An Important essay. I think when we sense a thinness in both fiction and criticism, the culprit is usually the same: malnutrition in the reading department. Do writers today feel any need to really know and engage with (bygone) critics like Edmund Wilson, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, or even the incredibly astute criticism that John Updike wrote in The New Yorker on a regular basis? I wonder, sadly, if these names even mean much anymore. Thank you.
The essay's gist, re books: "I want to speak passionately about how passionately we should speak about this passion." Nestling the argument for good voicey criticism (criticism as art) within anecdotes about all these bygone literary luminaries makes this whole essay bookish as shit, in an authentic conversational way, where each point is made with an "OH!-that-reminds-me" digressiveness; anecdotes-on-anecdotes; the talking style of someone who personally lives and breathes this stuff. I loved it! Ripatrazone both manifests and inspires the sort of passion he's encouraging. I've been having a great time writing book reviews lately, more of them than ever, and it's because I'm seeing pieces like this one all the time, reinforcing the sense of pleasure, passion, purpose about it. This was a real delight!
I study a neighboring field, art criticism. There are a number of parallels, but what interests me is that your chronology is quite different from ours. Your points of reference (1884, 1900s, 1959) are chosen to point up conditions and problems that still affect the present. I wonder what changes you would mark if you took your references from the 1960s (when art criticism began its own radical change from judgment to neutral description) to the present.
Perhaps I should say, since everyone on the internet seems to assume the worst of everyone else, that I'm not asking a leading question here. Some people trace art criticism back 2,000 years in the West, but I think a good case can be made that its formative and pertinent changes happened in the last fifty years, rendering "art criticism" c. 1900 or c. 1950 often irrelevant to current problems. Are there such turns in literary criticism other than market changes? Did the end of the Jamesian project for the novel also entail a different set of goals for criticism? Or--to put my question the other way around--if you were to write a second essay on the elements of James's criticism that no longer speak to the present moment, what would they be?
criticism turned into bringing up a novel so you can talk about how the novel doesn't sufficiently talk about your social-justice causes, rather than the criticism actually talking about whether the novel itself is good regardless of whether you agree with the ideas the novel pushes or condemns
. . . if she abounded in attenuations, well, hang it all, so did he! It was simply a difference of plane. Readjust the "values," as painters say, and there you were! He was to feel that he was only too crudely "there" when, leaning further forward, he laid a chubby forefinger on the stocking, causing that receptacle to rock ponderously to and fro. This effect was more expected than the tears which started to Eva's eyes, and the intensity with which "Don't you," she exclaimed, "see?"
"The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever, my dear, know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything. It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's the whole habitable globe. Oh, it's, believe me, of an obsessiveness!"
An Important essay. I think when we sense a thinness in both fiction and criticism, the culprit is usually the same: malnutrition in the reading department. Do writers today feel any need to really know and engage with (bygone) critics like Edmund Wilson, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, or even the incredibly astute criticism that John Updike wrote in The New Yorker on a regular basis? I wonder, sadly, if these names even mean much anymore. Thank you.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
I've read all of James, including The Prefaces. A remarkable essay from IMAGE that was one of my early publishers and to whom I remain indebted.
The essay's gist, re books: "I want to speak passionately about how passionately we should speak about this passion." Nestling the argument for good voicey criticism (criticism as art) within anecdotes about all these bygone literary luminaries makes this whole essay bookish as shit, in an authentic conversational way, where each point is made with an "OH!-that-reminds-me" digressiveness; anecdotes-on-anecdotes; the talking style of someone who personally lives and breathes this stuff. I loved it! Ripatrazone both manifests and inspires the sort of passion he's encouraging. I've been having a great time writing book reviews lately, more of them than ever, and it's because I'm seeing pieces like this one all the time, reinforcing the sense of pleasure, passion, purpose about it. This was a real delight!
I study a neighboring field, art criticism. There are a number of parallels, but what interests me is that your chronology is quite different from ours. Your points of reference (1884, 1900s, 1959) are chosen to point up conditions and problems that still affect the present. I wonder what changes you would mark if you took your references from the 1960s (when art criticism began its own radical change from judgment to neutral description) to the present.
Perhaps I should say, since everyone on the internet seems to assume the worst of everyone else, that I'm not asking a leading question here. Some people trace art criticism back 2,000 years in the West, but I think a good case can be made that its formative and pertinent changes happened in the last fifty years, rendering "art criticism" c. 1900 or c. 1950 often irrelevant to current problems. Are there such turns in literary criticism other than market changes? Did the end of the Jamesian project for the novel also entail a different set of goals for criticism? Or--to put my question the other way around--if you were to write a second essay on the elements of James's criticism that no longer speak to the present moment, what would they be?
criticism turned into bringing up a novel so you can talk about how the novel doesn't sufficiently talk about your social-justice causes, rather than the criticism actually talking about whether the novel itself is good regardless of whether you agree with the ideas the novel pushes or condemns
. . . if she abounded in attenuations, well, hang it all, so did he! It was simply a difference of plane. Readjust the "values," as painters say, and there you were! He was to feel that he was only too crudely "there" when, leaning further forward, he laid a chubby forefinger on the stocking, causing that receptacle to rock ponderously to and fro. This effect was more expected than the tears which started to Eva's eyes, and the intensity with which "Don't you," she exclaimed, "see?"
"The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever, my dear, know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything. It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's the whole habitable globe. Oh, it's, believe me, of an obsessiveness!"
—Max Beerbohm, "The Mote in the Middle Distance"