The Reading Experience

The Existing Public Sphere

In a post criticizing science fiction blogs for allowing "the SF blogosphere [to] become a venue for crassly commercial interests far more concerned with selling things than encouraging intelligent discussion," Jonathan McCalmont notes my own previous post distinguishing between "liblogs" and "critblogs" and suggests such a distinction is "more about retreating from the existing public sphere than it is about changing it."

I think he's probably right, although I would describe the effort to establish the category of "critblog" more as a separation of blog-centered critical writing from the necessarily ephemeral "daily digest" style of blogging than a full-on retreat from the "public sphere." Nevertheless, I share McCalmont's dismay that many litblogs have simply accomodated themselves to the "public sphere" of superficial literary discourse rather than continuing in the attempt to provide an alternative to that discourse. This is even more discouraging for "mainstream" literary fiction and criticism, since it gives in not merely to the commercialization McCalmont decries in the SF community but also to the unexamined assumptions and shallow thinking that make journalism-based commentary on "literary fiction" so crippling to begin with.

McCalmont correctly notes that

whenever commercial interests enter into a public space, they change the focus of discussion from what is good or interesting, to what is worth buying. We can see this effect in the fondness of the SF blogosphere for book covers, give-aways, recycled press releases and interviews that are far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view. By contrast, actual substantial reviews are few and far between (especially outside of specialised review sites) and when they do appear they are seldom discussed, seldom linked to and seldom responded to.

I don't know that I would say most mainstream litblogs are "far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view", but there is a distressing number of "give-aways, recycled press releases," and perfunctory interviews in the literary blogosphere as a whole, and "substantial reviews," sustained critical reflection in general, certainly are all too often "seldom discussed" in comment threads. Too much space is given over to perpetuating the "book business" status quo, reinforcing middlebrow standards and enabling market-driven reviewing practices rather than challenging and critiquing them.

Yet I do think it's ultimately pointless to expend too much energy directed at "changing" the literary public sphere, either generally ("literary journalism") or literally (the public blogo-sphere). Capitalism will continue to trump literary worth among the big publishers, gossip and book business fandom will continue to dominate high-profile literary discussion. Many litblogs will be swept up (have been swept up) into the publicity machine. Trying to halt all of this is as futile as the effort to make fiction palatable to nonreaders, which is finally what motivates the existing public sphere in publishing and book reviewing in the first place.

Even so, the blog remains a useful publishing tool, and the blogosphere a valuable publishing medium. Just as it was always possible--although harder to do for financial reasons--to maintain a space for worthwhile literary criticism in print among all the reams of wasted paper that constitute the majority of what appears in print form, it is entirely possible to stake out a segment of cyberspace for nontrivial criticism, notwithstanding the possibility that what was the literary blogosphere will drift into irrelevance. The audience for such criticism might be targeted and modest in size, but such has always been the case for any literary criticism that takes itself, and the work it considers, seriously.

The Minds of Characters

The contributors to the blog OnFiction profess to be doing "research on the psychology of fiction." If we take this to encompass broadly the increasing popularity of "cognitive theory" and neuroscience in the analysis of literature and our response to literature, "psychology of fiction" attempts to describe our reaction to fictional characters as if those characters were real people with minds, who, as a recent post at OnFiction has it, provoke us to "wonder what they are up to." In this view of the reading experience, "we readers imagine ourselves into the minds of characters as we run the simulation which is the literary story." So do writers, which accounts for the reported instances of characters "exhibiting apparently autonomous agency" during the composing process.

As a reader, I have never "imagined myself into the minds of characters" while running "the simulation which is the literary story." Neither can I really believe that anyone else has done this. In the first place, in most fiction that to any significant degree asks us to consider the mental life of its characters, we are not encouraged to imagine ourselves "into" their minds. Their mental life is presented to us explicitly, often in the narrative mode called the "free indirect" method, sometimes directly through a stream of consciousness, or near stream of consciousness, point of view. We don't have to "wonder what they are up to" because the author/narrator makes it perfectly plain what they are up to. Perhaps it is the case that in some first-person narratives we are invited to read between, or behind, the lines the narrator literally offers us, resulting in a perception of the narrator's state of mind to which even he/she has little access, but I don't think this relatively special circumstance is what the "psychology of fiction" generally emphasizes.

Second, in what way does "the simulation which is the literary story" differ or depart from the literary story itself? Are we being told that the "literary story" exists as a way for us to imagine the characters in other situations, situations the story doesn't relate? That the story is merely an excuse for us to wonder abstractly about the characters in all of their "autonomy"? Or is it that the "simulation" we "run" is just the story itself and that when we "imagine ourselves into the minds of characters" we are simply envisaging what it would be like to be these characters involved in this story? If "character" is so overridingly important in a work of fiction that we are led to detach it from all other elements of the work and regard the characters as real people we might ask over for drinks, then why bother with the other elements of the story? The author could just send us a character sketch of his protagonist, whom we could then imagine in any circumstance we'd like. And while I do believe some readers project themselves into the situations in which fictional characters are portrayed, this has more to do with the operations of the readers' minds than those allegedly at work in the characters' minds. Such readers are more engaged with the story in which the characters appear than with the characters themselves, certainly more than they're connected to the "minds" of those characters.

Similarly, I'm sure that some writers do experience their characters exhibiting "autonomy," taking the narrative in directions the author didn't anticipate, but I doubt that very often this is a result of the author dwelling in the characters' "minds." In my own on-and-off career as a fiction writer, I have had characters wander off the plotted path, but never because I could read in their minds that they thought it best to do so. Either the character's voice seemed to provoke a change in plan, or the story itself prompted a change in character, or the character just didn't seem in general to be the sort of character who would do that rather than this. Realizing that a narrative needs to be readjusted because one's preconceptions about a character's role in it have been altered is an aesthetically sound decision, but it has very little to do with remaining alert to the "psychology of fiction."

If anything, a fixation on "character," even more reductively on the "inner life" of a character, only makes our response to the whole work of fiction more impoverished. The very best fiction, like the very best art in general, widens our perspective on the possibilities of the form as a form. It helps us enhance our experience of fiction by remaining alert to all of the artistic choices the writer has made. In John Dewey's words, "The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest." Isolating character as the most essential element in works of fiction potentially circumscribes our response to them, blinkers our awareness of the other aesthetic "operations" at work in the text. It inherently declares fiction to be this sort of thing--a way of meeting up with imaginary characters--rather than all the other things it might be. It renders stories and novels into case studies for psychologists rather than complex works of art.

Something New to Do

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 academic approaches associated with Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. But at the level of its basic assumptions about literature--about why we study literature in the first place--there's absolutely nothing "new" about literary Darwinism, as Peterson makes clear, perhaps unwittingly, in his description of this method:

The most prominent [of the new science-based scholars] are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

To emphasize "evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts" is not different in kind from an emphasis on cultural patterns or historical patterns or, indeed, the kind of class-centered "patterns of behavior" emphasized by Marxism. What all of these appropriations of literature have in common is that they're really not about literature. Marxists have their political agenda for which literature seems a useful prop, cultural critics have theirs, and the literary Darwinists are now making a play at getting theirs a prominent place within the scholarship factory that academic criticism has become. Readers truly interested in the study of literature--not the study of science or sociology--have no more interest in reading Jane Austen for her representation of "mating rituals" than in reading James Joyce for his putative insights into the nature of Empire. These readers want to "study" both of these writers in order to more fully understand how their texts work, how they expand our ability to experience works of literature, to transform experience into aesthetic "patterns." Literary Darwinism will do nothing to assist such readers in the goal of engaging with literature as a singular form of art.

In this way, it isn't surprising that the Darwinists are encountering resistance from from "those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method." The "science" being employed by the Darwinists is not quite compatible with the "science" used by those enamored of "cognitive psychology," and thus the latter consider the former to be rivals in the competition to create the latest academic fad. And it is certainly not surprising that this whole "loosely defined group" would be opposed by the theorists and the sociologists, since they are in danger of being unseated at the academic big table, just as the theorists themselves began unseating the New Critics and the traditional historical scholars thirty-five years ago.

Prominent Darwinian Joseph Carroll gives the game away when he observes that

"The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do."

The worst thing that could happen to an ambitious academic critic is to be "left out in the cold," methodologically speaking. One wants to have tenure and as many publications in prestigious places as one can before the next group of promising scholars looking for something "new" comes along.

Carroll's Darwininian colleague Jonathan Gottschall makes it even more explicit:

"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies."

I don't know if Gottschall is being unusually honest or if he simply got careless in his word choice, but his invocation of "glamour" as the motivating goal of literary scholars, however dim and degraded such glamour might be--these are professors we're talking about, after all--only underscores how utterly trivial the "discpline" of academic literary study has become. It is about, and only about, itself as a "field" in the academic curriculum. All concern for literature as something that might be valued in its own right dissipated into the ivy-scented air long ago.

