Chapter 8: What Is Evaluation?

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Welcome to another Deep Dive.

Today, we have a very specific foundational mission.

Yeah, a really important one.

Right, we're looking closely at how exactly we judge a piece of writing.

Because, you know, think about the last time you put down a novel or walked out of a theater.

We probably had an immediate reaction, right?

Exactly, you immediately thought to yourself, wow, that was an absolute masterpiece, or maybe that was incredibly tedious.

Yeah, we do it instinctively.

But what are you actually doing in that moment?

Are you merely expressing a subjective personal preference, like no different than declaring your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Right, strawberry over vanilla.

Or is there a genuine objective standard of measurement operating in the background of your mind?

It's a massive question.

It is, and to figure this out, we are pulling our core insights today from a fantastic foundational source.

It's chapter eight of A Short Guide to Writing About Literature.

Which is such a great text.

It really is, the chapter focuses entirely on the question, what is evaluation?

And it offers this brilliant look at the actual mechanics behind our literary judgments.

It really is an essential framework to master.

But before we can even get into the weeds of evaluation and standards, we have to clear the air regarding a specific word.

Oh, right, a word that gets tossed around constantly.

And usually incorrectly, the word is criticism.

In every day vernacular, if someone tells you that you are being critical, they almost always mean you are finding fault.

Yeah, you're complaining.

Exactly.

You are pointing out that a narrative arc is weak, or that a protagonist is flat.

But in literary circles, criticism means something entirely different from just tearing a work down.

Okay, let's unpack this.

If criticism isn't just the act of giving a book a scathing review, what is it actually doing?

What's fascinating here is that literary criticism is chiefly concerned with two distinct operations,

interpretation and analysis.

Interpretation and analysis, got it.

Right, so interpretation is the act of setting forth, meaning basically decoding the thematic arguments the text is making.

Right.

Analysis, on the other hand, is the examination of the relationships among the parts, or tracing causes and effects within the text itself.

Neither of those operations is about handing out a letter grade or deciding if the author deserves an award.

Right, and we can visualize this distinction perfectly with Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman.

A perfect example.

If you sit down to write an interpretation of that play, your thesis might argue that Willie Lohman functions as the ultimate victim of a cruel, unyielding capitalist economy.

Because you are setting forth a specific meaning about the broader themes of the text.

Exactly, you are interpreting Willie's tragic trajectory as a commentary on the American dream.

Precisely, but if you shift gears and perform an analysis, you are looking at the mechanics.

You're examining the engine of the play.

The nuts and bolts.

Yeah, so you might turn your attention to the stage directions.

Miller specifically wrote a stage direction noting that towering, angular shapes surround the salesman's house.

Right, creating that cramped feeling.

Yes,

an analysis would point out how that specific, symbolic, claustrophobic setting physically and visually contributes to the overall meaning of the play.

It isn't declaring the play to be a masterpiece or a failure.

Not at all.

It is demonstrating how a specific localized part of the text creates a broader effect.

So analysis is essentially the autopsy of the text.

You aren't judging the moral character of the subject.

You're just figuring out how the bones fit together and why the muscles move the way they do.

That's a great way to put it.

We see this exact same analytical approach applied to Robert Frost's incredibly brief poem, The Span of Life.

The poem is literally just two lines.

It is.

The first line is, the old dog barks backward without getting up.

And the second line is, I can remember when he was a pup.

Such a beautiful, melancholic juxtaposition.

And again, a critical analysis of this poem doesn't involve deciding if it deserves a five -star rating on Goodreads.

Right, no star ratings here.

Instead, the critical eye looks directly at the contrast in the metrical stresses between those two lines.

Exactly.

Frost deliberately contrasts the heavy, irregular metrical stresses of the first line with the jingling bounds of the second.

It's so deliberate.

The first line, describing the old dog, is loaded with an exceptional number of heavy stresses.

It forces you, the reader, to slow down.

The line itself feels physically heavy, lethargic, difficult to get through.

