N+1, Issue 4

I've come across him all over the place: the Boston Review and LRB are couple great places where I've read his work.

Also: He seems to prefer his experimental poets to be ladies.

(I mean, have you read The Broken Estate? namely, the attack on Steiner, perhaps?)
(plus Steiner and Wood were born on the same side of the Atlantic!)
(different sides of the Channel, though!)

(wouldn't, say, Leavis be a closer reference point?)

Casuistry pls elaborate re (1) his super-MOR tastes and (2) his experimental poets gender preferences; I've found his tastes to be fairly idiosyncratic (the big names, but also Verga, Hrabal, Saltykov, &c.) and I'm just not familiar with any of his poetry criticism (that must make up less than 1% of his critical output, right?)

I believe Wood, pace the folks at n+1, is a magisterial critic with a singular voice, despite his conservatism (or even because of it, if you're especially hostile to a perceived cult-stud incursion into the humanities); to me, his criticism just gives a refreshing privilege to aesthetics (less refreshing now, perhaps, in the face of theory's spiral into oblivion) over, well, extra-aesthetic superfluities

But this is a 300-level survey course, so maybe he's leaving off his less well known favorites.

Steve Burt is an old friend of mine. I think he is pretty much the Randall Jarrell duh nose jars. And also the world's cleverest Field Mice fan.

The problem I have with n+1 (based on me picking up issue 3 while I was in Chicago last year) is that it seems to define itself too thoroughly as the anti-McSwys, which means, with laudable intentions it nevertheless tends towards the po-faced. That Radiohead feature was abysmal.

I generally despise the New Criterion, but I must admit that the phrase "artificial gravity" does capture what many perceive as a self-serving self-consciousness and -seriousness and -importance behind n+1's habit of spectacularly shitting on other publications (like McSwys and TNR)

But I do think this issue marks a very fortunate step away from the magazine's less becoming quirks/habits; if you were (rightly) put off by the last issue, maybe pick this one up

(and goddam, yes, that Radiohead piece...)

Leaving his account of what Engish departments do aside, appreciation for literature is not the same as appreciation for wine!

[I had to google the name of an expensive and respected wine; I am certainly no connoisseur.]

I'm not sure what English departments set out to do.

heh. nor I suspect are they. but not taste-making, at least not since the '70s.

fair point about the wine. I don't get wine at all, so I probably shouldn't have said anything.

n+1 has one torturously designed seeming website - i can't even find this wine bit - but it looks pretty readable, i might try and subscribe.

Maybe, but for serious, very few departments include this in their self-description (again, since the 70s). I think you're right in the sense that a certain kind of English professor relishes the opportunity to broaden the range of her students' aesthetic experience, but it's not as though assignments involve defences of works' greatness or anything like that. The mission statement is different. Taste-formation indisputably happens constantly in English classes, but most professors who aren't old-school are pretty uncomfortable with mandates to form tastes/preach literary greatness.

(The issue of what English departments do is, of course, quite different from the issue of what academics work on.)

These are great questions, but the thing is there has to be some process of selection, so traditional canons still play some role in syllabus-construction. In survey courses at the institutions I've been attached to, the "great" books are taught with books that were added after late-twentieth-century scholarship discovered them, when the scholars involved simply didn't believe in greatness. (And many "great" books get tossed off to make for a more varied syllabus.) I think the selection of books matters less than the attitude with which they're taught (though a syllabus comprised of only the usual suspects is telling, of course.) Single-author courses, I grant you, usually involve some claim of artistic mastery.

He has written all kinds of humor at Hallmark, but his specialty is verse. “I find it fun and rewarding to play with rhythms and the sounds of words.”

Scott was raised in Fort Collins, Colo. He holds a Ph.D. in classical studies from Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.

Be afraid, Ann Sterzinger. Be very afraid.

Literature being the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man, who can say anything of the sort about wine? Who would even dare to say that wine gives us insight into the human, psychology or history? It would sound like you were a total asshole. "This wine at first deceived me into thinking it was rather shallow, but after closer inspection I realized the depth of its character. I learned something about it and something about me." Fuck wine!