If Not Critical - Tapa dura

Eric Griffiths used to deliver his lectures quickly, but I suggest you read them slowly. The 10 collected here in If Not Critical about some of the writers closest to his heart - Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Primo Levi, Samuel Beckett - are richly textured, crammed with insight and often very funny. For anyone interested in how literature works, and why it matters, they are vital reading. (Sameer Rahim, The Telegraph)

A collection of the controversial critic's lectures showcases his distinctive style and astonishing range [...] If Not Critical serves both as a memorial and a fitting companion piece to The Printed Voice: it is the printed voice of Griffiths. Compiled and edited by a former student, Freya Johnston, it's not exactly a work of scholarship, nor indeed of literary criticism or literary history - it is far too various and unorthodox to be summarised. It is a demonstration, rather, of the art of thinking aloud, on paper. (Ian Sansom, The Guardian)

[T]his book deserves a wide audience... Ten of these scintillating, thought-provoking pieces are simply not enough. (Nicholas Lezard, Dhaka Tribune)

Johnston, a former student, has gathered a fittingly eclectic selection of ten of [Griffith's] lectures, ranging from Dante to Rabelais and Eliot (T. S.) to Swift. (Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement)

If Not Critical catches something of the movement of a speaking voice and the demands it makes on the listener. It is literary criticism 'to the moment' [] Griffiths is above all an apostle of close reading. He treats the passages he discusses as morally and psychologically instructive as well as semantically subtle. He attends to small details of syntax or diction, but he is also concerned with the big questions: mortality, morality, why we laugh at things [...] this book is a labour of intellectual devotion. (John Mullan, London Review of Books)

Mr Griffiths attracts superlatives. The Guardian once declared him the "cleverest man in England". Donald Davie, a poet and critic, called him the "rudest man in the kingdom". And for many of the pupils he taught over 30 years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was the greatest teacher they ever had. (The Economist)

Eric Griffiths delivered hundreds of lectures at the Faculty of English in Cambridge, yet his lectures were never turned into books. If Not Critical brings together ten lectures, published here for the first time, that offer a representative selection of Dr Griffiths' original, fully-argued, and richly exemplified contributions to literary criticism and literary history.

Crammed into his writing are decades of reading in several languages and across most genres and literary periods. In these lectures, he pursues the blind spots not only of other people's arguments, but of the whole business of criticism in general, with what he calls its 'over-concentration on a narrow range of examples . . . such over-concentration warps our thinking'. Implicit and explicit throughout his work is the argument that 'an appropriately wide range of instances is essential to making progress in conceptualisation'; that what we need, in order to do better thinking, is 'a keener attention to a greater variety of examples'. Such examples include, in these lectures, the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Kafka, Beckett, Racine, Rabelais, T. S. Eliot, and Jonathan Swift.