Pixels to Print
Sometime in 2003 I began to notice while "surfing" the internet (which then was not quite as complete in its ubiquity as it is now) certain websites focused on books and writing, generally providing brief commentary accompanied by links to reviews or articles on literary matters. Others began to appear offering somewhat more extensive commentary, and since the discussion I found on these sites--eventually I learned they were "weblogs"--clearly seemed seriously intended to call attention to new books (especially less well-publicized ones), to print-based literary criticism, and to "literature" in general, I decided to start a weblog of my own, on which I might try to determine if this new web based medium could support a longer form of literary criticism and if anybody wanted to read it. Thus I created The Reading Experience in January of 2004.
Among those early "litbloggers" I discovered were Steve Mitchelmore, first through a links-type blog called Splinters and then a blog with more extended posts called This Space, as well as Michael Orthofer, founder of The Complete Review and its attendant blog called The Literary Saloon. Mitchelmore's blog soon itself became an exemplar of the kind of long-form criticism (long at least for the internet) in which I was interested, and both The Complete Review and The Literary Saloon gained considerable prominence as aggregators of book reviews (including Orthofer's own, with their signature assignment of grades to each title) and of literary news more broadly, especially news about translated books. Not long after I started The Reading Experience, Scott Esposito began his literary weblog, Conversational Reading, which soon enough spun off a new online book review journal, The Quarterly Conversation, which in my opinion has become one of the most valuable sources of book reviews and literary criticism, online or in print.
All three of these writers ("litblogger" is no longer a term much in use, and would not adequately describe their current endeavors, anyway) have recently published books, which provides an opportunity to consider not just the contribution of the literary weblog to literary/critical discourse but how effectively the sort of writing developed on blogs transfers to conventional books-on-paper (or at least to the "book" as traditionally conceived). Although the contents of only one of the books (Mitchelmore's) actually consists of material first offered on the writer's blog, nevertheless we can say that in each case the writer initially discovered his signature voice and approach through writing on a blog. To what extent has online writing as represented by the blog affected "writing" in general?
Steve Mitchelmore's book, This Space of Writing, collects and arranges many of his most representative blog posts. On the broadest level, it succeeds quite effectively in focusing his most persistent concerns and developing his critical insights through consideration of specific writers and works, generally the writers for whom he has often expressed his admiration on his blog This Space. Readers who are familiar with Mitchelmore's critical practice through the blog will find this book a useful condensation of his ideas and sorting of his priorities, while those who are encountering those ideas and priorities for the first time in This Space of Writing should certainly find them provocative and passionately expressed.
Mitchelmore is from the U.K., but we don't find a lot of discussion of British fiction in these essays, with the exception of those devoted to Gabriel Josipovici, one of the few British writers Mitchelmore esteems as highly as the Continental European writers to whom he most often turns. The work of such writers as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Karl Ove Knausgaard provide his critical lodestar, and certainly readers of This Space of Writing unfamiliar with them will get a very good introduction to these writers and to the qualities of their work that elicit such a strong response from Mitchelmore. Mitchelmore values literary works that acknowledge the essential "solitude and silence" from which they came and in which the reader also must receive them. Bernhard's and Knaussgard's books represent
attempts to open onto the space that makes narrative possible, the singularities that inscribe themselves on a life and agitate a certain enchantment, opening the past as much as the present and future, yet which cannot be made present to the work itself.
He also uses the metaphor of "horizon" to evoke the "singularity" of the experience of literature: "The reader experiences the book by descending into a literary landscape walking along a dirt path, sheltering in a dappled grove, paddling in a stream. The horizon is obscured."
It is this very obscurity that gives literature its signature value. We do not look "beyond," to the world of experience in its extension, but within to the interior landscape literature makes available. Or at least this is how I interpret Mitchelmore's tropes, since if there is an obstacle to fully benefiting from Mitchelmore's criticism it is a certain obscurity in his own concepts--or at least in the expression he gives to them. After reading the entirety of This Space of Writing readers will likely have an adequately clear understanding of what Mitchelmore means by "silence" (and why it's missing from most conventional literary fiction) and why its lack of "horizon" makes literature uniquely rewarding, but I confess to finding his critical language at times somewhat impalpable or cryptic, at least according to my own admittedly more buttoned-down approach to criticism.
