| Title |
Excerpt |
Author |
Date |
Total Comments |
Recent Comment |
| The Value of the Business |
Cross-posted from thereadingexperience. In an essay at The New Yorker, Louis Menand recounts an episode from early in his career as a professor in which a student asked him, “Why did we have to buy this book?” Continuing in the student’s mercantile language, Menand avers that the student was “asking me… |
Daniel Green |
06/21/11 |
2 |
06/23/11 |
| The Kind of Work That You Like to Do |
Cross-posted from thereadingexperience. In a recent profile of Stanley Fish, Fish is quoted as having said, “Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I’m doing it.” He further amplifies: You do this kind of work simply because it’s the… |
Daniel Green |
06/05/11 |
6 |
06/07/11 |
| The Condition of Our Senses |
In his review of Susan Sontag’s journals, Daniel Mendelson contends that Sontag, in her practice at least, was not really “against interpretation” at all: The essays in Against Interpretation and in Styles of Radical Will may champion, famously, the need not for “a hermeneutics but an erotics of Art,” but what… |
Daniel Green |
04/28/09 |
2 |
05/11/09 |
| Young Americans |
This, more or less, is the thesis of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different… |
Daniel Green |
01/19/09 |
17 |
01/28/09 |
| The Reader and the Page |
John Lingan’s essay on William Gaddis in the latest Quarterly Converstation is very good, one of the best analyses of Gaddis’s work I’ve read recently. I particularly like this description of The Recognitions and JR: Gaddis anticipated postmodern American literature’s obsessions with entropy and the “death of the author,” but he… |
Daniel Green |
12/22/08 |
1 |
12/24/08 |
| Deserving Little Praise |
In the New York Times recently, Joe Queenan acknowledges that “the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise.” Queenan proceeds as if this were a revelation of a carefully-guarded secret, but anyone who reads newspaper book review sections with any frequency… |
Daniel Green |
12/04/08 |
4 |
12/04/08 |
| The Pedagogical Habit |
In a recent post, Rohan Maitzen suggests that responsible criticism (she has academic criticism in mind, but the point would seem to apply to generalist criticism as well) should concentrate not on “comparative measures of ‘worth’” but on “seeking out the measures that fit the particular case.” She continues: One of… |
Daniel Green |
11/12/08 |
18 |
11/13/08 |
| Easier to Talk About |
In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth includes a letter putatively written by “Amy Bellette” but, as it turns out, mostly written (she claims) by her lover, E.I. Lonoff, the perfectionist writer whose portrayal in The Ghost Writer initiated Roth’s series of Zuckerman novels. Bellette/Lonoff write: Hemingway’s early stories are set in Michigan’s… |
Daniel Green |
04/09/08 |
1 |
04/09/08 |
| Psychological Occurences |
In The Logical Structure of the World, Rudolph Carnap attempts to show how a “constructional system” can be built the purpose of which is “to order the objects of all sciences into a system according to their reducibility to one another.” Among these “objects” are what Carnap calls “cultural objects” (which… |
Daniel Green |
03/26/08 |
3 |
03/26/08 |
| One People |
Richard Jenkyns believes that, although a “canon” of literary works is necessary in providing us with a stock of appropriate “shared references,” such a canon does not have to be exlusively “high cultural.” It is surely vain to suppose that poorly educated and disaffected young Asians can be brought to a… |
Daniel Green |
12/18/07 |
3 |
12/22/07 |
| The Burden of Criticality |
Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows: . . .the critical frameworks inherited from the avant-garde and passed through the academic discourses of current art history are constrained by the expectation of negativity. Fine art should… |
Daniel Green |
12/07/07 |
21 |
12/18/07 |
| Analytic |
In his post on “Everything Studies,” Joseph Kugelmass suggests that If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine—Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest—while the creative disciplines would remain separate, including… |
Daniel Green |
08/29/07 |
2 |
08/30/07 |
| 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… |
Daniel Green |
07/03/07 |
19 |
10/07/10 |
