I really enjoyed this response to Ruby -- perhaps the only piece I've read that takes Ruby's claims seriously enough to disagree with them at such length. I found Ruby's diagnosis quite persuasive, but like the author here did not find Ruby's critical models all that helpful. (The presentation of Marracini's arguments in this essay confirmed my suspicions). I do wish Dess had addressed Ruby's own foray in to "creative criticism"--the book length poem, _Context Collapse_, for which the "Golden Age" essay now feels like an anticipatory manifesto.
I feel that many readers of Kramnick mischaracterize what he thinks knowledge *is*. JK is at pains throughout book to characterize close reading as a knowledge-making _practice_, a form of artisanal craftsmanship. In reviews, he's too often misread as defending Wissenschaft rather than a mode of tacit knowledge. His idea of "knowledge is closer to "knowing how" (connaitre) than "knowing that" (savoir). He imagines criticism and its institutional transmission along much the same lines as an MFA program--through imitation, mentorship, repetition, disciplined practice. It's not just about acquiring a body of doctrines.
In any case, I was really glad to see this intelligent critique of Ruby's prescriptions, even if Ruby's description of the contemporary media ecology of criticism still seems pretty pretty spot on.
the reason to dismiss _Context Collapse_ as "creative critical" "book length poem" is that it is a series of (clunky!) prose sentences enjambed seemingly at random to no particular effect
Thanks for reading and sharing your thinking on Kramnick. A few quick thoughts:
It would have taken me too far afield to go into a critique of Context Collapse which I found informative and sometimes entertaining but ultimately tedious and unfulfilling, yet, in line with Ruby’s materialist ideological stance.
I agree that Kramnick is often misunderstood, especially as how knowledge is produced through close reading. What Ruby doesn’t want to acknowledge (and is not emphasized in my essay) is that Kramnick, like Ruby, also believes criticism is a creative act (‘creative criticism’ or ‘artform’, as Ruby would have it). Kramnick quotes the critic Geoffrey Hartman about his thinking on this: “The closeness of critical writing, [Hartman] recognizes, blurs the line between text and commentary and thus is a kind of art form. ‘The line of exegesis’ is as ‘precariously extensible as the line of the text,’ each wrapping itself around the other. To write criticism is to make something new, to create ‘texts—a literature—of its own.’”
Ruby says that “Over and over again, Kramnick’s premises point toward a conclusion that he seems unwilling to swallow: namely, that criticism is a creative practice, not just in method, but also in outcome.” Yet this is not true at all: throughout Criticism & Truth Kramnick tells us he thinks: “the skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”
The issue is Ruby wants more than the kind of knowledge that is produced by close reading. As he says, “connoisseurs of creative criticism read it for its own sake—in other words, for the same reasons they read novels, short stories, poetry, and other genres of creative nonfiction.” He goes on to say (bear with me):
“It is not that producers and receivers of creative criticism do not value knowledge per se, it is that the kind of knowledge they are primarily concerned with differs significantly from one constrained by the norms of knowledge production as it exists within the institutional context of literary studies. As with the literary genres listed above, this particular conception of knowledge finds its telos in ethics, rather than in epistemology; in life, rather than in truth; in turning “knowing how” into “knowing of” rather than “knowing that.”
He does not say how (or what constitutes) knowledge that “finds its telos in ethics” would manifest itself. He goes on to say (bear with me again):
“For a criticism that conceives of itself as creative in method and outcome, innovates formally and stylistically in multiple genres, rejects the significance of the distinction between primary and secondary text, and aims at the production of aesthetic experience and ethical self-fashioning rather than truth and knowledge.” In his view, this is what “connoisseurs of creative criticism” are seeking.
But the question then arises, if you reject all the distinctions, and rule out truth and knowledge, is it criticism…or something else.
He then becomes preoccupied with propagandizing for Marraccini, claiming, as I note, that she exemplifies the type of criticism he advocates. (One of my (many) issues with her work is, as stated in the essay, that she does not innovate formally and stylistically. Ruby just gets this wrong. Everything she performs in her work was innovated by Serres.)
But enough. These are all intriguing and complicated issues. I may have more to say about them at a later date.
This is really helpful re: Ruby's misreading of Kramnick. Part of me wonders if this is due to the fact that Ruby wants to advocate for a de-institutionalized humanities -- the emerging alt-ac culture of Substack, LARB, n+1, The Point, etc. (what he's called recently "Criticism as a Way of Life"-- whereas Kramnick explicitly wants to defend criticism as disciplinary *know how* that can be be passed on in the classroom, seminar, and ultimately, through credentials like the graduate degree. I'd also be curious to know how Guillory's recent book on _Professing Criticism_ might factor into your thinking on the subject. Keep at it!
The only criticism I know anything about is rock criticism-- I grew up on it, and on legendary writers like Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Paul Williams, and all the great reviewers at punk zines like Maximum Rocknroll. But it seems to me, whatever the art, you can have a golden age of criticism only if you have a golden age of the underlying art form. Art and criticism exist in a symbiotic relationship. If the art is establishing a vital, electric connection to its audience-- a fanatical connection to it-- so will writing about that art.
Is that happening with American literature? I'm not seeing it. Not yet.