Peterson wonders whether literary Darwinism will "save literary criticism," but the only thing that will save literary criticism is, well, a revival of actual literary criticism. What the Darwinists are proposing is certainly not that. It's an effort to dislodge the "literary" from literary study once and for all. It seeks to subdue literature and all the remaining "subjective" responses to it and pin it to the wall of scientific scrutiny (at least to the extent that "literary Darwinisim" is actually science, which is altogether questionable). Gottschall is pretty clearly contemptuous of the established approaches to literary study, which, astonishingly enough, he seems to consider still too literary to be taken seriously. He's apparently an advocate of the notion that literary study has to be destroyed in order to be saved, although what remains as the object of scholarly study will then have no resemblance to literature whatsoever.

Serious Criticism

Much of Steve Wasserman's Columbia Journalism Review article is concerned with delineating newspapers' obligation to cover "books as news that stays news." He suggests that this means reviewing books "of enduring worth," which in turn suggests an emphasis on work of inherent literary value. I think most people would understand this to signify specifically works of literature--fiction and poetry, although some occasional works of nonfiction might also be included as achieving "enduring worth" as well. Indeed, in further indentifying "news that stays news," Wasserman asserts that "It is through the work of novelists and poets that we understand how we imagine ourselves and contend with the often elusive forces—of which language itself is a foremost factor—that shape us as individuals and families, citizens and communities. . . ."

But in his otherwise cogent enough defense of "serious criticism" in newspapers and other general-interest print publications, Wasserman doesn't really focus with much particularity on literary criticism. It is more or less conflated with discussion of "books" more generally, as if the latest academic tome on American foreign policy or most recent biography of William Randolph Hearst were equally the subject of "criticism" as a new novel by Richard Powers or new collection of poems by John Ashbery. As if the "news" conveyed by The 9-11 Commission Report were the same kind of news conveyed by Falling Man.

In fact, what Wasserman really has in mind is the kind of social analysis or cultural criticism described by Leon Wieseltier (as quoted by Wasserman): the "long, thoughtful, patient, deliberate analysis of questions that do not have obvious or easy answers." While most good novels do not offer "obvious or easy answers," I don't think it's the interpretation of fiction that Wieseltier has in mind here. Novels might sometimes provide grist for the cultural critic's rhetorical mill, but ultimately "criticism" as Wasserman and Wieseltier understand it is an "elite" discourse through which learned commentators discuss the cultural, political, and historical forces bearing down on "society" as it is reflected in all forms of expression. (I don't object to learned commentary per se, but I do like my learned commentary on literature to be about literature.) As Wasserman himself puts it, "the fundamental idea at stake in a novel—in the criticism of culture generally—is the self-image of society: how it reasons with itself, describes itself, imagines itself." It is the critic's role to sketch out this "self-image of society."

Suffice it to say I don't have much use for this conception of the critic's role, at least not if we're going to persist in calling such a critic a "literary" critic. It's telling that Wasserman singles out The New York Review of Books and The New Republic as exemplars of the kind of reviewing practice to which he aspired when the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (and presumably still does). As Michael Orthofer has recently pointed out, and as I have argued previously, the NYROB (for a long time now ) and TNR (increasingly) have more or less abandoned the task of reviewing fiction on any consistent basis. Only the most highly promoted, "big" novels, or novels by already established "big" authors get reviewed in these publications, and, especially in NYROB, the reviews are usually quite perfunctory, given length only by the tedious practice of dwelling on biographical details or surveying the author's career in an equally apathetic fashion. While both NYROB and TNR have sizable reputations for their supposedly weighty reviews and critical commentary, most of the weight comes precisely from discussions of books, mostly nonfiction, that illustrate how society "reasons with itself, describes itself," etc. (some might say it comes from the intensity of the commentators' own self-regard), not from "long, thoughtful, patient, deliberate" analyses of works of fiction or poetry.

Thus the whole ongoing debate about whether "serious criticism" can take place online or only in print is at best a red herring. Very little serious criticism of literature takes place in print to begin with, aside from the conventional, mechanical book-report review, which Wasserman concedes is, on the whole, "shockingly mediocre" as carried out by most American newspapers. "The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers," he writes. "One is tempted to say, perversely, that its disappearance from the pages of America’s newspapers is arguably cause for celebration." The question is, at least for me, not whether print is superior to pixels or whether the online medium can sustain serious literary criticism, but whether there is or will be such criticism available at all to those who want more than the "pablum" spiced up as criticism to be found in newspapers or the "long, thoughtul" exercises in fake wisdom on display at the "premiere" mainstream print journals. (Wasserman also mentions Bookforum, so I must hasten to add that I agree with his assessment of this publication. It is one of the few--perhaps now the only--book review that features actual literary criticism, and in more than token gestures.)

This is why I still hold out hope that blogs, or whatever subsequent online forms they might morph into, can serve as sites offering "serious criticism" of literature, both canonical and contemporary (but maybe especially the latter). Print may or may not be the more adequate medium for the kind of long and thoughtful meditation Wasserman and Wieseltier obviously prefer, but since newspapers are only offering less and less space for such efforts, and since print magazines and journals seem to favor the meandering "think pieces" over focused literary analysis, those of us who would simply like to see both contemporary literature and literary criticism continue to flourish don't really have the luxury of waiting for print editors to see the light or for would-be literary critics to quit noodling around. If blogs are attracting people, both writers and readers, who are enthusiastically engaged in discussions of literature, then I can't see any reason why the literary weblog or the online literary journal (or both together) can't be credible forums for "serious criticism."

The recent spate of articles deploring online discourse have raised various objections to this notion. The most easily dismissed is the assertion that criticism requires "authority" on the part of the critic and that blogs are too numerous and too dispersed to acquire such authority. While I can agree with Wasserman or with Richard Schickel that not every critical opinion is worthy of repect unless backed up with accompanying support and analysis (in Schickel's case, a point articulated in an essay mostly lacking either), there's nothing that automatically confers authority on a book review or critical commentary simply because it appears in print or that detracts from that authority because it appears online. Wasserman claims to agree with this ("content rules"), but also apparently accepts the further claim that most litblogs don't attempt such criticism, anyway, and that they lend themselves primarily to a cacophany of strident voices. Rohan Maitzen confesses that she, too, held such a view (actually she acknowledges she had no idea that blogs engaged in "serious criticism" even existed, a state of knowledge she also, as it turns out, shared with Schickel and Wasserman) but now, she writes: "I've been reading through the archives of some lively blog debates related to my own questions about the terms and tendencies of contemporary academic literary criticism. . .Following the long chains of arguments and rebuttals, examples and counter-examples, I'm struck with a familiar sense of futility: when so much has been said by so many so often, what can I hope to add? I'm also struck, though, by just how unaware I was that conversations of quite this kind were going on."

That Adam Kirsch hasn't taken the time to survey existing blogs to make sure his claims can stand scrutiny doesn't make his unexamined assumptions valid (precisely the opposite, in fact). Literary blogs and online publications will gather "authority" just as print-based publications did so: through what they produce.

Another objection, one that clearly underpins Steve Wasserman's essay, is that criticism must be "long" before it is "thoughtful" and since blogs by their very nature can't accomodate lengthy analysis they can't be thoughtful. It is still probably an open question whether the blog form will allow for the kind of analysis Wasserman has in mind (this will be settled at least as much by readers as by writers, depending on whether we overcome the "screen fatigue" that some readers profess to develop with longer forms of online prose), but it is certainly true there is no defensible case to be made that that sort of analyis is impossible on blogs. However, if blog detractors were to sample, say, the shorter posts sometimes offered by Steve Mitchelmore (This Space) or on a regular basis by Jonathan Mayhew , they would surely see that "deliberate analysis" can occur in shorter, more compacted blog posts as readily as in the conventionally drawn-out critical essays they champion. Jonathan's deliberately condensed bursts of insight are more discerning about poetry than almost anything else I read (and I read quite a lot about poetry, even if I don't post all that much about it on TRE.) Bloggers like these just may demonstrate in the long run that "thoughtful" literary criticism doesn't always have to be "long" and that the "patience" requested by certain windy critics might not really be worth the time.

A final objection lodged against literary blogs is that the kind of reading they encourage is too frenetic, that the hyperlinks they provide make them hyperactive. Such skipping hither and yon interrupts the cogitative process, turns critical analysis into a game of tag, a cross-blog competion for links. To me, however, the interractive and recursive features of blogs are their most valuable and distinctive, the features most likely to result in the internet/blogosphere making a real contribution to literary criticism. Of course they can be used as excuses for gossip, shortcuts to thinking, or for cheap self-aggrandizement, but ultimately their additional, more purposeful potential for exploring implications and extending lines of thought will surely be exploited more fully as well. Links, whether external to other sites considering in-common subjects and themes or internal to archived posts representing previously-expressed thoughts on a given issue, provide an opportunity to extend debate and reintroduce relevant ideas in new contexts. Even in this post, I have offered a half a dozen links, each of which if pursued through other links and comment threads could lead to substantive discussions of both the immediate subject at hand and other, related subjects to create a reading experience almost impossible to duplicate through traditional print sources. This sort of experience, by which one is led to parallel analyses and direct response, often without having expected to encounter such a vigorous exchange of views, is one I have myself increasingly come to appreciate in my own reading of literary blogs, and I would like to think that blog skeptics, if they bothered to investigage what good literary blogs actually have to offer, would eventually themselves find this form of critical discourse as substantial and satisfying as I do.