| A Retroactive Historical Trajectory |
It’s good that Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss print at the end of the book an interview with themselves about Interfictions, an “anthology of interstitial writing” they’ve edited and published through the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Otherwise I, for one, would have finished the book, including its nominal “Introduction,” without having much… |
Daniel Green |
06/19/07 |
4 |
06/20/07 |
| Ass-Backwards |
In her essay, “The Rise of the Blogger,” in The Philosospher’s Magazine, Ophelia Benson quotes H E Baber (whose blog is called The Enlightenment Project): “Nowadays publication in a refereed journal is just a prize – a credential for academics in support of employment, tenure and merit pay increases. Originally journals… |
Daniel Green |
05/08/07 |
2 |
05/11/07 |
| Interiors |
Caleb Crain wonders whether “novels spread human rights and discourage torture.” Quoting Lynn Hunt’s claim in her book Inventing Human Rights: A History that “novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings,” Crain glosses Hunt’s claim by adding: “As it became easier to imagine… |
Daniel Green |
04/24/07 |
18 |
04/27/07 |
| Mediation |
Tom Lutz asserts that Harold Bloom (along with Francine Prose) believes the current generation of politicized literary scholars (what Bloom terms the “school of resentment") “are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and… |
Daniel Green |
03/15/07 |
10 |
03/25/07 |
| Unalienable Rights |
Perhaps John Holbo will identify with this, from Jonathen Lethem’s recent Harper’s essay on “intellectual property”: . . .We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed… |
Daniel Green |
02/21/07 |
19 |
02/22/07 |
| Oceans of Nuance |
I just can’t resist. From an exchange between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris: . . .I have found that whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, religious moderates claim that we have caricatured Christianity and… |
Daniel Green |
01/20/07 |
1 |
01/23/07 |
| After Agincourt |
To continue this argument: I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion… |
Daniel Green |
01/18/07 |
51 |
01/25/07 |
| 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… |
Daniel Green |
12/12/06 |
5 |
12/22/06 |
| A World Apart: “Contemporary Literature” and the Academy"--Part IV (and Last) |
Parts I, II, and III. By 1980 “contemporary literature” had indeed been established as a subject of academic inquiry and criticism—in many ways it was increasingly identified with the avant-garde in academic scholarship, and would continue to be associated with the subsequent rise to prominence of critical theory—perhaps more quickly and… |
Daniel Green |
11/22/06 |
1 |
11/25/06 |
| Negation of Thought |
AC Grayling provides Richard Dawkins with reinforcements: “Atheism” is a word used by religious people to refer to those who do not share their belief in the existence of supernatural entities or agencies. Presumably (as I can never tire of pointing out) believers in fairies would call those who do not… |
Daniel Green |
11/13/06 |
21 |
12/30/06 |
| In a World Like Ours |
In Chapter 1 of Art as Experience, John Dewey writes: Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder--in a world where living creatures can go on living only by taking advantage of whatever order exists about them, incorporating it into themselves. In a world like ours, every… |
Daniel Green |
10/31/06 |
6 |
11/03/06 |
| A World Apart: “Contemporary Literature” and the Academy--Part III |
Parts I and II of this post can be found here and here. Together Radical Innocence and After Alienation did help to establish for American fiction of mid-century an identity separate from the “modern” fiction of the era following on World War I and clearly placed in the context of post-World… |
Daniel Green |
10/10/06 |
0 |
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| Belittling Art |
I agree with Jerry Saltz that it is a mistake to think “that art is about understanding, when, like almost everything else in the everyday world, art is about experience; it’s ‘I experience, therefore I am.’” Unfortunately, Saltz only muddles this valuable insight when he goes on to observe that: Art… |
Daniel Green |
09/19/06 |
9 |
09/28/06 |
| A World Apart: Contemporary Literature and the Academy--Part II |
