This James Wood essay -- C/D

Journalistic criticism, and the stuff we get into in our everyday lives when we recommend a book to a friend, is subjective: it treats the individual's reaction to the book, and thus often contains a judgement of quality. This kind of criticism is valuable to book readers, book sellers, newspapers, and society at large, but it is without the realm of the academy.

Academic mills, turning out millions upon millions of Englsih literature graduates every year, are never going to equip their victims for successful lives writing reviews in the newspapers; they don't aim to.

I am not sure I'll like it, when I read it. Yet, probably some things in it I will, really, agree with.

(of course, all academies *do* have notions of value. why otherwise would 'middlemarch' have a better showing there than the sweet valley high series of novels?)

1. To work analytically.
2. To write coherently and persuasively.
3. To study.
4. To manage time.
5. Other stuff (includes drinking, screwing around, practical jokes, and all that).

The implicit evaluation of literature, and its denial, was one of the many reasons I left my university.

equip.

lots of this reads like parody when he talks about what's in the Stevenson book: "Stevenson's story is that the 1960s were a time of political innovation and experiment" (my god!);

the ending - the appeal to the reader to agree w/ Wood on the grounds that he will stick up for the undying goodness of V.S. Naipaul - is kinda odd. did SRH actually read the essay?

all the literary history in the "literary history" paragraph is pretty much fertilizer.

i only just noticed this thread is a year old. oyy.

The problem with journalistic criticism is that it tends to be spectacularly bad at the examination part: even in fairly non-fluffy publications, the average book review is just an extended plot summary and a few calls on whether the book is enjoyable or not. The space in the center of that divide -- non-academic texts that actually get into discussing how books work and what books mean -- is, yes, missing.

I don't so much blame criticism, though: I think that kind of discourse is just generally missing from culture at large. I don't even feel like I see very much of it on this board, which has less to do with us as posters and more to do with a whole lot of structural stuff that I'll maybe save for another post.

As far as lit as crit goes: mmm, mmmmaaaaybe the right people aren't getting book deals. But we've hashed that out on other threads.

ha!

I think what Nabisco said here is key. Parts of the essay, especially the parts on value, remind me of the thread on humanism on ILE, especially the parts on universality. The criteria for academic criticism and the criteria for literary value are distinct. It seems that theory is very meta and concerned with the criteria for its own success or plausibility. Yet it seems important to attempt, somehow, to tie observations of contingency together in some larger claim about value, but it would probably be qualified with a million reservations. On the other hand, observations of contingency would probably strengthen journalistic criticism by making it more specific or by attempting to explain how or why things work.

It seems that it's only possible to accomplish one thing at a time, with the result that the other kind of explanation becomes secondary. My initial impression is that I would find these kinds of explanation dull. Maybe links in the other direction need to be made stronger, too.

Tangent: I'm pretty sure there was a long essay by Edmund Wilson in my sister's high school AP English textbook. Her teacher, who was into Freud, was much more interesting than mine, who had been an administrator. It was nice to hear his name mentioned. I ought to look his name up in the library catalog.

:(

This essay -- "Fundamentally Goyish" -- on Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man appears as a link in the side bar for the essay discussed on this thread. I haven't read it all, but just skimming the opening has me wondering if the lists in Ulysses might be the start of it all. I just finished The Crying of Lot 49, in which they appear as well, but maybe to different effect. I think cedars of Lebanon has come up more than once, though -- I mean from different sources.

(this is all second-hand mumbling, but, you know.)

also literary essays are harder to read when drunk

also i want to reread that book now

and rooting this in the-problem-is-that-zadie-smith-didn't-do-character-very-well is missing at least one important point (which point is probably: "the whole external world")

it [the obsession with jewishness] is an obsession which seems essentially inauthentic, and which marks the novel precisely as one not written by a jew

portnoy's complaint, one of my favourite novels, is based around an almost hysterical obsession with jewishness.

i'm not sure what israel has to do with this particular instance.

I think that Ray's distinctions are plausible.

If Ulysses were obsessed with Jewishness, perhaps I would not feel about it as I do. Then again: 2 years ago I went to a Jewish museum in Dublin, one of whose curators rather chauvinistically and aggressively went on at me about how Joyceans think they know EVERYTHING about the book, whereas, look at this display case, which shows all these other things, which were specifically Jewish, and which fans of Joyce did not know about: did I know about this? No. Or this? No. Or that? No. See, that told me. But as you can see, I just found his behaviour obnoxious. Perhaps that fellow would enjoy Philip Roth or Zadie Smith, or some other book which, unlike Ulysses, is obsessed with Jewishness.

nb: i don't think this is a very good book. however, the whole jewish/goyish thing is more of an annoyance. if it was the book's biggest problem, she'd be doing alright.

I still want to read The Irresponsible Self. And I am still rereading The Broken Estate. In fact I never finished it.

If I finish him on Gogol then I think I will have read all that book save the perhaps pointless last essay. I wonder if I am drifting back, from my admiration for his acuity and skill, to my old irritation with his idiot choirboyism.

Magnificent critique, till the penultimate paragraph:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/deresiewicz/single

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n05/hami01_.html
- just read this, not available online: Ian Hamilton on Randall Jarrell: he presents him as a brilliant, merciless hatchet-man reviewer - reminded me of the way some (like Wyatt Mason) describe Wood.

Jarrell's even less receptive to "ideas" and how books and poltics intersect, so I'm curious why that otherwise pretty good critique omitted mention of the critic with whom Wood has most in common.