In one of the installments of the apparently eternal series of "panel discussions" on book reviewing foisted on us by the National Book Critics Circle, Dwight Garner, according to Richard Grayson's account of the session, proclaimed that he and his colleagues at the New York Times Book Review turn to blogs not for criticism but "for news of the publishing world and gossip." Other panelists seemed to agree that this is what blogs are good for. On the one hand, this is just more evidence of the dense-headedness and incuriosity of Garner and his ilk, the self-appointed "gatekeepers" of mainstream book criticism. If they were truly interested in the "serious criticism" of literature, they would actively be looking in more than the usual places for anyone, in print or on blogs, who might be offering it. But they aren't, and they don't. On the other hand, that they can and do find blogs that supply them with their gossip is evidence enough that the literary blog as it has evolved over the 4-5 years of its existence indeed encompasses a large category of blogs that do little more than gabble on about the "book business" and its hangers-on practicing what is called "literary journalism." If anything, many of these blogs are even more sychophantic than the literary journalists themselves.

This has been a fairly predictable development of the approach taken by many of the founding literary bloggers, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient one. Most of the early bloggers did not simply link to "literary news" as an excuse for mindless chatter. They offered smart, often trenchant and contrarian takes on this news. If they hadn't, literary blogs would never have captured readers' attention the way they obviously enough did. (They certainly would never have attracted my attention as they did.) The collective existence of these weblogs, each contributing distinctive observations on books and book discussion, gave readers who happened upon them a perspective on the current literary scene that print criticism clearly was not providing. The literary blogosphere has now expanded to include more comprehensive and sustained commentary (including by many of the original bloggers themselves), but most of its critics seem fixated on what they perceive as the "chatty" qualities of the link-and-comment style of blogging. It allows them to continue in their condescension toward blogs, but I think I can even now hear the sound of their perches of "authority" crumbling.

UPDATE Kassia Krozier also gives Steve Wasserman a piece of her mind.

Of Limited and Personal Interest

John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. It's first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

The first half is actually the more interesting and lively part of the book. Here he surveys all the various efforts made to define art and finds them wanting, concluding that "Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art." The relativist in me wants to concede that ultimately this is true: no Platonic definition of art that thoroughly delineates those properties inherent to art and that marks it off from all those other phenomena that are "not art" exists. We wouldn't want one even if we could get it. Rogue artists who confabulate our notions of what art is and isn't are always going to come along, and we should be grateful for them, even encourage them. "Art" is, finally, whatever succeeding generations of human beings determine it to be.

On the other hand, when we all put on our logical thinking caps, we know that if "anything" is art, nothing is. There are just "things" that provide us with enjoyment, pleasure, instruction, or whatever we want to call whatever it is we get from these things. One could plausibly enough adopt this view (the pragmatist in me thinks it wouldn't ultimaty matter because it wouldn't really affect our sense of the value of what it is we do "get" from these things), but Carey himself finally doesn't want to go this far. He wants to retain the word "art," even if it does it does reduce art objects to those "things" someone, somewhere, thinks to call art. (Later in the book Carey tries to raise "art" back up to a more dignified status by stressing its utilitarian applications, but for it to have such applications it surely does have to exist in the first place, or those using it won't exactly know what they're applying.)

Thus Carey is able to argue further that "art" as it is celebrated by its snootier adherents doesn't have the morally elevating qualities they want to claim for it. No plausible evidence exists that art makes us better people. Most of the rhetoric used to pronounce on its spiritual qualites Carey incisively, and rightly, points out is so much bluster and metaphysical cant. If we can't provide specific scientific descriptions of the effect art actually does have on us (and Carey maintains that we can't) then better to remain silent than to make grandiose assertions about its "spiritual authenticity" or its ability to evoke "a peculiar emotion" that is "independent of time and place," as Clive Bell had it. And not only is the "religion of art" rhetorically bankrupt but it in fact "makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic."

Curiously, then, Carey winds up not so much rejecting the ethical function of high art but affirming its ethical dimension: Too much attention to the wonders of art and too much discussion of those wonders only work to make us bad people. That art turns out to be morally enervating rather than elevating doesn't make it any less "moral" in its implications.

Carey's inability to rid himself of the very assumptions he wants to decry runs throughout the chapter charging arts enthusiasts with turning it into religion. Such enthusiasts apparently are wrong not so much in thinking that art might have beneficial effects but in failing to spread those effects around widely enough: "Turning art into religion often carries with it the assumption that there is a higher morality of art, distinct from conventional morality." The religion of art "devalues, by comparison with itself, ordinary life and ordinary people." Furthermore, it is the focus on the appreciation of, rather than participation in, the arts, that keeps it floating above the outstretched arms of those "ordinary people" who might after all be made into better people if they were to experience the joy of art for themselves. As evidenced by various studies Carey cites, feelings of powerlessness might be alleviated (resulting in a decrease of violence), self-esteem might be raised, and an epidemic of depression might be halted. Thus, "Another thing we should do is to switch the aim of research in the arts to finding out not what critics think about this or that artwork--which is necessarily of limited and personal interest--but how art has affected and changed other people's lives."

Notwithstanding that Carey's contentions in this chapter essentially contradict everything he's said before--art can't be "anything" or there would be nothing specific to apply in the kinds of arts programs whose beneficent effects he lauds, and there would be no reason to enlist the arts at all in such programs if they can't change lives--they don't even count for much in Carey''s own ultimate valuation of "art" in the second section of the book, "The Case for Literature." It turns out that Carey's brief on behalf of participatory art was only a kind of gesture toward a quasi-Deweyan program of "making art," good for bashing the swells and the necessarily limited efforts of critics, perhaps, but not really a serious defense of an alternative to Art. Literature, it would seem, actually is art, and its primary effects are to be located in the secondary act of reading. (I agree that they are, but in the context of Carey's overall argument about the subjectivity of standards, it nevertheless brings the critic back into prominence, as the reader who proves to be especially attentive.)

Carey titles his first chapter on the subject "Literature and Critical Intelligence," but his initial argument seems to place "critical intelligence" in literature rather than the reader: "The first claim I would make is that, unlike the other arts, [literature] can criticize itself." It "shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." Perhaps this is true, but if so, it very nearly belies Carey's larger point that art--even the premier art of literature--doesn't have any particular, objective value. (Yes, Carey assures us that his valuation is indeed his unavoidably subjective own, but still. Carey's very attempt to offer concrete reasons for literature's superiority seems to assume at least an objective method of assessing its superiority.) "More powerful" suggests that works of literature do have some experiential qualities that can be measured. Furthermore, Carey believes that literature "is the only art capable of reasoning" and that "only literature can moralize." (He seems to be using "moralize" in a sense that makes it a good thing, something like a "critique" of human behavior.) Swift and Johnson are presented as authors whose works illustrate these capacities.

Carey appears to have adopted some variation on the otherwise presumably "elitist" French-theoretical idea that language, not writers, create texts, since it is "literature" that reasons and moralizes. If he means instead to say that individual authors such as Swift are moralists, this is just another way of describing their particular interests. It says nothing about literature as "art" per se. According to the terms of Carey's discussion, it is literature that moralizes, literature that reasons.

I confess I find this idea absurd in the extreme, essentially insane. Carey is hearing voices speak through literary texts that no critic or reader with a decent respect for fiction or poetry as distinctive modes of discourse would hear in such an unmediated way. Moreover, Carey himself apparently doesn't really accept these formulations. The final chapter of What Good Are the Arts? tries to make a case for literature based on the its characteristic "indistinctness."

All written texts require interpretation and are, to that extent, indistinct. But with Shakespeare something new happened. An enormous influx of figurative writing transformed his language--an epidemic of metaphor and simile that spread through all its tissues. . . So when writing is dense with metaphor and simile. . .the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart. It has, that is, to keep ingeniously fabricating distinctness--or whatever approximation to distinctness it decides to settle for--out of indistinctness. . . .

As it happens, I thoroughly agree with all of this. "Indistinctness" is a perfectly good name for that evasive quality in works of literature that sets them apart from straightforwardly discursive forms of writing, that in the most intensive way requires we really read the text before us. But I don't see how at the same time we are grappling with the "indistinctness" of literature we can also comfortably accede to its "reasoning"--after all, "the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart"--or its "moralizing." Either literature "says something" about morality or politics or ideas in the kind of readily accessible way Carey's discussion of it implies, or it is "indistinct" and thus all of its putative messages are unavoidably ambiguous when they're not just hopelessly garbled.

Carey wants to have it both ways: it is because literature can "communicate" more effectively and it can also remain "indistinct" in the manner common to all the arts that it is ultimately the most valuable of the arts. Perhaps this is just the consequence of the fact that literature emerges from language as its medium and that language is inevitably burdened with "meaning" (although it is also the consequence of a failure to consistently distinguish between the use of language for meaning and the use of language for aesthetic effect), but it nevertheless results in the most crippling contradiction in a book full of contradictions. Literature can't both produce an indistinctness that every reader makes distinct in his/her own way (or leaves it indistinct) and make moral and rational claims that are presumably universal in their appeal.