Note: Part I of this post can be found here. . . .Considering that if there was a reigning critical orthodoxy at the time [Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence and Marcus Klein’s After Alienation] were written it was New Critical formalism, one might expect them to show the influence of this method,… |
Daniel Green |
09/13/06 |
7 |
09/14/06 |
| A World Apart: “Contemporary Literature” and the Academy--Part I |
Note: This is the first in what will probably be a 3-5 part post. In his memoir Keeping Literary Company, Jerome Klinkowitz, who became not long after the events described one of the best-known advocates of “contemporary” fiction, describes his graduate school experience: At school [Marquette University] I was making my… |
Daniel Green |
08/30/06 |
3 |
08/31/06 |
| Other Spaces, Other Things |
To some extent, I agree with Adam Kotsko that “Meta-blogging is the greatest vice yet developed by humankind.” Blogging about blogging can become just another variation on navel-gazing, and the triumphalist celebration of blogs by some prominent political blogs can be especially obnoxious. But at this point in the development of… |
Daniel Green |
07/04/06 |
4 |
07/05/06 |
| No! |
From D.T. Max’s New Yorker article on Stephen Joyce, prickly and uncooperative grandson of James: More than a dozen Joyce scholars told me that what was once an area of exploration and discovery now resembles an embattled outpost of copyright law. Robert Spoo, who used to edit the James Joyce Quarterly,… |
Daniel Green |
06/14/06 |
8 |
07/10/06 |
| Harold Bloom |
Since the publication of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom has become something of a caricature, derided on the one hand for the vehemence of his displeasure with the direction literary study has taken over the past quarter century, his opposition to the politicized, anti-aesthetic criticism he identifies collectively as the “school… |
Daniel Green |
05/14/06 |
16 |
05/17/06 |
| Horizontal Cross-Linking |
Although I otherwise have great respect for Jurgen Habermas, these remarks strike me as utterly asinine: Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the… |
Daniel Green |
04/10/06 |
6 |
04/14/06 |
| Natural Excess |
Like Lawrence , I was initially drawn to How Novels Think by its title. I hoped to find an argument on behalf of the notion that novels do think (even if only by analogy to how people think), an analysis of fiction that would provide us with an alternate way of… |
Daniel Green |
03/24/06 |
0 |
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| Also Elsewhere |
Readers interested in the implications for aesthetics of Darwinian biology/evolutionary psychology might want to look at this essay of mine at The Quarterly Conversation. The essay had been scheduled to appear in the new issue of the journal Context, but at the last minute the publisher decided not to run it… |
Daniel Green |
03/07/06 |
0 |
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| Screenplay Novels |
Vis-a-vis the previous post, readers might want to check out this site. |
Daniel Green |
03/05/06 |
11 |
03/06/06 |
| The Standards of Responsible Scholarship |
John D. Caputo on Jacques Derrida: . . .What everyone has more or less picked up about deconstruction, even if they have never read a word of it, is its destabilizing effect on our favorite texts and institutions. Derrida exposes a certain coefficient of uncertainty in all of them, which causes… |
Daniel Green |
02/15/06 |
70 |
02/21/06 |
| Demanding Assent |
Peter Berkowitz’s review of Theory’s Empire in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review is mostly the usual sort of argument made against Theory by conservatives (cultural and political): Theory is just a cover for various kinds of leftist political crusades, it represents an attack on the inherited principles of the Enlightenment, etc.… |
Daniel Green |
02/08/06 |
32 |
02/11/06 |
| “I Don’t Want to Lose What I Called to Say” |
The fiction of Stephen Dixon starkly illustrates the difference between realism as a literary effect and “story” as a structural device, a distinction that is often enough blurred in discussions of conventional storytelling. “Realism” is the attempt to convince readers that the characters and events depicted in a given work are… |
Daniel Green |
01/31/06 |
1 |
02/01/06 |