On the other hand, after reading this book no one could doubt Mitchelmore's commitment to a view of literature that affirms its status as art and defends it against attempts to identify it with conventional practices or subsume it to external agendas. However subjective his terms of analysis might sometimes be, he uses them as a way of taking literature seriously to a degree found in few other critics short of Harold Bloom. It is surely unlikely that before the development of the literary weblog pieces such as the ones collected in This Space of Writing could have found a home in traditional print publications, but that is mostly because Mitchelmore indeed regards the literary work and the role of the critic with an intensity of purpose that most literary journalism rejects in favor of "liveliness," which usually manifests itself in superficial analysis and trite observations. Mitchelmore thinks that reading is not simply a life-enhancing but a life-determining activity. This is the way literature orients us to life, through the transforming experience of reading, not in the specious attempt to "represent" reality, and Mitchelmore's inquiry into how such a thing might happen, despite the relative brevity of some of the selections, is not content with surface details about plots and settings, and his commentary is never trite.
Although This Space of Writing is not conspicuously a theory-oriented book, readers will surely note the numerous references to the theoretical writings of such figures as George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, especially the latter. These references are scattered throughout the book, and thus the critical/theoretical perspective informing Mitchelmore's analysis remains in the background. While again we learn enough about the animating assumptions of a writer like Blanchot to appreciate the extent to which Mitchelmore shares them--the name of his blog and title of this book testify to that, as they are both allusions to Blanchot's book The Space of Literature--this influence is perhaps the most opaque to American readers, as Blanchot is in this country one of the least known of the major 20th century French thinkers. Certainly Blanchot's ideas are most appealing to someone who, like Steve Mitchelmore, wants to deepen his engagement with literature rather than dismiss it as too subjective and turn instead to its social context, which may explain their relative neglect by American academic critics.
Michael Orthofer's The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction is published by a university press (Columbia University Press), but it has a much wider audience in mind, an audience comprised of readers mostly unfamiliar with "world literature," or at least literature from the less prominent or privileged corners of the world. This, unfortunately, is a widely shared condition, among academic and non-academic readers alike. The book could be seen as the culmination of the effort Orthofer has made since founding Complete Review/Literary Saloon to call attention to translated books. While this guide to contemporary world fiction goes beyond translated fiction to include entries on English-language fiction as well, surely its greatest contribution to "world literature" is in surveying available translations from all regions of the world and informing readers about the writers and works that are available in English. Since English remains the world's foremost literary language--in terms of the number of readers a translated writer could acquire, not in its presumptive superiority as a medium of literary achievement--Orthofer's book potentially brings translated fiction to the largest audience a writer outside the English-using world might hope to reach.
Orthofer has always seemed encyclopedic in the scope of his interest in translated fiction, so the comprehensive treatment of contemporary world fiction in this book is no surprise. (If he hasn't literally read every single title in the book it would be understandable--but I'd be willing to wager that he has.) At the same time, his introduction duly cautions the reader to consider the less than ideal circumstances in which translated fiction is made available to American readers:
When publishers in the United States do seek out translated works, they often take their cues from elsewhere. Critical acclaim, literary prizes, and best-seller status--preferably in several different markets, rather than just the original local one--are prerequisites for most foreign fiction to be considered from the American market, especially large commercial publishers. This herd mentality is widely practiced elsewhere as well, leading to a narrow, homogeneous tier of international fiction that is widely available throughout the world and in many languages, whereas excellent works from less internationally celebrated authors can struggle to find the recognition and readers they deserve. Even though exceptional works do come into circulation in this way, too often it is the second-rate works--the earnest prize-winning novels and imitative local thrillers--that make the cut and disappoint both readers (with their mediocre quality) and publishers (with their low sales).