Perfectly mirroring the old dog who can't even be bothered to stand up to bark.

And then you hit the second line where the speaker is suddenly thrust into a memory of the dog as a young pup.

And that line features a relatively even jingling, iambic meter.

It bounces.

The analysis merely points out that brilliant contrast between the content and the rhythm of the words themselves.

It is pure observation of the craft.

And this brings up a crucial baseline assumption.

For the most part, critics assume that the works they are analyzing already possess inherent value.

They wouldn't bother otherwise.

Right.

They assume the text is good enough to merit deep attention in the first place, which is why they dedicate their energy to interpreting and analyzing, rather than just arguing over its basic worthiness.

So what does this all mean for you when you are reading?

Because the reality is we definitely still evaluate things.

We still rank things.

We constantly argue that one novel is greater than another.

Again, help ourselves.

Exactly.

That brings us to the ultimate question of this deep dive.

Are there actual objective critical standards?

There's an old Roman saying that perfectly captures the trap we all tend to fall into.

Oh, degustivus non est disputandum.

Yes, which translates to there is no disputing tastes.

It is a stubborn, pervasive idea.

We hear it all the time today when someone shrugs and says, look, I don't know anything about modern art, but I know what I like.

The ultimate conversation ender.

It really is.

It aggressively reduces all evaluation to mere personal taste.

Under this theory, if you say, this is a brilliantly written novel,

you aren't actually making a claim about the novel itself.

You're really just saying, this novel caters to my specific preferences.

But if literature is an art form, there have to be standards, right?

We evaluate almost everything else in the human experience based on agreed upon metrics.

We don't just say a gymnast's routine was good because I liked it.

We evaluate the height of the jumps, the precision of the landings, the complexity of the rotations.

We have established criteria for fluency in a language.

We don't just rely on vibes.

You certainly don't.

And to make this incredibly practical, think about evaluating something as utilitarian as a kitchen knife.

I think about this analogy a lot, actually.

If you are evaluating a kitchen knife, the standards are wonderfully clear.

The baseline standard is that it ought to cut cleanly.

Right, that's step one.

Beyond that, it ought not to require constant sharpening and it ought to feel balanced and comfortable in the hand.

Sure, you might also want it to look aesthetically pleasing or to be rust -proof or to fit your budget.

But those core standards of what makes a knife good at being a knife

are objective, stateable, and measurable.

Exactly, so what is the literary equivalent?

If we connect this to the bigger picture, we have to ask what are the baseline standards for a lyric poem or an epic novel?

The foundational standard is unity.

Unity.

Yes.

In a truly good work of literature,

all of the individual parts, the diction, the syntax, the pacing, the imagery,

must contribute to the whole.

They must work together to create a unified effect.

But mere unity isn't quite enough to elevate something to greatness, is it?

I mean, a very simple repetitive children's book might be unified, but we wouldn't necessarily call it a towering work of literary genius.

No, which is why complexity is the necessary companion to unity.

A work of high quality needs to juggle complex themes, nuanced characters, and sophisticated structures, and still maintain that unity.

That has to hold all those spinning plates up at once.

Exactly.

Robert Frost once referred to a poem as a performance in words.

When you are reading, you are evaluating the success of that performance.

So to go back to our earlier example, if a poet writes a piece with incredibly mournful, devastating content about profound loss, but chooses a bouncy, jingling meter to deliver it, the performance is a failure.

The parts are fighting each other.

The text lacks unity.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

We have unity, complexity, and aesthetic performance as our baseline standards.

But the water gets muddy very quickly when we dive into the more heavily debated standards we use to judge writing.

Very muddy.

Let's start with morality and truth.

There is a famous quote from Samuel Johnson, written all the way back in 1765 in his preface to Shakespeare.

He stated unequivocally, it is always a writer's duty to make the world better.

That encapsulates the morality standard perfectly.

It argues that art has a didactic responsibility, but applying that standard immediately introduces massive complications.

