About Daniel
Daniel Green was an English professor for 15 years, but left academe for the good of all concerned. He still monitors developments in academic criticism and writes the occasional scholarly essay, but has mostly concentrated lately on general interest essays, reviews, and criticism, to be found in a variety of publications, both print and online. He also writes fiction and maintains a literary weblog called The Reading Experience.
Email Address: greend1@charter.net
Website: http://noggs.typepad.com
Posts by Daniel
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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 is so striking is that there is not anything very erotic about these essays; they are, in fact, all hermeneutics. In the criticism, as in the journals, the eros is all from the neck up.
A little later he asserts that
this astoundingly gifted interpreter, so naturally skilled at peeling away trivial-seeming exteriors to reveal deeper cultural meanings--or at teasing out the underlying significance of surface features to which you might not have given much attention ("people run beautifully in Godard movies")--fought mightily to affect an “aesthetic” disdain for content.
Mendelsohn is pretty clearly attempting to turn Sontag’s own strengths as a critic--"peeling away” and “teasing out"--against her in order to question the critical agenda with which Sontag began her career as literary critic, and for which she is still most prominently known. To so baldly label her an “interpreter” is to dismiss her early efforts to rescue the aesthetic pleasures of art from the maw of interpretation and its attempts to “dig ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” She was an interpreter all along and thus the “disdain for content” she expressed could only be an affectation.
Continue reading "The Condition of Our Senses"Permanent link • (2) Comments
Monday, January 19, 2009
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 social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn’t tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.
It is tempting to say that the condition Bauerlein describes, here and in the book as a whole, has always obtained, that the majority of American youths have always found their interest in “the social scene around them” rather than in “books and ideas and history and civics.” Indeed, to judge by the majority of adults who were themselves once “young Americans,” this would seem to be the case since they, too, as far as I can tell, have little interest in the “stores of civilization,” little knowledge of the wider world beyond their own “social scene” as it is to be found in their neighborhoods, their communities, or perhaps on network television. American democracy has produced many admirable things, but one of them is not a widely informed and curious populace motivated by a love of learning for its own sake--however much the image of the bookish youth of the tenement or farm, of the self-educated immigrant, might still linger.
Continue reading "Young Americans"Permanent link • (17) Comments
Monday, December 22, 2008
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 shared the high modernists’ attention to form. Like Joyce peppering Ulysses’s newsroom scene with capitalized headlines, Gaddis constructed The Recognitions and JR as mimetic of their subjects—the former is as bulging and ornate as the Flemish paintings that protagonist Wyatt Gwyon is paid to forge, and the latter is one continuous flood of voices, frequently unidentified, that recall either a stock ticker’s relentlessness or an overlapping teleconference. . . .
I also mostly agree with this characterization of Gaddis’s work:
Just as his novels JR and A Frolic of His Own announce their subjects (”Money . . . ?” and “Justice?” respectively) in their opening sentences, William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” No single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project, in which he chronicles the myriad ways that postwar industrial American culture devalues and drowns out individual expression in an endless barrage of information. His concerns were weighty—nothing less than the erosion of western culture and society—but Gaddis’s novels are ultimately saved from grim systemic coldness by his emphasis on work, which he defined strictly and defended with religious zeal. To Gaddis, work equaled an individual effort (best exemplified by the sympathetic and underappreciated artists of his first novels, The Recognitions and JR) to sort through the swarming cultural ephemera and create, with monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce. Since Gaddis believed the two to be tantamount, his emphasis on the value of work was nothing less than a defense of the artistic impulse itself.
I don’t think that Gaddis avoids “grim systemic coldness” simply through his depiction of work (a point on which I elaborate below), but that the “work” of art holds special value for him is clearly enough illustrated in his novels.
Continue reading "The Reader and the Page"Permanent link • (1) Comments
Thursday, December 04, 2008
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 knows that they are filled with reviews that are not just reflexively laudatory but are rhetorically empty in every way that might otherwise qualify them as “criticism.” Plot summary substitutes for analysis, effusive approval for critical judgment, nitpicking for reasoned objection.
Queenan believes this happens because “Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road” or “because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps.” While neither of these explanations speaks well of American book reviewing--even though Queenan does try to make excuses for it--I believe the simplest explanation goes even farther in clarifying the problem with newpaper book reviews: Honest criticism can’t be found in these pages because criticism itself can’t be found there, for reasons that are inherent to the medium.