The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction is in part an attempt to ameliorate this discouraging situation by highlighting the more "exceptional works" available, especially those offered by the "smaller and more nimble publishers" that have increasingly appeared.
The format of the book--it is essentially a reference book--precludes Orthofer from engaging in much literary criticism, although he does attempt succinct descriptions of the writers and works he includes, typically identifying the prominent writers in a given country, as well as their most noteworthy or representative books. Although many of the writers mentioned, particularly those from Western Europe and perhaps Latin America, will be relatively familiar to readers who monitor the most influential book review pages, many others will surely be unknown. No region of the world is left uncovered, although in some cases Orthofer must note the dearth of available translations, as in southeast Asia, where "Almost no fiction from the. . .nations extending from Burma (Myanmar) to Vietnam is accessible to English-speaking readers, despite the strong literary traditions in several of these countries," or the South Pacific, where size and isolation made it difficult "for local literature [from the islands] to make inroads beyond their shores."
Altogether The Complete Review Guide seems a quite useful book for readers who would like to begin reading translated fiction, but who would also like to go beyond the names most likely to show up in the New York Times Book Review and aren't sure where the best source of advice about where to start might be found or how conflicting judgments might be reconciled. Orthofer's guiding hand is a sure one. He makes all the suitable distinctions and concisely provides information allowing readers to make discerning choices. In general, the book effectively transfers to book form what is most valuable about Orthofer's blog and website: their effort to be useful to serious readers of fiction. My only real reservation about the book is the inclusion of a section on U.S. fiction. While Orthofer's selection of authors and tendencies is defensible enough, still, since the book is clearly intended to steer English-language--primarily American--readers to existing works of fiction in translation, the discussion of American fiction seems at best perfunctory, at worst overly reductive, and ultimately unnecessary. This is probably true of the sections on British and Canadian fiction as well, although perhaps some more provincially-minded American readers might find them informative.
If This Space of Writing and The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction reinforce and confirm their authors' initial ambitions as writers exploring the possibilities of blogging as a medium for writing, Scott Esposito's The Surrender embodies an ambition entirely separate from the author's work as a literary blogger and editor, signaling an aspiration to reach an audience broader than that attracted to purely literary discussion and criticism (like Orthofer, Esposito's interest as critic has inclined in particular to translated fiction). The Surrender is a memoir (albeit one that also at times veers into cultural criticism in its triptych of essays) relating Esposito's gradual acceptance and ultimate expression of his lifelong impulse to cross-dress: "On the day I at last felt hair brushing the small of my back I understood," he writes at the beginning of the book:
It was a time of great indulgence. Twelve very dauntless months in which I demolished my exasperating timidity, this endless maybe. There would be no restraint. This nagging over wasted money and deviant needs would drop dead. Drop dead. I did as I pleased. I answered all impulses without hesitation. I did not pause for even one second. Stopping to think would only lead to that oppressive indecision. But there was absolutely no need for contemplation because my entire life I had known exactly what I must do. First a new dress. . . .
The book treats this phenomenon not as an element of sexuality per se (although it is closely tied to cultural conceptions of masculinity), and Esposito's story finally would have little to no interest to readers seeking titillation or prurient detail. It is in part a story of self-discovery and self-assertion, in part an examination of the depth of American culture's rigid opposition between male and female as marks of identity and the damage it causes. The essays inevitably provide a narrative of Esposito's odyssey--although in a fragmented, nonlinear way that makes the story itself subordinate to his meditation on and exposition of the story's broader significance. One could say that Esposito's effort to express the complexity of the story from his current perspective is finally the actual story that emerges from The Surrender. In a sense, writing the essays in this book parallels and reinforces in literary form the affirmation of authentic self he chronicles, a declaration to the world at large of the integrity of that assertion.
