Taxonomic Criticism

While advocacy of literary criticism often singles out close reading, this essay argues that a more important skill that enables formalism in the first place is taxonomy—dividing, categorizing, and mapping the cultural field by means other than, say, Amazon’s algorithms that tell us if we like x we should also buy y. Taxonomy is a skill of aesthetic judgment, exploring the dialectic between object and category, and although the paradigmatic category is the beautiful (and related evaluative categories like good art), the skill can, and should be, directed to a wider set of categories, including ones we are prompted to invent and name by the objects we study. This categorical approach traces back less to the New Critics and more to the Neo- Aristotelian Critics affiliated with the University of Chicago. This essay recovers their approach to genre and goes on to argue that it came closest to being perfected in a succeeding generation by radical feminists, whose politicization of rape in the 1970s was fundamentally a project of literary criticism. Intervening into recent debates on the politics of aesthetic education, I argue that apprehension of an aesthetic field of categories depends on a prior apprehension of a political field of categories, which for radical feminists included what harms belonged to categories such as rape or what subjects were paradigmatic of categories such as survivor. Approaching political categories with the aesthetic skill of taxonomy, I ultimately recommend politics as an exercise in genre criticism.