As far as I can tell, Carey seems to have written this book in order to upbraid the likes of Geoffrey Hartman, who, according to Carey, believes "the experience he gets from high art is better than that others get from the mass media." Since there is no way of establishing that high-art lovers do obtain a "better" experience therefrom, or even of establishing what "better" might mean, all defenses of high art are simply expressions of elitism dressed up in patronizing rhetoric.

But what if the experience of art does contribute to human improvement? Not because art's moralizing or "spiritual" qualities directly lead to social change or self-actualization, but because close consideration of art enhances our ability to have fulfilling experiences? Because complex works of art encourage us to pay attention in a way that does not direct it into pre-existing channels or entirely cut off the very possibility of sustained, fully-engrossed attention by settling for the superficial or the sanctimonious. Even if there is no way of measuring the quality of experiences of this sort vs. the quality of the "anything" someone might want art to be, who really thinks that anything will do? Near the end of the book, Carey offers a sop to art-lovers: "That the arts are enjoyable to those who enjoy them is a fact that it may seem I have not emphasized enough in this book. If I have not done so, it is partly because it is obvious, and partly because being enjoyable does not distinguish the arts from a vast range of other human activities." But what if it's why the arts are enjoyable "to those who enjoy them" that's important? Not because it confers some special honor on their declared tastes but because the enjoyment comes from having one's powers of apprehension challenged?

And why can't the objects of this particular kind of enjoyment be called "art" by those who care about it? Why does John Carey want them to stop calling it that, unless they also stipulate that "anything" can be art if claiming otherwise makes the "inartistic" feel bad? It's finally only Carey who seems to believe that "art" must have a metaphysically-fastened, all-encompassing definition, or else there's nothing.

Past the End of the Year

Cynthia Ozick makes at least one very important point in her essay, "Literary Entrails," in the April, 2007 Harper's Magazine:

. . .in searching for the key to the Problem of the Contemporary Novel (or Novelist), there are cupboards where it is useless to look. And there are reasons that do not apply: writers vying for the highest rung of literary prestige; potential readers distracted by the multiplicity of storytelling machines. Feuds and jealousies are hardly pertinent [e.g., Ben Marcus vs. Jonathan Franzen], and the notorious decline of reading, while incontrovertible, may have less to do with the admittedly shaky situation of literary fiction than many believe. The real trouble lies not in what is happening but in what is not happening.

What is not happening is literary criticism.

Unfortunately, Ozick isn't very precise in explaining what she means by "literary criticism," beyond conjuring up a critic possessing "a powerfully persuasive, and pervasive, intuition for how [novels] are connected, what they portend in the aggregate, how they comprise and color an era." Even more unfortunately, she doesn't bother to bring poetry within the purview of criticism, which might have forced her to identify those elements of the critic's task that take criticism beyond taxonomy ("how novels are connected"), which is an important but by no means sufficient activity, and beyond noting what an era's fiction "portends," how it "colors" its time and place, which seems to me to be the job of sociologists and historians, not literary critics engaged in what I take to be their most indispensable work: reading individual novels (and poems) carefully and insightfully, giving other readers a sense of what a particularly dedicated reader experienced while attending closely to the text. The most efffective critics also bring a familiarity with literary history to bear on the text at hand, but simply pointing out "connections" and keeping track of the "aggregate" won't really do.

Ozick invokes James Wood, apparently now almost everyone's default setting for the category "critic," as an exemplar of the kind of criticism she presumably has in mind, but she quotes some of his more pompous, oracular pronouncements--"Belief is a mere appendix to magic, its unused organ. This is a moral problem" [referring to the work of Toni Morrison]--rather than any specific instance of critical analysis that might help us actually read the text more efficaciously, as opposed to admiring the critic's cute phrase-making or joining in on his moral sanctimony. Wood does frequently enough mix in plausible analysis with his moralizing, but it would seem that Ozick prefers his rhetorical posturing to his usable criticism.

Nevertheless, Ozick is right to distinguish between "literary criticism" and most book reviews and between literary criticism and academic criticism. While some book reviewers are also skillful critics (Sven Birkerts, Louis Menand, Daniel Mendelsohn) able to use the book review form to more precisely critical ends, Ozick is right to maintain that the judgments of book reviewers, even reviewers who are themselves writers, are too often "capricious," too often constrained by the formulaic structure of the book review. She is also accurate in her description of "advanced" academic criticism as limited by its "confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin," reducing literature to dogma. (One can only hope that she is correct in predicting such criticism is "destined to vanish like the fog [it evokes].") The success of academic criticism in appopriating "criticism" to itself, however much it has devolved into an insular discourse that long ago left any real interest in literature far behind, has created a situation in which the brief newspaper/magazine review has to suffice as "literary criticism." Ozick justifiably calls for the development of "a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics," for the more amply developed kind of criticism she at least gestures toward in this essay.

This perceived need for a renewal of criticism is where I myself began when creating this blog. To some extent, I have become only more aware of how the absence of such criticism, less deadline-driven and publishing-centered, has created a situation like the one Scott Esposito describes:

Enough with the mad rush of literature where we barely have time to contemplate spring's hot titles before summer assaults us with its books. Why not linger over those spring books (and the winter ones as well), think about them a little longer, say something about them that will last past the end of the year?. . . .

Such a "mad rush" of superficial discussion can only result in a brand of reviewing that emphasizes the trendy and ephemeral, that elevates the "book business" and its trivialities over the long-term consideration of books that more people ought to read, of books that might even stand the test of time and still be read a generation from now, not just next year. One thing Ozick overlooks in her discussion of the current state of criticism is exactly where good literary criticism might appear. (One place to look would be Scott's own online critical journal, The Quarterly Conversation.) Certainly newspapers and magazines are not suddenly going to publish more of it. The current effort by the NBCC to "save" the book section at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not likely to succeed,and if it did wouldn't make much of a difference--I can't remember the last time I read the AJC's book reviews with any seriousness. Literary quarterlies might usefully devote more of their space to criticism, but that really hasn't been happening very much, either.

In starting this blog (and joining up with other literary blogs in implicitly attempting to create a "broad infrastructure" of serious literary discussion), I was making a judgment that the blog post could come to approximate (in a perhaps more condensed form) if not replace the critical essay--the available forums for which have long been dwindling in number--as the vehicle for "literary criticism." Not only could an individual post attempt critical readings of various kinds and lengths, but that post could be linked to other posts (both of one's own, and of others considering the same subjects) in a kind of chain of critical discussion. I still believe that literary blogs can perform this function (especially since numerous other bloggers have since appeared taking what seems to be the same approach), although Cynthia Ozick either hasn't considered this option or shares the same blinkered attitude to online discourse expressed by Michael Dirda, Keith Gessen, etc. Her one mention of blogs is dismissive, as she refers to "blogging and emailing and text-messaging" as among the distractions the younger generations have succumbed to. I assume she's one of the print fetishists who can't imagine serious literary debate occuring online.

But I can't share either her snobbery or her conviction that, whether serious criticism survives or not, "novels will be written, whatever the conditions that roil around them." I think the existence of literary criticism is a necessary condition of the survival of both fiction and poetry. Without thoughtful discussion of what's being done by interesting writers, as well as continued discussion of what's been done in the past, "novels" as a form of "literature" will descend into further irrelevance. With no one to argue over what makes writing "literary" in the first place, or why such a concept even matters, novels will at best be only the first step in developing the script for the possible movie so many novels already want to be. Unless folks like Cynthia Ozick think rigorous print-based criticism is going to make a miraculous comeback in newspapers and magazines whose editors suddenly come to their senses and seek to safeguard the literary tradition, she ought to contemplate the possibility that "pixels" can form words and paragraphs and essays just as readily as ink.

Marginalizing the Academy

Ron Silliman thinks that

there’s going to be – already is, I suspect – some clashing over whether it’s possible to do serious critical writing in this form [i.e., blogging]. One of the most interesting things about last December’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was listening to one fifteen-minute paper after another & realizing that two-thirds had less in the way of ideas than the average blog note. And this was, by all standards, an excellent MLA convention. Try writing 200 MLA presentations in one year, tho, and your whole idea of what constitutes a critical piece of thinking is going to change. In this sense, the real promise of blogging is the one that it holds for changing what constitutes critical thought, literally marginalizing the academy as a site for such about poetry, returning critical writing instead to the poets themselves, most of whom do not teach, or do so only under the most abject of adjunct circumstances. Perhaps marginalizing is too strong a term – there are, after all, good people in the academy who do serious work – but at least “de-authorizing,” de-legitimating academic critical writing as such, forcing it to compete on an equal basis with the “deep gossip” of poets writing about their own work & that of others. Nothing could be healthier than that.

I mostly agree with this, but I think Ron both exaggerates the extent to which the academy any longer engages in "critical thought" about poetry (especially current poetry) and fails to reserve a place in the critical consideration of poetry for critics other than poet-critics.