If ultimately The Surrender lingers in the reading memory first of all as memoir, certainly Esposito also relies on his skills and sensibility as a literary critic when drawing out the implications of his experience. The book originated as an essay first published in The White Review, "The Last Redoubt," (which now serves as the middle section of The Surrender), and while in this essay Esposito first reveals his heretofore "secret life," he does so as part of an extended and very detailed exposition of Abbas Kiorstami's film, Close-Up. He concludes:
At the end of the film [the protagonist] breaks out into tears. As he delivers the gift of a small tree to the family he has wronged, he begins to weep. With. . .the family massed around him he loses all control. Whoever he has become, he feels that the world now condones it, and that weight is overwhelming.
In the final essay he similarly parallels his increasing determination to assert his true nature with the particular books he was reading during the process (in the year of his "decision," the list includes, among others, Harry Mathews, Gerald Murnane, George Eliot, Karl Ove Knausgaard, as well as Wittgenstein and Derrida). However much The Surrender might be called "personal writing," clearly part of the courage Esposito mustered and the insight he gained while contemplating his circumstances were derived from his intense engagement with art, literature, and critical inquiry.
Although the book is often focused specifically on Esposito's desire to wear women's clothing, finally the taboo he most fervently wants to break is the one forbidding men from cultivating feelings associated with femininity. While his own feminine inclinations seek external expression through discarding conventional male clothes and adopting emblematic female attire, what he really desires is that the culturally reinforced divide between masculinity and femininity be breached, the opposition between these categories subverted. Here the influence in particular of Derrida on Esposito's thinking can be discerned; indeed, the book might have been given additional coherence if this influence had been even more explicitly drawn out, providing a conceptual frame that helps us understand the artificiality of "masculine" and "feminine" in contrast to their persistent cultural dominance, the pernicious consequences of which Scott Esposito's experience exemplifies. On the other hand, this undoubtedly might have tilted the book more toward abstract theory and potentially lessened its appeal to general readers as a form of personal testimony.
In its way, The Surrender shows Scott Esposito, of the three writers considered here, diverging most sharply from the path on which he started as a literary blogger. Steve Mitchelmore continues to hew to that path most faithfully, not just in his book but in the writing he continues to do on This Space, while Michael Orthofer perhaps demonstrates a certain kind of continuity between what can be accomplished on blogs and what we expect from books. Certainly all three writers succeed in demonstrating that the literary blog was (is) a medium perfectly capable of supporting credible critical discourse and cultivating intelligent critics whose contributions to that discourse easily rival anything to be found in the purely print media. That they now are contributing through these books ultimately seems simply the confirmation of their already evident achievements.
Bringing Something to the Party: Literary Weblogs vs. the Print Media
(Note: This is the paper I recently presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. It was part of this panel.)
While "surfing" the world wide web in late 2003, I began noticing certain websites—they looked more like online diaries—discussing books and writers with an enthusiasm and a seriousness of purpose I was not seeing elsewhere on the web. I then had some nascent ideas of my own about how the online medium could serve more usefully as a forum for serious-minded literary commentary than it had up to that point, and the creators of these websites seemed to have had similar ideas, although understandably they were as yet being applied in somewhat rudimentary ways.
What most made these sites stand out for me was that they were linked to each other, as if this was some kind of network that had been around for a while, an opportunity for like-minded readers to conduct an ongoing discussion about recent books and literary news. Most of this discussion was in the form of relatively brief observations or opinions offered along with numerous hyperlinks, but often the observations were astute and the opinions expressed with sharpness and wit. If this was something that could not exactly be called criticism, it was manifesting an intensity of interest in serious writing—"literature" was usually used without irony—that was clearly not being satisfied by the coverage afforded it by publications in what these bloggers—and these were indeed blogs that I was reading, although I was only vaguely aware of the term—called the "mainstream print media."
