“The second aspect is that I feel an urgency to do something about it; for example, to speak to someone about it. This urgency is an essential part of this experience.”
A third and perhaps surprising aspect, noted Chaouli, “Is what I refer to as ‘opacity,’ which is to say, that in encountering a certain work I’m overwhelmed, and so I run out of words to describe it and my experience—it exceeds my capacity in some way. It’s not that my own training and experiences don’t help me, but they don’t provide all the answers I’m looking for.”
In writing and publishing the book, Chaouli said, he hopes to reach “Anyone, at any level of expertise, who has had an experience of reading, hearing, or watching something and feeling they need to stop what they’re doing and tell someone about it. And it's not only that urgency, but also the overwhelming nature of the encounter that lends to the inadequacy of describing and capturing what we experience, that’s what I wanted to grasp.”
Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University called Something Speaks to Me “Essential reading not for literary critics alone but for anyone who has fallen under the spell of a powerful work of art and feels the mysterious compulsion to speak about the experience.”
One of the potential, hoped-for outcomes of the book, Chaouli said, is that “People will find new ways to not only analyze, but also to articulate, express, and participate in these kinds of experiences, or dialogues. And even find a new language, a new mode of participation when experiencing something like this.”
Participation is key, he said. “Everyone is a critic in the sense that we find ourselves articulating, processing, and bringing to life through language the experiences that affect us in some special way. In contrast, my observation is that most scholarship denies itself the possibility of participation by erecting very complex systems of concepts—scholarly analysis and judgment is a different mode of approaching a work, versus participation.”
The heart of poetic criticism, Chaouli asserts, “Lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings, no matter the form. That is precisely where the creative impulse is. It's not poetic criticism because it uses fancy language or flashy adjectives, it's poetic because you recognize the creativity in something and this leads to creativity in you who has encountered it. You find yourself expressing things you didn’t know you could say.”
Through his new book, “I hope that readers’ capacities for responding to such experiences expand,” Chaouli said, “so that we allow ourselves to develop poetic and creative ways of processing and giving voice to our own experiences with the things that move us.”