University literature departments have long ceased to be (if they ever were, except in the creative writing programs and the literary magazines many such programs sponsored) the centers of serious literary criticism (criticism of literature, not criticism that happens to include literature as a target of theoretical or cultural analysis), especially criticism of poetry. (See Jonathan Mayhew's post on this subject.) The "deep gossip" of poets on blogs and in other non-academic publications already in my opinion vastly exceeds in its utility the pseudo-commentary emanating from academe, although I like to think that in its seriousness of purpose, most of this blogcrit goes well beyond "gossip."

Insofar as blogging about poetry (and fiction as well--academic criticism about current fiction is hardly any more useful than its poetry counterpart) does succeed in "marginalizing the academy" even further, this can only be a good thing, so long as academic criticism continues to view literature simply as a "specimen" to be examined for all but its literary qualities. But I also think there is room in poetry blogging for critics who are not also (or perhaps not primarily) poets themselves. Such critics would have "deep" sympathy for the practices and assumptions of working poets but would also provide a critical perspective (ideally buttressed by a similarly deep familiarity with literary history) that didn't reflexively privilege one or another such practice or assumption and that approached both poetry and fiction from the standpoint of the engaged reader rather than the writer and his/her perhaps partisan inclinations. (Which isn't to say the non-poet blogcritic would have no such inclinations, but they would be anchored at a different angle of approach.)

At a time when literary blogs do indeed show an increasing ability to "deauthorize" academic criticism as it has established itself over the past fifty years, it would be a shame if the cleavage in contemporary literary criticism--between academic critics on the one hand and practicing poets and novelists on the other--were to be permanently hardened with little space in between for critics who want to write about literature but who don't ultimately consider themselves either "scholars" or poets. Both poetry and criticism would suffer from such an unyielding opposition.

Mainly Negentropic

In an essay at electronic book review on "ecocriticism," Andrew McMurry writes:

. . .The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly suited for stopping or even slowing the headlong rush into destruction (and this is where I differ from some in ecocriticism. . .who imagine that poetry and art and film can help us tread more lightly on the earth) because the roots of the problem go far deeper than culture can penetrate. Still, a study of culture helps us to understand what sort of creatures we are that we can effectively choose to immolate ourselves and the planet. Literature, as we all know, is the human pageant distilled; but it's equally the transhistorical record of a sad and furious primate, a mirror held up to our species' ugliness. Passed through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory, literature reveals instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments. In simple terms, the price we have paid for the complexity of our things is the decomplexity of earth's things. As a species, we have the power to modify our surroundings to suit our needs but not the wisdom to suit our needs to our surroundings.

This seems to me an admirably succinct account of what might be called the unromantic school of ecocriticism (disencumbered of the notion that literature can and ought to be deployed as a weapon in the battle to stave off our "headlong rush into destruction," that it might "help us tread more lightly on the earth"). It recognizes that the "resources" of art and literature are wasted when expended on agitprop and ill-disguised moral instruction, and it doesn't insist that writers exchange art for "relevance." McMurry clearly enough believes that literature does have relevance of a sort, but it isn't the kind that must be channeled into particular programmatic or ideological forms.

But he is stuck with a conception of literature that equates it with "content," that reduces it to its role in facilitating our understanding of "what sort of creatures we are," its status as "transhistorical record." Literature, through providing "a mirror held up to our species' ugliness," offers us information about ourselves, in this case disturbing information further clarified "through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory." Literature's mirror and criticism's lens reflect back to us in a handily focused and duly intensified image "instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments."

That works of literature do frequently reveal "the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities" is undeniable, although this is so mainly because serious writers do not shy from portraying human activity in all of its manifestations (many of which are ugly indeed), not because ecological degradation in particular seems especially pertinent. One might just as easily say that, viewed in the right way, literature reveals "the highly erotic quality of all our activities" or the necessarily "economic" character of those activities. An "interpretive lens" of any sort that directs its attention to what a literary work "reflects" is necessarily going to distort the work, in most cases extracting from it what it hoped to find in the first place, but approaches as determined to "see" only content as ecocriticism puts into high relief this tendency to appropriate the incidental characteristics of the work for external and purely utilitarian purposes, leaving the "merely literary" properties of novels and poems and stories to those who, in this case, seem blithely unaware of the overriding need to save the planet.

(Which is not to say that ecocritical insights never contribute to our understanding of particular works. To add such an insight to others that might be gathered in considering a given text is a perfectly sound strategy, but of course in most cases the ecocritic would likely not appreciate ecocriticism being subsumed to the broader goal of literary understanding in this way. It only makes the ecocritical agenda seem secondary to the protocols of reading literature efficaciously.)

Thus while McMurry is able to resist concentrating the interpretive lens of ecocriticism even more narrowly on the therapeutic possibilities of literature (convincing us "to tread more lightly on the earth"), he remains content with the metaphors of literature as mirror and criticism as lens. There's no doubt that all works of literature refer us to and illuminate human reality, if not always so directly and so simply as the mirror metaphor implies. But Stendhal's notion of the "mirror in the roadway," when taken too literally, too quickly sanctions the assumption that literature is important for its content and that its most immediate use is to enlighten us about this or that "issue," to serve as the "subject" of some such mode of analysis as ecocriticism. By deflecting attention away from the work itself and onto the "reality" it supposedly reflects, the mirror metaphor encourages us to ignore those elements of literature without which literary texts would be no different than any other species of writing: form and style.

In fact, Andrew McMurry might go some way toward easing his own dyspepsia caused by the depravity of human nature if he were to pay some attention to the aesthetics of literature. By putting aside the mirror and considering the way fiction and poetry transmute human experience into complex and challenging verbal forms, he might come to appreciate one kind of human activity devoted to creating rather than destroying. He might learn that art is one way by which the human imagination is able to realize its more beneficent possibilities. It's all right there in front of us, but sometimes we seem too busy staring at our own reflections in the mirror to see it.

Close to Heresy

On the heels of the previous post examining the absurd idea that formalism--close reading, paying primary attention to the formal and stylistic properties of works of art and literature--is a "mechanical" approach that turns art into "something less than human" comes this equally silly commentary by Emily Wilson at Slate:

Historicism, in various new and not-so-new guises, dominates most contemporary academic literature departments. It has become something close to heresy to suggest that any literary work could be studied without close reference to the specific place, time, and culture in which it was produced. Literature does not express timeless truths about human nature—or, at least, you would sound like a simpleton if you said so at an academic conference. Rather, literature articulates the ideas and values of its own time, according to older, Hegelian forms of historicism. Or literature "negotiates" the "power dynamics" of its own time, according to the newer, post-Foucaultian versions. These positions each have something to be said for them: Both respond, in different ways, to the obvious fact that literature is not produced independently of its author and his or her society—as radical forms of literary formalism might suggest. . . .

So formalists believe that a work of literature is produced "independently of its author"? Literally by a machine? By some magic process whereby an author discovers his/her new book fully-formed beneath a moss-covered rock?

Similarly, just how would a writer work "indepentently. . .of his or her society"? All writers are literally expatriates? They float above the world on a billowy cloud of inspiration, gazing heedlessly on their fellow humans down below, who don't seem to realize they might also be "independent" of their time and place?

What radical formalist ever believed such patent nonsense? Of course, names are never given in these sophomoric caricatures of formalism because no literary critic has ever held the position that "literature. . .is produced independently of its author and his or her society." Only someone intent on marginalizing formalism--aesthetic appreciation more generally--could even read such a statement without noting how ludicrous it is. Those of us who prefer to focus on the aesthetics of literature (without which there is no literature) are not so stupid as to think poets and fiction writers free themselves of the assumptions of time and place and produce "timeless truths"; we do think that they produce art, and that art bears scrutiny as art at least as much as (in my opinion more than) it does as a specimen of "the ideas and values of its own time."

Wilson goes on to maintain that "the triumph of historicism is a pity, not least because the dominance of any orthodoxy tends to deaden the critical faculties," but she has clearly accepted the underlying demonization of formalism (it's "inhuman," to accept it "heresy") that has made the domination of historicism in academic criticism possible. To deviate it from it might cede the scholarly territory to those radical formalists and pleasure-seeking aesthetes who still lurk outside the campus walls. Such "simpletons" wouldn't understand "power dynamics" if it was right there in front of them.

A Certain Image Regime

At The New Criterion, Michael J. Lewis quotes from The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, by art historian T. J. Clark:

My art history has always been reactive. Its enemies have been the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity, and conceived of as something less than human, non-human, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical. In the beginning that meant that the argument was with certain modes of formalism, and the main effort in my writing went into making the painting fully part of a world of transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs, “politics.” But who now thinks it is not? The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. “Being fully part” means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service.

"But who now thinks it is not?" A better question: Who ever thought it was not? What formalist ever believed a work of art or literature was literally "brilliantly (or dully) mechanical," or, at least, that a proper response to art was one that regarded it as "something less than human, non-human"? Has anyone ever really confronted a work of art "in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns"? The very fact the a human being experiences a work created by another human being, both of whom presumably draw on very human attributes--creativity, attentiveness, for that matter even the ability to self-induce a "trance-like" state--would seem to make the transformation of the puerile metaphor of the "mechanical" response to art into something real, something to be contrasted with "human," manifestly preposterous. Yet this association of formalist criticism of all kinds with merely "mechanical" aesthetic appreciation and "engaged" political criticism with the fully "human" world of "transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs" has been an operational assumption of academic criticism for almost three decades now, producing such an endless stream of ideologically sodden "scholarship" that apparently even Clark has had enough.

