern critics’ accusations of Eliot’s anti-semitism, Sell goes through a series of contor-
tions, none of which are particularly convincing. His aim is to demonstrate that (p. 234):

a post-postmodern mediating critic’s most typical line of argument is that in debates about
Eliot, Dickens, Stowe or any other writer, a readership can come into communication not only
with the writer, but in effect with other readerships.

This, however, rather begs the question. That Eliot was anti-semitic is undeniable.
How the critic deals with this deplorable trait is deeply problematic. Sell suggests that
because he was writing nearly a century ago such sentiments are explicable on the
grounds that when he was writing ‘they would not have been generally regarded as
reprehensible’ (p. 232). Sell is careful not to condone Eliot’s views, but I am surprised by
his use of the term ‘generally’. Following the Dreyfus affair, it seems to me far more
likely that anti-semitism was on the decline, at least among liberally minded people (i.e.
the kind of audience to which the author is currently appealing). Sell, I think, rather
ducks the argument here and his view that the increasing heterogeneity of new reader-
ships somehow solves the problem is deeply unsatisfactory.
Sell’s chapters on his chosen prose works appear to manifest the same felicities and
faults as his chapters on poetry although I do not feel qualified to judge them. On bal-
ance, then, my final impression is that communicational criticism is unlikely to challenge
any of the existing critical orthodoxies. I believe it is insufficiently rooted in a coherent
philosophical ground and that its aims are, ultimately, vague and unfocussed.4

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