| The Big Picture |
Chris Bachelder makes as good a case for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle as I’ve read in a while: The Jungle aims to provide an accurate report of the many ways that life in Packingtown crushes people, destroys their power of self-determination, even their humanness. Individual desire, typically the engine of fiction,… |
Daniel Green |
01/17/06 |
1 |
01/18/06 |
| Dizzy |
This post is an addendum of sorts to Mirian Burstein’s excellent critique of Lindsay Waters’ essay “Literary Aesthetics: The Very Idea.” Miriam has insightfully pointed out the essay’s conceptual flaws, and I would just like to amplify her suggestion that these flaws ultimately undermine what otherwise might be a valuable argument… |
Daniel Green |
12/26/05 |
1 |
12/27/05 |
| The Good Reader |
Nikolai Duffy, in his essay “In Other Words: Writing Maurice Blanchot Writing”: For Blanchot, the good reader would not be what he terms the critical reader but the literary reader. Rather than interrogating “the work in order to know how it was fashioned” (SL 203), which is to say, rather than… |
Daniel Green |
11/26/05 |
13 |
06/13/06 |
| Not-Knowing |
J. Peder Zane thoughtfully considers the “knowledge deficit” among today’s college students. Citing a dinner conversation with some University of North Carolina professors, Zane observes: All of them have noted that such ignorance isn’t new—students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the… |
Daniel Green |
11/14/05 |
33 |
06/21/07 |
| Sticking to the Words |
According to Ellis Sharp: . . .[Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” is] a campaigning song, set in the real world. If you say that it doesn’t matter what the song is about, or whether it’s true or not, and that it’s just great music, then I think you’ve missed a lot of the… |
Daniel Green |
11/07/05 |
85 |
11/11/05 |
| 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… |
Daniel Green |
11/01/05 |
22 |
08/12/06 |
| Sleeping Well |
Jonathan Mayhew, at his weblog Bemsha Swing: In conversation with my Latin Americanist colleagues an issue came up. They worry that literature itself is a conservative thing. That is, they view the object of study itself as somehow suspect, infused with conservative baggage that it is their task to be suspicious… |
Daniel Green |
10/22/05 |
15 |
10/24/05 |
| Parodic Repetitions |
From a speech by the Estonian poet and critic Märt Väljataga, reprinted in Eurozine: . . .I share Terry Eagleton’s nostalgic utopia of a public sphere or “republic of letters”, where the literary criticism could operate. Instead of indulging in jargon and terminological games, literary criticism would regard not only academic… |
Daniel Green |
10/12/05 |
5 |
10/16/05 |
| Propelling Society Forward |
George Katsiaficas’s “Aesthetic and Political Avant-Gardes” attempts to recoup the original sense of the term “avant-garde” as delineating “attempts to forge new dimensions to our aesthetic and political definitions of reality.” “At the intersection of art and politics is where the term originated,” writes Katsiafacas, “and it is there that its… |
Daniel Green |
10/05/05 |
4 |
10/10/05 |
| Erasing Society |
In an essay about the “feud” between the critic Irving Howe and the novelist Ralph Ellison about the role of “protest” in fiction, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington observes: . . .Whereas Ellison saw a danger in collective generalizations, Howe was attuned to the perils of erasing society. In his autobiography, A Margin… |
Daniel Green |
09/13/05 |
7 |
09/14/05 |
| Apostles for Art |
On the one hand, Camille Paglia thinks that “Mainstream America looks at art and the artist as a scam and they don’t want to support government funding of the arts. Who pays the price for this are working-class talented young people who don’t have access to arts programs. Across the country… |
Daniel Green |
08/10/05 |
12 |
08/11/05 |
| Morally Sound |
In “Literary Aesthetics and the Aims of Criticism” (included in Theory’s Empire), Paisley Livingston comes to this eminently reasonable conclusion about aesthetic experience: An aesthetic experience of literature, I suggest, is an intrinsically valued experience occasioned by the contemplation of the qualities of a literary work of art. Such contemplation is… |
Daniel Green |
07/26/05 |
11 |
07/27/05 |