It's good that T. J. Clark wants now to challenge the pseudo-analyses of "belonging to the world" and "image regimes," but maybe he should have realized that his own interpretation of formalism was itself a "parody notion," that he was exchanging one "mechanical" approach for what was inevitably to become its equally distorted mirror image. It now seems a fixed law of academic criticism that one generation will dismiss the previous generation's preferred critical method based on its least representative, most exaggerated characteristics, while going on to practice a new method that seems designed to provoke a similar reaction from the next (or in this case, from one of its own.)

I am loath to quote The New Criterion approvingly, but I agree with Lewis (although I'd change his "immeasurably" to "somewhat"):

. . .The tendency of Clark’s career, then, has been to dislodge the aesthetic object from its pedestal to set it back into the social, cultural, and political currents that brought it forth. Such an approach, wielded judiciously, can immeasurably enrich the understanding of an object. But, used indiscriminately, it can also impoverish that understanding, rendering the object into a mere historical document—like a bill of lading or a deed of transfer. And a mediocre work of art always speaks far more eloquently about the society that made it than a great one. In the end, an insight that aspired to widen the scope and relevance of art history demoted it to a subspecies of social history. And Clark, whatever one may think of his politics, is too good an art historian not to realize that this is a loss for everyone.

Wieseltier's World

In his diatribe against Steven Spielberg's Munich, Leon Wieseltier writers:

The film is powerful, in the hollow way that many of Spielberg's films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid. Spielberg knows how to overwhelm. But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away.

I do not generally count myself among Spielberg's defenders--there is something slick and hollow about many of his films--but I've just seen Munich (as well as The War of the Worlds), and I have to say that, while I've come to expect that Wieseltier's discussions of both films and fiction will be obstinately wooden-headed, the willful incomprehension in this "review" seems particularly thick. Although Wieseltier does at least in this instance make relatively clear the source of his discontent: he really doesn't care for art at all.

For Spielberg, Munich is a rather restrained exploration of moral ambiguity, although it perhaps does ultimately signal its theme--a man in a moral quandry--a little too intently. In my opinion, it does not in the least portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of "equivalence" or depict only "cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse," as Wieseltier charges. These are by now just the reflexive accusations always leveled at any treatment of this conflict that does not unequivocally take the side of the Israelis. (Note: I mostly take Israel's side myself. I think its cause is just, even while some of its actions have been counterproductive.) What it does is take the principle enunciated by Golda Meir early in the film--that the Jewish people must demonstrate they will no longer accept brutalities committed against them without a response--and examine how it actually plays out in practice. The film's protagonist decides that an eye for an eye is not itself an acceptable precept in a world where everyone has their grievances and innocent people cannot always be spared. This seems to me an entirely defensible response to his experience, and for Wieseltier to classify him as just another "cruel Israeli with remorse" is simply obtuse.

And, as even Wieseltier grudgingly admits, the film is very well made. In fact, in its understated exposition and its muted atmosphere, Spielberg risks alienating those in the mass audience who expect the usual bold-letter filmmaking from this director. So when Wieseltier complains of being "overwhelmed" and "manipulated" he is really protesting against aesthetic values in general. It's the same thing he did several years ago in taking John Updike to task for excessively pretty writing about 9/11/01 ("Such writing defeats its representational purpose because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. . .There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth") and in reviewing Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, which in Wieseltier's world was too "cunning" and had the audacity to "come armored in ambiguity about its own character."

Ambiguity is something Wieseltier apparently cannot abide, especially when it comes dressed up as art, but of course ambiguity is the very essence of art. Without it, literature in particular becomes just another form of moral or political discourse (which is paradoxically what Wieseltier objected to in Checkpoint), but Wieseltier's aversion to being "ravished" by art is obviously so powerful that it is a price he would willingly pay. "There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies." To be instructed in sanctimony, no doubt.

Leon Wieseltier is the sort of "moral critic" who makes me even more convinced that all approaches to art that don't first of all reckon in a conscientious way with its aesthetic qualities are just beside the point. He is a self-satisfied and self-righteous moralizer whose air of smug superiority hovers over every word he writes. "The only side that Steven Spielberg ever takes is the side of the movies," he proclaims, as if this was an appalling moral failure. But if the alternative is to accept the harsh and colorless conditions of Wieseltier's world, I'll sign up with Spielberg.

False Authorities

Self-Styled Siren quotes a professional film critic about the impact of blogs: "I have no idea what is going to happen with the...review biz. The Web has created this false sense of authority, in which everyone believes his or her opinion is equally valid. Witness blogs. Witness the e-mail I get, in which my correspondents rip me a new one each day."

SSS observes:

. . .the Amazon and IMDB comments pages, and blogs, enable some badly educated and tasteless people to give an inflated rating to their own opinions. It's difficult to argue with that. While some people in those forums write from a careful consideration of what they have read or seen before, others rant, ramble and cannot even bother with spell check. There is a definite streak of anti-intellectualism in the anti-critic school of thought, too. Critics are snobs, rage the IMDB chatboards. What do they know? I'd rather listen to someone just like me.

Some critics, however, have devalued themselves. The movie studios get sycophantic, third-rate members of the press to write "HANG ONTO YOUR SEATS!" or some such about their latest ghastly shoot-'em-up, and after a while even the word of a writer for a major daily carries a great deal less weight.

It is true that not everyone's opinion is equally valid--but this means only that not everyone bothers to support his/her opinion with equal weight. Simply writing for a newspaper does not in itself convey a "true" authority to the critic, if the views expressed do not go beyond plot summaries and vapid opinionizing. Speaking for myself, I don't find much critical weight in the opinions--about either film or books--expressed in most of the "major dailies" The amount of space given over to reviews is much too sparse to allow for much real criticism of any kind, and, if anything, SSS understates the extent to which film and book reviewers have become appendages of their respective "industries."

We can only hope that blogs don't succumb to the same temptations to sycophancy. If litblogs become just another opportunity for publishers to hawk their wares, as Dennis Johnson fears might be happening, a real opportunity to provide a critical alternative to the media powers-that-be--to rip them a new one indeed--will have been lost.

Standing Still

In his essay "Love and Hatred of 'French Theory' in America," Rolando Perez provides this very incisive account of the reception of Theory in the 1980s:

Those of us who were either in the U.S. academy as professors or as graduate students in the early 1980s were weaned on the milk of post-existentialist, French thought. For reasons that had little or nothing to with the individual thinkers behind the different theories, two camps formed all on their own. Or perhaps more accurately, according to the academic interests of the people involved. Those whose interests were primarily literary were attracted to, studied, and wrote on Barthes, Derrida, Jabes, de Man, etc. Much of what we think of as being "French theory" today is the result of the kind of literary criticism that was carried out in prestigious universities like Yale during the 1980s. Academicians and graduate students who were interested in Continental political philosophy found in Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, the necessary keys they needed to critique contemporary, American capitalist society. Some of us attempted to bring these two strains of French thought together, either from the literary or from the political end. And there were good reasons for such attempts, even if at times the actual results were less than satisfactory.

He continues:

Certainly there were things to criticize in what came to be known as postmodern French theory. There were people who were churning out deconstructive readings of just about everything under the sun, and doing it quite badly: building careers, amassing publications for tenure, and saying nothing. And the same could be said of all the Deleuzean articles that made it to the pages of so many publications. Yet few would deny today the importance of contemporary French thought on American letters. Up until what some have called the "French invasion" of academia, American literary criticism was at a stand still, and Continental philosophy was merely what was left of the exhausted, no longer relevant post-war philosophy of phenomenology and existentialism. What French Theory in America and Hatred of Capitalism do is to show us in an eloquent manner what French thought has contributed, and continues to contribute, to academia and the art world.

Although I can certainly see how an endeavor like "Continental philosophy" might at a given time be "exhausted," in need of fresh insights and an altered focus, I find it harder to agree that "literary criticism was at a stand still." How could literary criticism--considered as a practice, not as a theory about practice--be at a "stand still"? Unless the term has come to mean only theory about practice, and the actual practice of explicating and evaluating texts is something else, something about which academe no longer concerns itself?

The latter kind of criticism doesn't need to be "advanced," its assumptions "updated." Explication is explication. The process of moving from consideration of textual features to an evaluation of the text's success in accomplishing its implicit purpose remains the same. Certainly insights garnered from a familiarity with theory or another critic's method might be brought to bear in a particular instance, but this will provide a new perspective on the individual work at hand, not on the practice of literary criticism per se. The new perspective has been produced by the application of an unchanging principle--read the text as intensively as one can, come to a conclusion based on an assessment of ends and means.