Because it forces us to filter the evaluation of the art through the subjective moral framework of the reader.

Precisely.

And just to be completely clear for you as we dive into this next part, we're looking at this strictly as an academic exploration of how different personal frameworks dictate evaluation.

We aren't taking any sides on the moral frameworks themselves.

Right, we are purely examining the mechanics of literary judgment.

Absolutely.

So to illustrate this friction, imagine a beautifully written short story that sympathetically and tenderly treats a gay or lesbian relationship.

Now consider a reader who approaches that text from a strict traditional Judeo -Christian perspective.

Okay.

Because the content of the story conflicts with their foundational moral values, that reader might evaluate it as a bad story, or at the very least, determine it is not as worthy or valuable as a story that celebrates traditional heterosexual married love.

Okay, let's unpack this.

You hand that exact same text to a reader who is a gay or lesbian critic, or simply a reader who does not subscribe to those traditional Judeo -Christian values.

They might evaluate the story as a masterpiece.

Exactly.

In their view, the sympathetic portrayal helps to build empathy, it educates readers, and therefore going right back to Samuel Johnson's metric, it successfully does something to make the world better.

Same text, entirely different evaluations based entirely on the moral standard applied by the reader.

This raises an important question, and it creates the ultimate artistic dilemma.

What happens when the moral content you agree with, and the artistic execution of the text are completely at odds?

This is the exact scenario that breaks the morality standard.

Let's imagine that the story about the gay or lesbian relationship is an artistic triumph.

The prose is sparkling.

The characters are incredibly complex and memorable, the pacing is flawless, the performance in words is undeniable, but then imagine the story about heterosexual married love, the one that aligns perfectly with the traditional reader's moral framework is terribly written.

The dialogue is wooden, the plot is trite.

The emotional beats are overly sentimental and unearned.

That is the crux of the problem.

If you rely primarily on morality as your standard for evaluation,

how do you handle that disparity?

How much weight do you assign to the obvious moral content versus the sheer artistry exhibited in the telling?

It's a tough spot to be in as a critic.

If morality is your only lens, you might find yourself forced into the uncomfortable position of declaring a poorly written clumsy story to be better literature simply because you happen to agree with its didactic message.

Which brings us directly to the concept of truth as a standard.

It is closely related to morality, but distinct.

Does a piece of literature actually have to be true or align with your specific vision of reality to be evaluated as a great work of art?

We can test this standard by looking at Edward Fitzgerald's famous 1859 translation of the Rubiat of Omar Khayyam.

Oh, this is a great example.

The philosophical underpinnings of this poem are stark.

It suggests that God does not exist, or perhaps even more bleakly, if God does exist, he simply does not care about humanity in the slightest.

That is a massive philosophical pill to swallow.

There are millions of highly moral people who hold that exact view of an indifferent universe and millions of highly moral people who fiercely reject it.

But the critical question is, do you actually have to subscribe to that belief?

Do you have to believe it is the truth to highly evaluate the poetry itself?

Let's look at the actual text.

One of the most famous stanzas from Fitzgerald's translation reads, a book of verses underneath the bow, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and vow.

Beside me singing in the wilderness,

oh wilderness, we're paradise and now.

It is undeniably beautiful.

It is a gorgeous articulation of the idea that the simple, fleeting pleasures of this material world are the only paradise we will ever know.

Now, some critics will argue that they can only assign high literary value to a work if they share its core beliefs, if they believe the text corresponds to fundamental reality.

But many other readers take a totally different approach.

They argue that the magic of literature is that it absolutely does not require us to believe in its views.

Instead, literature derives its immense value from its ability to give us a profound, visceral sense of what it feels like to hold certain views, even if we completely disagree with them.

What's fascinating here is how effectively we can see this by looking at two contrasting religious texts.

First, consider the lyric poem, A Better Resurrection, by Christina Rossetti.

True.