Continue reading "Deserving Little Praise"Permanent link • (4) Comments
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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:
Continue reading "The Pedagogical Habit"One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.
Permanent link • (18) Comments
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
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 Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.
I was reminded of this passage when reading Brian Boyd’s “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature," not because Boyd himself really finds external issues easier “to talk about than the fiction,” certainly not because Boyd values such issues more than “the fiction,” but because even in his attempt to retrieve the “art of literature” as the central subject of literary criticism he seemingly can’t help but underscore the value of fiction as the gateway to something else.
Continue reading "Easier to Talk About"Permanent link • (1) Comments
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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 include works of art) and “pyschological objects.” The former, Carnap maintains, are reducible (for the purposes of this system) to the latter:
The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art, for example a marble statue, is indeed not identical with the recognition of the sensible characteristics of the piece of marble, its shape, size, color, and material. But this awareness is not something outside of the perception, since for it no content other than the content of the perception is given; more precisely: this awareness is uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses. Thus, there exists a unique functional relation between the physical properties of the piece of marble and the aesthetic content of the work of art which is represented in this piece of marble.
To put it another way, the aesthetic experience includes an awareness of the piece of marble in all of its physical attributes, or of a page of text with its words printed in a particular style on paper of a particular color and weight, but it only begins there. “Aesthetic content” requires another step to be fulfilled:
. . .if a physical object is to be formed or transformed in such a way that it becomes a document, a bearer of expression for the cultural object, then this requires an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals, and thus psychological occurences in which the cultural object comes alive; these psychological occurences are the manifestations of the cultural object.
Although he uses the word “experience” rather than “psychological occurences,” and although he is more rooted to the “physical object” than is Carnap in what seems an essentially phenomenological analyis of the experience of art, John Dewey in Art as Experience offers a philosophy of art and the reception of art that at least has a family resemblance to what Carnap is suggesting here. Both Dewey and Carnap avoid attributing metaphysical status to the “beauty” of art (a beauty that is intrinsic to the work) by locating the aesthetic in our apprehension of the work. As Carnap puts it, for the work to become a “bearer of expression,” there must be “an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals.” Similarly, Dewey would maintain that these “several individuals” include both artist and audience, as the work is not really complete until the viewer/listener/reader is able to “recreate” it in perception: “Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. 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.”
Thus aesthetic judgment is unavoidably subjective, requiring the “transformation” Carnap describes, a process that will be bound to the “point of view and interest” of the “beholder,” as Dewey has it. Still, the “sensible characteristics” of the work remain what they are, and aesthetic judgment cannot simply be cut loose from the work’s sensible properties. Indeed, the more fully one experiences art according to Dewey’s account of the process, the more, and the more intensely, those sensible properties will be felt.
It seems to me that both Carnap and Dewey remind us that, although the aesthetic is consummated in the “psychological occurences” experienced by readers or viewers, the sensible charactertistics of works of art and literature cannot be denied or dismissed. Thus, in reading fiction, we should not forget that neither people nor “things“ are the subjects of perception. Words are. If, for example, we are reading a realist novel, we are not experiencing “the world” faithfully reproduced at all. We are not even, finally, experiencing a world of the author’s creation, whether it’s a world meant to be taken as a version of the real world or one the author has imaginatively brought into being. We are experiencing writing, which, through the psychological processes Carnap and Dewey invoke, is “transformed” into a world of characters and their stories. Ultimately a sufficient accumulation of responses by readers in turn transforms the work into a “cultural object.” In our haste to describe that realist novel as a convincing “picture” of reality or as something “that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict,” we should not forget that it’s neither. As an object of aesthetic experience, it’s just writing, skillfully arranged for your act of recreation.
Permanent link • (3) Comments
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
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 stronger sense of belonging in Britain by a diet of Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms. The truth is that shared references and resonances mostly need to evolve naturally, that most of them derive from popular culture, and that many of them are like family jokes. Television has had enormous power as a unifier; this power is now declining with the proliferation of channels and new media, but in their time Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one people.
