While surfing around the various author pages described in a previous post, I ran across a couple of other websites that represent a promising development in the publication of online literary criticism. One is the Raymond Carver Review, sponsored by the International Raymond Carver Society and Kent State University, and the other is the Cormac McCarthy Journal Online, sponsored by the Cormac McCarthy Society and Angelo State University. Both offer full-length critical essays about the two authors, and all contents are freely available through links without the intervention of such entities as Project MUSE or High Beam Research.
One could hope that more such critical sites will appear eventually, especially considering that 1) few print academic journals any longer publish author or text-centered criticism that isn't more about capturing the text in question and feeding it through the maw of Theory or cultural studies than it is about illuminating the reading experience of that text and 2) print academic journals are as doomed in the long run as newspapers and magazines as media for any kind of criticism, literary or otherwise. Eventually all such critical work is going to move online, and while it is conceivable that some attempt will still be made to limit access to it (for commercial and/or "gatekeeping" purposes), a proliferation of seriously-intended webjournals in the meantime could make such an attempt ultimately a futile one.
Both of these journals offer peer-reviewed, multi-essay "issues," and there is no reason why this approach, and this format, could not flourish online, but even something less than this fully academicized method of publication could provide perfectly credible literary criticism based on careful reading, sound research, etc. The apparatus of peer review is intended to insure publication of "scholarship" that meets the purely academic standards required for promotion and prestige, not necessarily of the most interesting criticism about the most deserving writers. Judicious selection of material based on its potential interest and utility to readers, who can themselves further judge the value of such contributions, would surely be good enough in most cases. The multi-essay form of presentation has its uses--it allows for the consideration of "themes" and for other more serendipitous connections to be made--but perhaps other webjournals could use the continuous mode of publication I am trying out at Critical Distance.
A focus on particular writers, such as that undertaken at RCR and CMJ, makes sense to me as well. In print journals this approach has generally been taken vis-a-vis already canonical writers--Joyce, Faulkner, etc.--but the ease with which webjournals can be created and disseminated makes it increasingly plausibe to also devote specific attention to more recent writers. The creation of such journals by other "societies" or by individuals would help to foster the kind of vibrant online community of literary discussion and commentary the cybersphere potentially could host, and I certainly hope to see more of them in the not-too-distant future.
You can search for a lot more free author-specific articles by using the JURN search-engine. JURN searches free ejournal articles in the arts and humanities, and now indexes over 2,500 titles. http://jurn.org/
I hadn't yet found the Raymond Carver Review, but I have now :) Thanks.
One can also create "overlay journals", which create issues based on obscure themes simply by linking to reputable full-text academic sources, found in repositories, author archives, ejournals, etc. Example: http://www.jurn.org/ejournal/index.html
Posted by: JURN | June 01, 2009 at 09:13 AM