Rossetti was a devout Anglican, and this poem is an agonizing exploration of spiritual numbness that eventually gives way to desperate spiritual hope.

She writes, my life is like a broken bowl, a broken bowl that cannot hold one drop of water for my soul.

She concludes the stanza by pleading with Jesus to melt and remold her shattered life into a royal cup.

The imagery of the broken bowl unable to hold water is so universally evocative.

It is a deeply religious poem, obviously.

But the argument here is that you do not need to be an Anglican, and you don't even need to be going through a religious crisis to evaluate that poem as a brilliant piece of writing.

Exactly.

It offers a perfectly crafted, empathetic window into a highly specific state of mind.

Evaluating it doesn't require you to vote on the truth or falsity of the religious doctrine itself.

We see the exact same phenomenon on a much larger scale with Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy written in the early 14th century.

It is an intensely, specifically Roman Catholic text deeply rooted in medieval theology.

And yet, secular readers and non -Catholic readers have devoured it with intense pleasure for centuries.

Largely because of Dante's staggering ability to portray rich, complex characters.

The perfect example being the famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, trapped in the Second Circle of Hell.

In Dante's specific theological worldview, they are eternally damned because they were unrepentant adulterers, swept forever in a violent storm that mirrors their unbridled earthly passions.

But as a modern reader, you don't have to share Dante's literal belief in a physical hell or his specific theology regarding their damnation to be completely captivated by the tragedy of their story.

You can evaluate the text highly based on its flawless execution and psychological insight, regardless of its literal truth.

Which naturally leads us to the final major standard people lean on for evaluation,

realism.

Realism, right.

If a text doesn't need to be philosophically or theologically true,

does it at least need to correspond to the physical real world to be considered good?

This debate is endlessly fascinating.

There is a very extreme view on this.

Some critics argue that real world beliefs, historical truth and physical realism are entirely irrelevant because literature has absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

In this view, a work of art is a closed system.

It only needs to be internally consistent.

If you apply this lens to Shakespeare's Macbeth or Julius Caesar, you realize that Shakespeare isn't writing history textbooks.

No, not at all.

Yes, he heavily borrowed material from historical chronicles, but Macbeth is not a peer reviewed historical account of 11th century Scotland.

And Julius Caesar is not an accurate political history of Rome.

They're entirely self -contained universes.

Right, we aren't supposed to evaluate the characters against the actual historical figures.

We don't fact check Macbeth.

We only require that the characters within the play act in ways that are consistent, believable and engaging according to the rules of the world Shakespeare built.

Under this theory, literary works aren't true or false.

They're only coherent or incoherent.

The great poet William Butler Yeats summarized this perspective beautifully.

He noted that you can continually argue with and refute a philosopher, but you cannot refute the Song of Sixpence.

Sing a song of sixpence, pocket full of rye.

It is a nursery rhyme that has survived for centuries.

It hasn't survived because it imparts crucial factual truths about blackbirds baked in pies.

Definitely not.

It survives because it creates its own weird, engaging, perfectly rhythmic little universe.

You can't argue with it because it isn't making a claim about reality.

However,

there is a very strong counter argument to this extreme closed system view.

It is what we might call the common sense response.

And it is a view that has been held by almost everyone in the Western world from the ancient Greek philosophers right through to the 19th century.

And it remains dominant among many skilled readers today.

The common sense view argues that, despite the brilliance of the Song of Sixpence, most literature is fundamentally connected to life.

Sure, we sometimes read highly stylized, fanciful detective fiction just to test our puzzle -solving skills or to pass the time on an airplane.

But generally, when we engage with a profound work of literature, we do so because we feel it says something vital about the actual world we inhabit.

This is especially true when evaluating the realistic short story or the novel.

Take the fiction of Kate Chopin, for example.

One of the primary reasons her work is so highly evaluated is that it provides a meticulously detailed, atmospherically precise picture of what the real world of Creole New Orleans was like in the late 19th century.

We are explicitly invited to compare the intricate social world she creates on the page to the social world we understand.