So I decided to see if I might join that network. My goal was to explore the possibility that this new online medium—new, at least, in its focus on literature—could in fact be used to foster creditable literary criticism. In my very first post on my own blog—which I called The Reading Experience, drawing on my affinity for John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy of "art as experience"—I said: "I would like to test the proposition that the internet, in the form of the so-called 'blogosphere,' can provide a forum for a new kind of literary criticism, more compact and concise, perhaps, than conventional print lit-crit, but serious criticism nonetheless." I should say that my background was in academic criticism, but I had recently been writing and publishing more or less general-interest criticism in book reviews and literary magazines, with some hazy notion of becoming a freelance writer, if it was still possible to actually succeed in that ambition. Perhaps this "new kind of literary criticism" would prove to be a worthwhile alternative both to academic criticism, which was no longer receptive to the critical approach I preferred (focusing on the aesthetic character of literature), and to the precarious practice of newspaper and print magazine criticism.
Thus did I find myself participating in the development of the "literary weblog" (most often referred to as the "litblog") from essentially a kind of public reading diary to a much more flexible medium capable of incorporating the whole array of discursive forms—personal essays, manifestos, reviews, critical analyses, as well as fiction and poetry. This discourse was indeed generally "more compact and concise" than these same forms as they might appear in print, and typically it was characterized by a more informal, often quite conversational tone. But this conversational quality of what came to be known as the "blog post" was directly related to the device that most obviously distinguishes the blog post (or any online writing) from writing in print: the existence and availability of hyperlinks. The ability to direct readers elsewhere as a way of supplementing or supporting the writer's purpose, of directly counterposing the writing at hand with other voices considering the subject, often voices in dissent as well as support, inherently encourages a conversational, dialogic approach, and many literary bloggers explicitly sought to demonstrate that this sort of literary discussion had its own kind of value.
That value was certainly disputed in the few years it took for the literary blog to evolve and begin to attract the notice of the broader literary culture—editors, critics, publishers, and readers. Notable figures from within that culture rendered pointed and often severe judgments:
Recognition is. . .measured in the number of hits—by their clicks you shall know them—and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses—fillips of contempt, wet kisses—aren't criticism.
Editors, n + 1
To listen to the avatars of the New Information Age, the means of communication provided by digital devices and ever-enhanced software have democratized debate, empowered those whose opinions have been marginalized by, or, worse, shut out of mainstream media, and unleashed a new era of book chat. . . .
Steve Wasserman
("Book chat" was one of the favored words used by critics from the "mainstream media" to belittle the level of discourse they perceived to be characteristic of litblogs.) Sven Birkerts wrote:
The implicit immediacy of the "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumptions of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new-of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of "I've been thinking" approach. At some level it's the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.
Richard Schickel would surely have been appalled by the title of this panel. In a piece published in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote, after registering his horror at the thought that literary blogs might come to replace newspaper book reviews:
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism—and its humble cousin, reviewing—is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Schickel's description of the practice of criticism may or may not be correct—I agree with much of it, but find it difficult to conclude that the authentic responsibilities of conscientious criticism necessarily make it an "elite enterprise"—but the mistake he and these other critics made was in assuming that the particular qualities they discerned at that moment in literary weblogs, and online writing in general, were fixed qualities, that online critical discourse could not continue to develop to the point it could just as easily attract "individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book" as print. Even at the time, Wasserman conceded that "what counts is the nature and depth and authority" of criticism, "as well as its availability to the widest possible audience. Whether readers find it on the web or the printed page matters not at all. Content rules."
All along there were litblogs that tried to uphold the critical standards that were supposedly being abandoned (I won't be so presumptuous as to pronounce mine as one of them), but these blogs were generally never mentioned in the surveys of the damage being done by the literary blogosphere that for a while appeared with numbing regularity (or so it seemed). If it was true enough that some litblogs (whose number was increasing quite quickly) offered "criticism" that was not that far removed from n + 1's caricature of the typical blogospheric "response"—"I shit on Dante"—there were plenty of others whose authors considered themselves to be contributing to a valuable collective discourse about literature of a kind not previously available to the broader literary public and took seriously the imperative to offer more than off-the-cuff remarks. (And if at the time it would been accurate enough to call many of these bloggers "amateur" critics, very many of them have since, in fact, gone on to establish themselves as respected professional writers and reviewers.