Developments over the past twenty-five years have produced a conception of "literary criticism" by which the object of criticism is no longer the literary work itself but the operations of criticism. The very notion of the "literary" is interrogated and competing notions of "value" are debated. These are perfectly acceptable things to do, but they have become the defining characteristics of literary criticism, not the appraisal of works of fiction and poetry per se, at least insofar as the very term "criticism" has become synonymous with "academic criticism"--which I would argue has certainly happened. The debate over Theory is often framed as a conflict between the "higher eclecticism" John Holbo writes about and a more respectful appreciation of literature itself, but it would be more precise to say that one distinctive practice--literary criticism--has been replaced by another--theoretical speculation, with literature as its prompt.

I am not arguing that such speculation should not be carried out. Even if I did believe that (I don't), no amount of complaining by the advocates of "literature itself" is going to return us to the days when Literature was the disciplinary main attraction, the "literary" scholar its curator. For whatever reason, studying literature for its own sake has proven to be an unsuitable activity in the contemporary university. I do wonder, however, why the term "literary criticism" continues to be used in describing what academic scholars are now doing in most literature departments. Surely it isn't necessary to retain it for purposes of prestige or legitimacy. Why not just acknowledge that both Theory and cultural studies are what they are--which is to say, they are not literary criticism. They are both more and less than literary criticism: more in that they take all of culture as their domain, less in that by widening the scope of "criticism" so broadly they don't really notice individual writers and works much at all. If nothing else, relinquishing the title to "literary criticism" might revitalize criticism as a general-interest practice and in so doing might bring some needed attention back to the novelists and poets who could use it.

Scary

It's hard to understand why The Sunday Times considered something like this to be worth publishing as "art criticism":

. . .Rubens wasn't simply an admirer of innocent feminine plumpness. Like a lot of men with a taste for the failed weight-watcher, he had a thick streak of cruelty running through him. His feelings about women were edgy and confused. In Rubens, particularly in his early years, the taste for the multi-pound nude disguises some very unsettling hungers for sex and violence. . .

. . .My own view is that Rubens was a slobberer ahead of his time. His taste for brutally implied sex and the naked humiliation of women speaks to the modern world on subjects for which there is now a huge audience. Look properly at Rubens, and you're looking at a pretty scary guy. . . .

One could certainly find Rubens's paintings to be full of disturbing images of "sex and violence," but why is it necessary to conclude that such images reveal something "unsettling" and "scary" about the artist himself? His art may indeed be "unsettling," but this by no means constitutes evidence of any kind whatever about Rubens's "feelings," his "hungers," or even his "taste" for anything other than his own kind of painterly imagery. The easy association of an artist's work with what the critic wants to think of as his/her "peronality" is asinine, and it is at the very least disappointing that a publication like the Times would encourage such an association.

Several decades worth of art criticism and education (including literary criticism and education) demonstrating the fallacy of considering a work of art to be some kind of immediate translation of the artist's emotions or ruminations has apparently been entirely supplanted by the idea that art is "expression" of the most direct and superficial kind. The artist doesn't "express" him/herself by creating discrete and complex works of art, but by pouring all those pent-up feelings, unimpeded by aesthetic devices, right on to the canvas or the page. So much for Keats's notion of "negative capability," in which the artist is able to subsist in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts," or T.S.Eliot's insight that creating great art and poetry is precisely an "escape from personality." Art and self-assertion have become mostly indistiguishable. (And as Eliot further puts it, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.")

Presumably, Waldemar Januszczak is arguing that the "scary" qualities of Ruben's art come not from a direct expression of them but as a kind of emanation from his "unconscious." But this is mostly a distinction without a difference. Januszcsak can only render this judgment by generalizing from the paintings he's looking at, and his assertions that they reveal Rubens to be a sadomasochist do not depend upon their being either conscious or unconscious acts. His "true" feelings and beliefs are being expressed regardless. But of course Januszczak doesn't know anything about what Rubens was thinking or feeling while painting these works. At best, he's reducing great art to the delineation of the artist's character, his "soul." At worst, he's using great art as an excuse for making cheap and sensationalized remarks.

Attitude Police

In an essay in The Hindu Literary Review, novelist Tabish Khair makes a number of provocative points about historical inaccuracy in contemporary British fiction. Particularly good is this general discussion of the role of readers:

. . .The reader, not as a blank receptor of the intentions of the author or the text, but as someone who actually reads. The reader as the critic. Here the etymology of the word "read" has to be kept in mind: to read is to "think, suppose, guess; discern the meaning of (chiefly in read a riddle, a dream); inspect and interpret... " Related, as the word is, to the Sanskrit rãdh and the Old Slavonic raditi, it also includes the active sense of "accomplish" and "attend to" respectively. Moreover, one of the original senses of the Germanic root is that of "taking charge" and the act of interpreting written symbols is suggested by its Old English root.

But then he adds:

Reading is also an act of digging. A reader is not only someone who stays on the surface of the text, but an active thinker and interpreter. She attends to the text, but she also accomplishes and takes charge.

It seems to me that attending to a literary text is one thing--something that in fact too many readers don't do carefully enough--but to "dig" into it in the way Khair has in mind is something else. The reader participates in the creation of the text's "meaning" (more loosely, whatever significance a particular text is going to have for a particular reader), but to "take charge" of the text almost seems to undermine the very purpose of reading a work of literature in the first place, to make the act of reading always the possibility of waging war on the text. (Granted, this is the preferred strategy of much of current academic criticism, but it's obnoxious nonetheless.)

Simply taking pleasure in the reading of literature is converted by Khair into a "passive celebration" of it. Again, I understand that this kind of wariness of being "passive" and of being insufficiently skeptical of literary representation when it purports to depict marginalized groups is built into the project of contemporary cultural studies, especially that version that has come to be called postcolonial studies, but at what point does such wariness simply become an impatience with literature altogether? Must a poem or a novel always be ultimately an excuse to determine what improper attitudes it's illustrating? If, as a reader, you're looking for that work that's going to express only pure thoughts and pristine beliefs, or as a writer you want to produce such a work, you're not going to succeed. And even if you do, how boring that book is likely to be.

The literary offenses Khair uncovers seem to me pretty minor. Zadie Smith seems to be confused about a character's religious affiliation. Yann Martel gets a name wrong. Monica Ali appears too enamored of Britain's cultural freedoms. It's an awfully puritanical view of a poor novelist's obligations to insist that mistakes can't be toleratied, that a novelist can't just write novels without being held to account by the politically-inspired "diggers" and the attitude police.

Khair concludes by speculating that "one can only imagine the Reader-without-History as a non-reader, as a passive receptor, as a simple celebrator of the text, not as someone who interprets, guesses, digs. It is at best a reader — to the extent that she is brought into being — who wants to escape from history. It is a reader who wants to feel good about being who or what she is, and a knowledge of history — even one's own history — does not always cause one to feel good." How about a reader who neither wants to escape from history nor "feel good about being who or what she is" but instead read novels for the aesthetic pleasure they might provide? Is such a reader also being irresponsible? Are aesthetic resources not precious enough to dig for?

Thanks to Amardeep Singh for the link.

Intellectual Vocations

Dale Peck must be wondering if his strategy for calling attention to himself and for waging verbal war against most of his fellow writers was worth the consequences of actually gaining that attention. Now that the whole thing has degenerated into the ugly farce of "bitch-slapping" discussed on tabloid tv, one hopes he has decided that literary warfare of this kind only trivializes the cause of serious writing, the very endeavor Peck professed to be defending. If Peck had been engaged in honest literary criticism in the first place, rather than merely projecting a kind of free-floating, incendiary "attitude," I might feel sorry for him, but as it is I can't help concluding he has received the very response his "hatchet jobs" were inviting.

In the aftermath of Crouch vs. Peck, however, I am more interested in the comments made by Leon Wieseltier, as reported in the New York Observer. As the literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier was ultimately the one responsible for soliciting, editing, and publishing Peck's "reviews" of Rick Moody, Stanley Couch, et. al., and even more than Peck he should have known what kind of reaction they would provoke. What does he now have to say for himself?

Mr. Peck’s unpopularity, Mr. Wieseltier said, "makes it more necessary to be clear that what Stanley did is unacceptable.

"Hitting someone for something they’ve written represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the intellectual’s vocation," Mr. Wieseltier said. . . .

Mr. Wieseltier said that after Mr. Peck’s review ran in The New Republic, he offered Mr. Crouch—also a contributor to the magazine—"ample space" to write a rebuttal. "I knew that Dale’s piece would be very wounding," Mr. Wieseltier said. "And I wanted to be fair."

Having known that Peck's review would be "very wounding," Wieseltier chose to run it anyway, but now "hitting someone" is a betrayal of "the intellectual's vocation?"? What sanctimonious blather. Which wound is likely to be the longest-lasting and was the most unprovoked: the bitch-slap or the hatchet job? Is inflicting any kind of wound part of the intellectual's vocation? And who's most reponsible for Dale Peck's current "unpopularity"? Who encouraged him to be an irresponsible critic in the first place, to substitute invective for analysis?

