Criticism as Cultural Interpretation
Although I agree with Barrett Hathcock's conclusion that the kind of "cultural criticism" represented by Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come "too energetically [mines its] material for the...
View ArticleReviewers Reading Reviews
I finally managed to watch on C-SPAN the "Ethics in Book Reviewing" panel discussion from the recent Book Expo America. Quite frankly, most of it was pablum (except for John Leonard's remarks and some...
View ArticleThe Burden of Criticality
Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows: . . .the critical frameworks inherited from the...
View ArticleBook Reviewing in America
In her book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press), former Boston Review editor Gail Pool writes: Readers dismayed by the lack of criticism in reviews...
View ArticleB.R. Myers
B. R. Myers's critique of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke essentially amounts to these two complaints: a) Johnson is not a psychological realist, and b) there are passages in the book that Myers doesn't...
View ArticleAesthetic Judgment
On the one hand, Rohan Maitzen's comments about the nature of "academic criticism" seem to me unimpeachably correct: . . .aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an...
View ArticleSocially Constructed
In his recent post on his Think Again blog about the misappropriation of deconstruction by American academics, Stanley Fish writes: . . .No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown —...
View ArticleRealist Vision
In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision, Peter Brooks writes: With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of...
View ArticleLost in Translation
In a recent post at his Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges...
View ArticleLiterary Darwinism
Britt Peterson's Chronicle of Higher Education article on the champions of "literary Darwinism" portrays these "scientific" literary scholars as threatening to overturn the currently entrenched...
View ArticleAdam Thirlwell
Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and...
View ArticleWhat James Wood Does Right
I'm astonished to be saying so, but William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works provokes me to come to Wood's defense. Although Deresiewicz correctly points out the narrowness of...
View ArticleWhat James Wood Does Wrong
(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly) The limitations of James Wood’s How Fiction Works become evident in just its first few pages. In his Introduction, Wood tells us that although...
View ArticleSusan Sontag
In his review of Susan Sontag's journals, Daniel Mendelson contends that Sontag, in her practice at least, was not really "against interpretation" at all: The essays in Against Interpretation and in...
View ArticleCraft
If we take The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (Tin House Books) to be a representative gathering of critical wisdom from current American writers, what does it ultimately tell us about...
View ArticleMorris Dickstein
Readers of Morris Dickstein's newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, should find it an agreeable survey of the cultural expressions of the 1930s that reveals how...
View ArticleMorris Dickstein
Readers of Morris Dickstein's newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, should find it an agreeable survey of the cultural expressions of the 1930s that reveals how...
View ArticleHistorical Fiction
In an essay defending historical fiction, Allan Massie concludes that There are essentially two sorts of novel, the open and the closed, even if many straddle the frontier that divides them. The closed...
View ArticleArticulating a Poetics
Ron Silliman begins The New Sentence (1987) with this unimpeachable claim: . . .if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to...
View ArticleThe Literary-Industrial Complex
In 1974, Richard Kostelanetz published a book called The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America. Amplifying arguments Kostelanetz had been making throughout the 1960s and early 1970s,...
View ArticleLearning From Modernism
I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that The New Critics developed theories sympathetic to some aspects of literary modernism, but they condescended to Pound, Williams, and Cummings, tolerated Moore, ignored...
View ArticleInteriority
The editors of n + 1 tell us that The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and...
View ArticleWhy Criticism Matters
Predictably enough, the symposium on "Why Criticism Matters" in the January 2 New York Times Book Review primarily if unwittingly illustrates just about everything that's wrong with literary criticism...
View ArticleBased On a True Story
William Skidelsky is entirely justified in objecting to the ever-increasing number of films and novels offering "fictionalised portraits" of historical figures and events, although I can't agree with...
View ArticleCriticism and Literary Magazines
Roxanne Gay recently agonized over the profusion of literary magazines available to too few readers: One of the primary challenges with getting people to buy magazines is that there are too many. It’s...
View ArticleRichard Poirier
(This essay was originally published in Open Letters Monthly.) As I was working on a dissertation that was conspicuously about “postmodern” fiction, examined from a “poststructuralist” perspective,...
View ArticleChristopher Hitchens as Literary Critic
(This essay was originally published in Agni Online.) “Is there a more relevant (and readable) literary critic than Christopher Hitchens?” asked the Independent in 2003. The immediate occasion...
View ArticleOrchidaceous Extras
In his essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchid,” the philosopher Richard Rorty describes the personal and professional discoveries that allowed him, finally, to abandon the attempt to reconcile the twin...
View ArticleLiterary Topographies
Recently Lev Grossman explained how he chooses books to review. "I review books," he proclaimed, "if they do something I’ve never seen done before; or if I fall in love with them; or if they shock me...
View ArticleNay/Yay
There's been much discussion of the role of "enthusiastic" as opposed to "negative" book reviews lately, but perhaps some reflection on the limitations of the book review as a form are in order before...
View ArticleThe Object of Criticism
My knowledge of Object-Oriented philosophy is certainly imperfect (and thus open to correction), but I think I understand it well enough to assess Graham Harman's article on the relationship of OO...
View ArticleNot Quite a Manifesto
Daniel Mendelsohn contends that to be a critic requires "expertise, authority, and taste." He leaves out the most important attribute a critic should have: the ability to pay attention. In fact,...
View ArticleThe Russian Language Itself
In her recent review of the reissue of Andrey Platonov's Happy Moscow (NYRB Classics), Christiane Craig observes that "The work of translating Platonov must demand an almost inhuman attention to the...
View ArticlePostmodern Ficton and Academic Criticism
I A Period of Transition Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few...
View ArticleThe Organized Efforts of the Program: On McGurl's The Program Era
To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so...
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