Something like a validation of the potential for the literary weblog to provide intellectually serious literary criticism was the appearance in 2005 of a blog called The Valve. This was a multi-author blog, intended by its founder, John Holbo, to be explicitly "academic" both in the affiliations of its contributors and in the focus of the subjects addressed. I was asked by Holbo to be among its original lineup of contributors, and The Valve rather quickly became a very popular site (certainly its number of daily "hits" far exceeded anything I had seen on my blog, or any of my blogger colleagues had seen, for that matter), succeeding in its purpose of attracting academics as both authors and readers and of taking up literary issues in a way that academic critics could find credible. Eventually The Valve began presenting blogging "events" in which all of the contributors posted extended commentary on or related to a currently prominent scholarly or critical book. The first of these events considered Theory's Empire, which allowed The Valve's slate of contributors to examine the generally anti-theory essays collected in this book, resulting in a lively but also carefully considered series of essays, in sympathy with the book's agenda, strongly critical of it, and somewhere in between. Each of these posts also attracted a large number of comments (some of them as long as the post itself; most of them civil), and altogether this event provided a range and depth of response to and coverage of this book and the scholarly issues it raised that in my view could not have easily been accomplished in print journals.
Over the course of its existence (it officially ceased publishing new posts in 2012), The Valve continued to solicit new contributors, but eventually the initial enthusiasm waned, although I would argue that in part this was because the original inspiration for the blog had been fulfilled and the idea of intelligent, informed critical writing appearing on the web no longer seemed such a novel proposition. Something similar happened with the first wave of literary weblogs. Although a few of them still exist (including my own, in an updated iteration), many do not, or at least have been inactive for a long time. But these blogs were in fact remarkably successful, not just in ultimately reaching a wide audience of interested readers but in establishing a space in the cybersphere for the nontrivial discussion of literature, and ultimately in changing the reading habits of many serious readers who previously would never have regarded the internet as a source of legitimate literary debate. I believe it fair to say that the notion one can find entirely respectable web-based critical commentary online is now incontestable and mostly noncontroversial. Someone surfing the web as I did 12 years ago will discover much of interest within a few clicks, although these sites and pages might not be blogs. But this, too, seems to me a sign of their success, not their obsolescence.
Today literary weblogs are more likely to be known simply as "book blogs," and most of them have indeed settled for something like "book chat" as their mode of operation. More serious-minded blogs do remain, authored by reviewers, critics, and some academics, as well as by poetry and fiction writers using the weblog medium as more than a promotional instrument. Admittedly these blogs have a smaller audience than many literary bloggers had during their period of greatest notoriety, but they may also have a more easily assumed authority and less defensive tone. Nevertheless, the "litblog" is not the object of attention it once was, when it seemed for some to promise liberation from the arbitrary authority of print book reviewers and so-called literary journalists and for others to threaten the already wobbly status of book coverage in the digital era print press.
A significant factor in the relative decline of the litblog is surely the concurrent rise of social media, specifically the development of a substantial literary presence on Twitter and Facebook. The sort of brief commentary and linking with which literary blogging began, and continued to be a prominent feature, has largely been taken over by these social media forums, where a network of "connected" Friends and Followers exchange news and views, albeit often in an unavoidably offhand way due to the limitations of the medium used. To the extent that a need for "connection" itself is met by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the same function as served by blogs becomes less urgent, since social media provides it more immediately and ultimately more broadly. Arguably, however, the force of this need was first fully expressed through the success of blogs, which demonstrated that it could be met through digital communication.
In my view, the most important reason why the literary weblog is not now the center of literary discourse online is that in retrospect it also served to illustrate that a serious and sustained level of wired critical discourse was possible, and in the process initiated a transformation of attitude that eventually resulted in its being superseded by other kinds of web-based publication that, while perhaps using the template introduced by weblogs, could not really be called blogs. Multi-author sites such as The Millions or The Rumpus looked like blogs, but they published something much closer to conventional literary essays, articles, and reviews. In tone these sites were not much removed from typical literary journalism, although the pieces posted there had fewer restrictions on both content and style than traditional print publications. Soon enough, web-specific journals focusing entirely or in part on book reviews such as The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, and Full Stop appeared, as well as other publications that offered print versions but also had significant presence online, such as Rain Taxi and The Brooklyn Rail. Some intellectually weighty journals such as 3:AM Magazine and Jacket had been around as long as, or longer, than blogs, but they, too, gained greater attention in the litblog's wake.