Wieseltier surely has a lot of gall to talk about the "intellectual's vocation" in this context. There was nothing "intellectual" about Peck's reviews. (This doesn't mean that Peck isn't or can't be an intellectual, to the extent anyone would want to be one of those. It does mean that his reviews were themselves the betrayal of the intellectual's vocation: to interpret carefully, to give good reasons for one's judgments, to avoid self-display.) Publishing them in The New Republic was not a contribution to intellectual debate, but a wholesale attack on contemporary fiction for not measuring up to the ponderous standards of literary moralism Wieseltier's book review section purports to uphold.

For Wieseltier and the reviewers he most often turns to are indeed exemplars of the current version of "moral criticism," the approach to literature that, in the succinct definition provided by Hugh Holman, "judges art according to ethical principles." At its best, moral criticism considers literature to be the greatest repository of illustrated "ethical principles," and takes works of literature seriously for this reason. (Although I myself can't see that literature really serves this purpose, or that it does so other than serendipitously.) At its worst, moral criticism is interested in literature only tangentially, to the extent it provides the occasion for moral reflection or discourse. This kind of criticism frequently dismisses the aesthetic qualities of literature outright (usually moral critics discuss only fiction, since poetry is obviously already too aesthetic for its own good). Here's Wieseltier approvingly describing Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the Trilling anthology The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: "He did not read to be ravished. He was exercised more by 'the moral imagination' than by the imagination. And he grew increasingly suspicious of art. . .In works of literature Trilling found mainly the records of concepts and sentiments and values. . .Trilling was a very unliterary literary critic. His conception of his critical duty was less professional and less playful--and bigger. The novels and the poems that he pondered were documents for a moral history of his culture. Finally, he was a historian of morality working with literary materials. . . ."

Although Wieseltier remarks that these obsessions on Trilling's part "marked his limitation as a critic of literature," they are limitations only if you think there's merit in being a "literary literary critic," which Wieseltier and most other moral critics pretty clearly think there isn't. And I invite readers to determine for themselves how many of the attitudes attributed here to Trilling seem to be shared by Dale Peck. "Suspicious of art"? Novels as "documents for a moral history of his culture"?

Exactly how moral is it to write and publish essays that verbally attack most writers in sight, that condemn current writers en masse as morally defecient in too many ways to count, and to do so in language and tone (and this is true not just of the reviews by Peck in The New Republic) that is by turns smarmy, cynical, and mocking? In the final analysis, what kind of contribution to literary culture, to literature, is it to pronounce almost all contemporary fiction a waste of one's time? How many clueless, narrow-minded, self-righteous killjoys have said similar things in the past about books now unambiguously considered great?

Violence certainly is a violation of the intellectual's responsibilities, but so are disingenuousness and hypocrisy.

Heavy Burdens

I do not read the Wall Street Journal and know nothing about Eric Gibson, the features editor of its "Leisure and Arts" section. My comments are restricted to this article (May 28) about the recent fire in a London warehouse that destroyed a large collection of contemporary art. Neither do I know anything about the specific art works for which Gibson expresses his particular scorn (the usual kind of philistine skepticism), although I will say it's an especially cheap device to pick out just two of over one hundred works and implicitly hold them to be representative of the whole.

What's really objectionable about this article is the attitude it betrays toward not just contemporary art but toward the nature of art in general, an attitude, I'm afraid, shared by all too many self-appointed arbiters of contemporary art (and literature) given all too much space in "mainstream" newspapers and magazines. (In this case I am able to say that it is an attitude most academic critics have abandoned, although in many cases an equally extreme and unthinking attitude in the other direction has been adopted instead.) This view of art is pretty much encapsulated in this statement: "It's not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It's just that the work of these artists--as of all contemporary artists--is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one's existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can't quite see it as a body blow to civilization."

The key words here are "cultural heft" and "civilization." According to the definition of "art" apparently being used by Gibson, art is about "culture," and a work of art becomes a part of culture by acquiring "heft." It would indeed seem that a work of art doesn't necessarily reveal this heft upon initial examination since new art is too "untested" to have it. It's a weight that, presumably, subsequent critcs load onto it. (Now you know why all those "great works" of art and literature you were exposed to in school seemed so heavy on the spirit.) Related to this is the art work's relationship to "civilization." Civilization, one has to conclude, is that ponderous institution wherein all of that great mass of art can be stored, and such lightweight fare as was being kept in that flimsy warehouse burned through lack of time to bulk up.

A little later in the article Gibson also pronounces on the role of critics: "Criticism used to be about detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality. Critics used to refrain from applying the word 'masterpiece" to any work less than a few hundred years old." Putting aside for now the questionable assumptions behind the description of what criticism "used to be," there seems an elemental lapse in logic here. How can criticism be about "making rigorous judgments about artisitic quality" if you have to wait around several hundred years to say anything at all?

Art is not for culture or for civilization. Art and literature are for the enjoyment and edification of people, individual people, artists, writers, viewers, and readers who live now and can't really hold off until someone three centuries from now says its okay to call it art. "Civilization" may not have suffered from the London fire, but it's quite likely that potential viewers of this art have suffered a loss, the loss of a possible experience of some worthy art that can't be replaced by going to a museum to look once again at certified "masterpieces." Not to mention the loss felt by the artists themselves, which is real enough despite the "perspective" Gibson appeals to at the end of his article.

Nor is true that criticism has always been about "detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality." Detachment and discernment (the latter predicated on the former) were indeed qualities valued by certain kinds of modern critics, but they were mostly attempting to show how works of art and literature that seemed alien and unconventional (not unlike the works Mr. Gibson disparages) could be judged artistically accomplished if you regarded them in the appropriate ways. Actually very few of these critics were known for "rigorous judgments" about inferior art, as the consideration of such works added nothing to their broader goal of enlarging our understanding of what "art" could be. Only certain newpaper-based critics interpret the requirements of their job in this way.

We'd all be much better off if critics in Eric Gibson's position, able to discuss art with a relatively wide audience, would forget about culture and civilization and making rigorous judgments about quality and stick to describing and explaining the works of art they actually encounter. Consigning it all to the "bonfire of the vanities" only makes them look silly.

On Reserve

Literary criticism is in a sorry state these days. Discussion of books and writing has been superseded by gossip about writers (Elias Canetti/Iris Murdoch) and even about critics (Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom), the most talked-about critic has become so because he indulges in hysterical and ad hominem attacks on writers who don't write books like his own (Dale Peck), not a single book nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of "criticism" is actually a work of literary criticism. Literary webloggers have so far focused their attention on what passes for literary "news" (a useful enough service nevertheless), book reviews of fiction are gradually being abandoned, academic critics concern themselves with literature at all only to the extent of instructing their students to despise it.

There was a time when well-read and skilled critics wrote books intended to enlighten interested readers--all interested readers--about the nature and possibilities of literature, in effect to show them how to read fiction, poetry, and serious drama more profitably. Very little of this is done anymore. Most literary journalists don't seem to know how to read profitably themselves (there are exceptions, always exceptions), most academic critics simply aren't interested in it. I am thus providing here a list of the kinds of books I have in mind, books that are still eminently readable and that would educate anyone who picked them up about literary forms, style, history, predominant themes, etc.

Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American
Literature
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970

These are not the "top ten," certainly not the only ten, merely ten. Many others could be added. I have not included books on individual authors, of which there are scores of good ones. Again, I would have included books of equal merit of more recent vintage, but there really aren't any, at least not books that are designed to demonstrate to readers and potential readers the rewards of serious literature.

Actually such books would greatly benefit all would-be writers as well. They would learn how to build on the accomplishments of the past, how to think clearly about the requirements of literary form, as well as when to alter and rebel against the practices of the past. Many writers who went through college, possibly graduate school, when these books were routinely assigned would undoubtedly testify to this. It is a great failing of the literary academy, and the literary culture more generally, that so few people now seem to recognize the value of this critical heritage.

Taking Up the Slack

The most recent issue of The Antioch Review (Winter 2004) is devoted entirely to poetry and, more importantly, the criticism of poetry. Included are lengthy and insighful discussions of Eavan Boland, Charles Simic, and Frank Bidart, among others. Although at an earlier phase of recent literary history these essays might have been considered "academic," they are, relatively speaking, free of jargon and external agendas. This is an especially important point to make, because what is now called "academic criticism" is all but unreadable and concerned with everything but works of literature. Although poetry criticism is actually in less dire straits than the criticism of fiction in most academic journals, nevertheless we have come very far down a very dark road since the days when New Criticism and other approaches emphasizing "literature itself" were the coin of the academic realm. Not that I necessarily wish to see the return of New Criticism or some new variant--I have written critically of the limitations and flaws of the original proponents of the New Criticism. But what has been lost in the abandonment of this kind of formalism is any serious attention to the intrinsic value of reading works of literature as opposed to all other "texts." This is too high a price to pay. Mainstream literary journalism has by no means taken up the critical slack, and one of the few ways by which serious and sustained literary criticism might by saved is for literary magazines like The Antioch Review to print engaged criticism alongside the creative writing most such publications now emphasize. To this end, The Antioch Review should be commended for its efforts in this issue, and other journals should be encouraged to emulate them.

Addendum: See also the Pleiades Book Review, a new online service of the Pleiades literary magazine.