There's an incredibly powerful quote regarding this exact standard from the novelist, D .H.

Lawrence,

found in his book, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

He is discussing why the novel, as an art form, matters so much to human existence.

He writes,

That is perhaps the most profound standard for evaluation we have discussed.

Lawrence is arguing that a good novel, when properly handled by a skilled artist, can actively inform and lead our sympathetic consciousness into entirely new places.

It can teach us how to feel.

It can also lead our sympathy away from what he calls things gone dead, dead conventions, dead moralities, outdated ways of thinking.

In his view, a truly great book serves as a resuscitative tool revealing the most secret places of life.

So under Lawrence's standard, we're evaluating literature based on its emotional and moral utility.

Does the text prompt us to care about human relationships that desperately deserve our attention?

Does it help us recoil from political, moral, or religious dogmas that no longer serve human flourishing?

That is an evaluative standard that relies heavily on truth and a connection to reality.

But if we connect this to the bigger picture, we find one final brilliant twist on this idea of truth and realism.

You do not always need literal, physical realism to reveal a profound truth about the real world.

Yes, the perfect example of this is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, written in 1726, the most famous section features a society of Lilliputians people who are exactly six inches tall.

Now, obviously, a society of six inch people is pure fantastical invention.

It is not literally realistic.

But would anyone argue that Gulliver's Travels is unrelated to real life?

Not at all.

As we read, we quickly perceive that except for their absurdly tiny size, the Lilliputians behave exactly like us.

They are prone to the exact same ridiculous political squabbles and vanities.

Their tiny physical stature is a brilliant, completely unrealistic image used to convey the very real truth of human pettiness.

Swift utilizes a totally unrealistic device to force us to see our own real world flaws more clearly.

The performance in words is masterfully executed, it is internally unified, and it reveals a deep truth about humanity without bothering to be literally true itself.

Which brings all of these abstract philosophical concepts down to a very practical application for you.

The chapter concludes with a specific rule for writers, providing a way for you to synthesize everything we've discussed when you are drafting or revising your own academic essays or literary critiques.

So what does this all mean for your own writing?

It means that when you sit down to write an essay, evaluating a piece of literature, you must constantly imagine your audience.

You need to imagine that you are explaining your evaluative position to someone who, quite reasonably, wants to hear the specific reasons that have led you to your conclusions.

And more importantly, they want to see the textual evidence that supports those reasons.

Exactly.

You cannot just write, the knife is good.

You have to explain that your standard for a knife is sharpness, and then you must provide the evidence that this specific knife cuts cleanly.

Similarly, you cannot just write, the poem is good.

You have to clearly articulate whether you are valuing its structural unity, its emotional complexity,

its moral effect on the reader's sympathy, or its internal consistency.

And once you state that standard, you must provide the specific textual evidence,

the quotes, the meter, the stage directions to back it up.

Evaluating literature is a wonderfully complex, multi -layered process.

It is never just a simple thumbs up or thumbs down based on a gut feeling.

When we evaluate, we are looking at the unity of the parts, the complexity of the performance in words, and how the text interacts with our own deeply held views of morality and truth.

Whether we are analyzing Willie Lowman's

The Bouncing Meter of Robert Frost's Poetry, or the petty squabbles of six inch tall Lilliputians, we're engaging in a rigorous, rewarding exercise of analysis and interpretation.

And this raises an important question, a final thought for you to ponder long after we wrap up today.

We spent a lot of time discussing how our evaluative standards often rely heavily on our current moral values or perception of what is true.

We have.

Does that mean a masterpiece today could be considered bad literature a century from now, simply because society's moral compass has shifted?

That is an incredibly fascinating dilemma to chew on as the landscape of writing and society continues to shift.

We hope this deep dive has given you a whole new toolkit for thinking about how and why you judge the things you read.

Thanks for taking this deep dive with us from everyone here at the Last Minute Lecture Team.

Keep reading critically.