The obvious flaw in this argument comes from that “in their time.” The accomplishments of Morecambe and Wise notwithstanding, the ultimate point of a canon is that it includes “shared references” that are timeless, not merely of unifying value in a particular historical era. Unless future generations will likely value Morecambe and Wise as much as those “in their time” did (although, who knows, maybe they will), there seems little point in enshrining them in a “canon,” which will only come to seem as much an imposition on the tastes of those later generations as Milton and Wordsworth
Continue reading "One People"Permanent link • (3) Comments
Friday, December 07, 2007
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 not have to bear the burden of criticality nor can it assume superiority as if operating outside of the ideologies it has long presumed to critique. Fine art, artists, and critics exist within a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture. (247)
According to Drucker, artists of the 2000s (representatives of which her book discusses in some detail), no longer see “complicity” with mass culture as an evil to be avoided. These artists use mass culture to create dynamic, visually arresting works the ultimate ambition of which is to be aesthetically pleasing. No requirement of “criticality” is necessary for ideological correctness: the purpose of art is to be aesthetic, and contemporary artists are exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of mass culture to create “fine art” that doesn’t pretend to an inherent “superiority” over that culture. Complicity is ok, as is taking sensory pleasure in art.
Continue reading "The Burden of Criticality"Permanent link • (21) Comments
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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 Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, and Musical Composition. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope . . . .
I would be willing to accept this proposal (with one proviso, discussed below), but there are actually a number of assumptions about both art (the “creative disciplines") and about academic study that need to be unpacked from this passage I’ve quoted.
Continue reading "Analytic"Permanent link • (2) Comments
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
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.
Continue reading "Of Limited and Personal Interest"Permanent link • (18) Comments
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
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 of an idea what either “interfiction” or “interstitial” are supposed to mean.
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s intoduction tells us that a book of his was published as a novel, even though it was really a memoir. Later, a publisher wanted to “repackage” the book as a memoir. Presumably, then, the book is neither a novel nor a memoir, but something “in-between,” even though Fenkl’s account makes it perfectly clear that it is a memoir, its “tropes, its collaging of time and character” notwithstanding. Using what Fenk thinks of as “novelistic” devices not make the book a novel. Not wishing to have it understood as a memoir does not make it other than a memoir.
Continue reading "A Retroactive Historical Trajectory"Permanent link • (4) Comments
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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 were supposed to be a vehicle for making the results of one’s research available to peers for discussion and collaboration, a way to make work that would earlier have been done through professional correspondence available to more people. Lots of us, pushed to show ‘productivity’, don’t work on issues we regard as worthwhile and publish the results to advance work in the field – we pick fields in which it will be easy to publish and select issues to work on in the interest of ‘getting publications’. Even ass-backwarder, instead of being valued because they make scholarly work more readily available, journals are valued because the print medium restricts the amount of work that can be made publicly available, so that a publication ‘counts’.
“Blogs, and more broadly online publication, advance research done for its own sake rather than as a credential for professional advancement.”
Permanent link • (2) Comments
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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 the feelings and interior lives of other people, it became harder to justify treating them with cruelty or systematic inequity.”
This is a cogent enough observation (although it remains after-the-fact speculation), as long as a caveat is added: Novels, or at least certain kinds of novels, can make make it “easier to imagine the feelings and interior lives of other people,” but this is a secondary effect of the novel as a form, not its reason for being. It exists to allow writers the opportunity to create aesthetically credible works of literary art in prose, not to champion human solidarity and facilitate good will toward men.
Continue reading "Interiors"Permanent link • (18) Comments
Thursday, March 15, 2007
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 without mediation of any kind.”
Lutz associates this view that we should return to “the text” with New Criticism, but nowhere in his essay does he reveal (if he knows) that Bloom was actually hostile to New Criticism. He considered its approach so limiting and so dismissive (in the practice of most of the New Critics, at least) of the Romantic poets, whose work Bloom so loves, that he deliberately designed his own theory of poetic influence as a corrective, if not an outright rejection, of New Critical biases. Lutz goes on to associate both Bloom and New Criticism with such disparate figures as Mortimer Adler, E.D. Hirsch, and John Sutherland, simply because they appear to endorse the idea that learning to appreciate the “text itself” is an important part of literary education.
Continue reading "Mediation"Permanent link • (9) Comments