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John Holbo - Editor
Scott Eric Kaufman - Editor
Aaron Bady
Adam Roberts
Amardeep Singh
Andrew Seal
Bill Benzon
Daniel Green
Jonathan Goodwin
Joseph Kugelmass
Lawrence LaRiviere White
Marc Bousquet
Matt Greenfield
Miriam Burstein
Ray Davis
Rohan Amanda Maitzen
Sean McCann
Guest Authors

Laura Carroll
Mark Bauerlein
Miriam Jones

Past Valve Book Events

cover of the book Theory's Empire

Event Archive

cover of the book The Literary Wittgenstein

Event Archive

cover of the book Graphs, Maps, Trees

Event Archive

cover of the book How Novels Think

Event Archive

cover of the book The Trouble With Diversity

Event Archive

cover of the book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?

Event Archive

cover of the book The Novel of Purpose

Event Archive

Style Matters

Higher Ed Inspires Labor “Videos of the Year”

Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll

Sister Carrie and Television

A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Bad Books

Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis

The Valley of Elah as our Heart of Darkness

“what-have-you intriguing subject”

Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas

Time’s Arrow in Literary Space

Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow

Baddest of the Bad

The “Crisis” in Literary Studies, by Mimi & Eunice

The Hurt Locker’s Addiction to Detachment, and Ours

Bill Benzon on Style Matters

Ray Davis on Style Matters

ajay on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Luther Blissett on Style Matters

Jim Harrison on Style Matters

Jonathan M on Style Matters

Ray Davis on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Luther Blissett on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Bill Benzon on Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll

ajay on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Rohan Amanda Maitzen on Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll

Bill Benzon on Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll

Bill Benzon on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?

Ray Davis on Bad Books

Ray Davis on Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll

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Friday, May 23, 2008

Links: Trilling, New Blog, Criticism, 1001 books

Posted by Bill Benzon on 05/23/08 at 10:34 AM

Cynthia Ozick reviews Lionel Trilling’s second and unfinished novel The Journey Abandoned (and discusses his first, The Middle of the Journey, as well) at The New Republic.

There’s a new blog in town, OnFiction, brought to our attention by Rohan in a comment to her most recent post. It’s a group blog run by a philosopher, Keith Oatley, and two psychologists, Raymond A. Mar and Maja Djikic three psychologists, Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic. Purpose: “To understand how literary art enables psychological change to occur so that readers are responsible for that change. To put this another way: we don’t aim to understand persuasion, but we do aim to understand how people can use fiction to help transform themselves.”

Salon’s Louis Bayard and Laura Miller on the death of the literary critic. They’re discussing Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic. (Rohan discusses the book here.) Miller:

Which brings to mind McDonald’s complaints about the “democratizing” of criticism, the idea that anyone can and should do it and that no one opinion has more weight than any other. The blogosphere, as he sees it, is only the most visible manifestation of this broader, anti-authoritarian trend. Because academic critics have abandoned evaluation, the popular critics charged with saying whether a book is good or not have gotten “slack,” in McDonald’s eyes—deficient in rigor and scholarship. If anyone can do it, then surely it’s a skill that requires no expertise or cultivation. It’s true that anyone can dispense quickie, depthless, thumb’s-up/down judgments, but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole. And of course, that might be contributing to the impression that literature doesn’t offer anything special.

The horror, the horror!

The New York Times has an article about another one of those lists, in a book, Peter Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Universe 2006):

If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident. “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall informed me in an e-mail message. And how.

The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. Arranged chronologically, it begins with the novel’s primordial period — everything up to 1800 — and then marches century by century into the present.

More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. Like many others, I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three?

The list itself.


Comments

The claim that academic critics have abandoned evaluation seems curious to me, though McDonald is probably right about the two worlds of criticism are moving farther and farther from each other. But that increasing distance means that academic critics focus on very different books than popular critics; how many people within academia ever seriously address the stuff that was published within the last year (as it is the popular press’ job to do)? People’s jobs are in things like Shakespeare and Melville, who haven’t exactly been publishing up a storm lately. So to claim that the ways academia has stopped “evaluating” literature, whether or not that’s true, seems a bit beside the point: popular critics and academic critics are simply talking about different books, to different people, for different reasons.

By on 05/23/08 at 02:02 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I wrote at more length about McDonald over at ‘home’:

The Dead (Critics, That Is)

For various reasons, I find the straight-up pressure for critics to be more evaluative bizarre because it seems so obvious that you need to define “good” and “bad” in some way before you can move the discussion forward even a little bit.  Most avid readers, as well as English professors, are probably devout pluralists in this respect anyway, able to recognize many varieties of excellence.

I liked Bayard’s reply that, “believe it or not,” he has learned from literary blogs and other nontraditional venues for criticism.  I believe!

By Rohan Amanda Maitzen on 05/23/08 at 02:29 PM | Permanent link to this comment

When I read “Louis Bayard and Laura Miller on the death of the literary critic” I picture them posed like Marines on the mountain of Iwo Jima.

By Ray Davis on 05/23/08 at 10:31 PM | Permanent link to this comment

a philosopher ... and two psychologists

Philosopher, aloud: “Why did I say that?”
Psychologists, silently exchanging glances: “What were we thinking?”

By nnyhav on 05/24/08 at 11:55 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Actually, they’re all psychologists. Don’t know where I got the idea that Oatley was a philosopher.

By Bill Benzon on 05/24/08 at 12:15 PM | Permanent link to this comment

”...but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole.”

Neither does reading “professional” criticism (that higher opinion bracket), automatically, either. How about reading lots of books, according to one’s own interests, and trusting one’s own conclusions to be of personal relevance… ?

A good literary critic should be more like a stranger on a street in a foreign country, giving brief directions, sending one on one’s way; not so much a tour guide (imagine seeing Paris for the first time with a tour guide) or a parole officer (ditto).

I sense a hint of the Obsessive Compulsive hovering around all these “lists”. And: instead of a critic’s vivisection (humane or not) of a text, why not make it more of a standard to have the writer her/his self pleading each respective book’s case in a couple of thousand words? 

Who knows: doing away with some of these arbiters of style might even bring some of the pleasure of reading back to the “masses”.

By Steven Augustine on 05/26/08 at 01:15 PM | Permanent link to this comment

As a Texan I delight reading almost means we’re going to save money in the future by utilising alternative muscularity. I hope Texas continues to be at the forefront of the new-energy revolution, for the interest of the environment and saving.

By motor accident clam on 11/29/09 at 02:11 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Let’s hear it for alternative muscularity!

By Bill Benzon on 11/29/09 at 02:22 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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