The literary criticism in these publications, generally, but not exclusively, reviews, often went far beyond, both in length and in critical heft, what was offered in all but the most studious general interest print publications. Indeed, these book review sites are much more likely to cover experimental and translated works and books from independent presses, which are at best sporadically reviewed in mainstream print book review sections. Few of the reviewers could be called "amateurs" as most of them are experienced reviewers, many with credits as well in the print press, or aspiring reviewers with clear ties to the literary community (themselves writers, writing students, or independent critics). Perhaps it would not be quite accurate to call these critics "professionals," since much of this work in unfortunately unpaid, but the breadth of reading and the critical sensibility on display signal that the motivation behind the work transcends the affirmation of status symbolized by monetary remuneration, coming instead from a conviction that contemporary literature deserves genuine critical debate and assessment, which increasingly cannot be fully supplied by newspaper and periodical criticism. (But it would still be nice if these reviewers were paid.)
The appearance of such web-based book review journals as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the National Book Review has definitively refuted any remaining claims for the inherent superiority of print criticism to criticism originating online. LARB in particular makes it impossible to think that intellectually engaged and critically scrupulous writing needs print on paper for its ideal expression. (This is true not just of LARB—one can find this kind of writing on many of the other sites I have mentioned.) Numerous contributors are in fact academics writing about subjects not always addressed in general interest publications, usually in an accessible prose avoiding the most reflexive kinds of jargon but also the most overt attempts to "popularize." (A good example might be the relatively recent pieces on alternatives to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" offered by Rita Felski and others.) The same thing is true of Public Books, which, however, has not yet attained the prominence of LARB. The National Review of Books is closer to the conventional newspaper book review, but it is notable as an implicit acknowledgement of the decline in book coverage in American newspapers in its founding as an online alternative.
A number of the publications I have identified do also offer print versions, although in many cases contents are also available, in part or in their entirety, on the websites. This does not so much indicate a retreat from a commitment to the online medium as it does a recognition that a strict demarcation between the two media has become increasingly untenable, at least as it is supposed to mark some essential difference, about which we must always remain mindful. Sampling both the online and print editions of one of these journals shows there is no such difference, neither in ambition nor in quality of thought. In these publications it becomes clear that writing in print has no intrinsic, metaphysical advantage over writing published through digital means, no greater authority that doesn't come from the centuries-long dominance of the printing press. It should also be said that the convenience and immediacy of online publication does not make it superior to print when convenience and immediacy are not relevant concerns.
I would argue that the primary legacy of the literary blog consists of its questioning of the hegemony not of print but of those critics and reviewers claiming the imprimatur of authority on the basis of little more than their access, however much achieved through perceived merit, to the limited supply of critical outlets in print. That so many of the first wave of bloggers have subsequently achieved considerable status as writers and critics, online and in print, makes it pretty clear that "merit" was a more widely dispersed phenomenon than some critical "gatekeepers" would have had us believe. The point is not that blogs facilitated the career aspirations of any particular writers or critics but that they fomented a reappraisal of the way we talk about our literary culture that ultimately has reinvigorated non-academic literary criticism. That talk is both livelier and more comprehensive than it was before there was such a thing as a "literary weblog," and the critics who fretted over their own looming demise still have their part in it.
My own blog does still exist, although I don't make the effort to keep it continually updated that I did in the past. I generally post longer, reflective essays or reviews of books that I haven't more formally reviewed elsewhere. My audience isn't large, nothing close to the audience I could reach as a contributor to The Valve, but I like to think it's an audience prepared to believe they will find substance in the criticism they encounter when they visit this blog.