Not awfully familiar with the landscape of contemporary criticism, but I do find it somewhat ironic that this essay--a meta-meta essay, criticizing literary criticism essays that criticize literary criticism--dedicates so much of its space towards demonstrating layers of misreading without producing a morsel of knowledge that bears any resemblance to life. That's to be expected with writing so far in the stratosphere, and maybe ironically strengthens the position he argues against. I enjoyed reading this because it had pretty words and clever arguments. To a limited extent I learned a bit about reading something well. The correspondence to genuine truth, though, remains obscured, and the objective of criticism has been buried by the emotiveness of the writer.
From Kant to Wilde and Geoffrey Hartman, aesthetic experience and truth/knowledge/judgment need not be seen in tension with each other. The danger pointed out at the conclusion, criticism as pure performance or in a different register the affective fallacy, seems merely an unwillingness to strive toward an ideal outside the self, whether it's objectivity, truth, or knowledge of something, whatever it may be (even self-knowledge). That is to say, does Pater not provide insight into, or knowledge of, La Joconde?
I recall feeling (and saying) on Twitter that I felt a Ryan Ruby essay coming out was “an event” and that I enjoyed his and other critics’ work as if they were like pop stars dropping singles on an adoring listenership. But the problem wasn’t the stellar criticism of the essays it was the critics’ pugnacious behavior on the social media platform of Twitter which became a shithole over the past two years. I left there and I was glad to be away from that “social media based critical careerism” — in favor of Substack which is far better for this sort of thing. I don’t know if it is *still* a golden age of criticism that needs Twitter as a scaffolding (I hear this metaphor is an AI tell): it feels like it doesn’t matter now.
Lol I hated Ruby and that whole crew before I permablocked Twitter from all my devices -- well that's not true, I kind of loved him for acting so much like a parody of a pretentious literary critic from a Flaubert novel or something. But I think you're totally right. Many people whose work I might have liked in a vacuum and who I might have gotten along with in person I was turned off of bc I would see them getting into dumb slapfights enough times to build some parasocial mental model of a person I disliked. Ofc I probably wouldn't have heard of them at all if not for Twitter, so double edged sword I guess.
If the only point of reading literature, over genre-slop, is to get people to accept racial-balancing and reproductive-rights, then didn't literature succeed and we don't need it anymore because it's irrelevant? If literature doesn't have to convince you to vote Blue--what are the great apolitical novels?
There is literature (non-slop) in "the genres" the same as plenty of what claims to be "literary fiction" is obvious slop, novels are historically a slop medium, after the printing press had been around a while novels were basically considered like soap operas or KPOP or some shit for dumb broads. Sharp slop v.s. nonslop divide is less pronounced in literature than in film, genre v.s. literature is basically an academic and commercial invention of the last century, borrowed from film or maybe given license back in the 20s by the emergence of film as a new mass medium which relatively heightened the status of novels, soon to be bolstered by a bunch of GIs getting government-subsidized English degrees after WWII. Anyway, for much more basic counter examples to the slop/genre dichotomy, Dracula and Frankenstein are 100 and 200 years old and obviously works of literature, Philip K. Dick is now a canonical conceptual / prose stylist, William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin, and so on.
"accept racial-balancing and reproductive-rights"
You've picked two issues totally bound up in the American 1960s which gives you, conservatively, 4,000 years and ~5 continents worth of literature which necessarily must have had different points
"literature succeeded"
The last 60 years of US history are basically a proving ground for the fact that the culture emerges from the politics, not the other way around. Clearly there has been a profound failure of all these "pro-Roe v. Wade / Brown v. BOE novels" to affect people's attitudes enough to also affect political change, because Roe has been overturned and there is bipartisan consensus on migrant immiseration plus overheating public sentiments of racial separatism, racial nationalism, white black brown and confessional. I wonder, how haven't the dim bulb reactionaries gotten TIRED OF WINNING yet? THE HIPPIES LOST! THE 60S ARE OVER!
"we don't need it anymore because it's irrelevant?"
You're too stupid to even know why this might be case, you're asking it like it's a brand new question
"If literature doesn't have to convince you to vote Blue"
Name 5 fucking novels great or not in this or any decade where the message, implicit or explicit, is "Vote For Democrats in the Presidential Election"
"what are the great apolitical novels"
Even if you're asking this as a joke it would tell everyone you are illiterate. HOw bout Moby Dick or something thatd' be a good start. The Scarlet Fucking Pimpernel. Fuck you
I'm so glad you agree that the right has triumphed over the wanky lefties and "culture is downstream of politics" bollocks. But sadly, I suspect it means that you and your skivvy-wearing mates want to subject us to more of the politics of oikophobic psycho-babble for years to come. Fortunately, as you say there is plenty of marvellous literature written before the leftoid wankers dumbed it all down and removed all the aesthetic joy that real literature can provide.
I really enjoyed this response to Ruby -- perhaps the only piece I've read that takes Ruby's claims seriously enough to disagree with them at such length. I found Ruby's diagnosis quite persuasive, but like the author here did not find Ruby's critical models all that helpful. (The presentation of Marracini's arguments in this essay confirmed my suspicions). I do wish Dess had addressed Ruby's own foray in to "creative criticism"--the book length poem, _Context Collapse_, for which the "Golden Age" essay now feels like an anticipatory manifesto.
I feel that many readers of Kramnick mischaracterize what he thinks knowledge *is*. JK is at pains throughout book to characterize close reading as a knowledge-making _practice_, a form of artisanal craftsmanship. In reviews, he's too often misread as defending Wissenschaft rather than a mode of tacit knowledge. His idea of "knowledge is closer to "knowing how" (connaitre) than "knowing that" (savoir). He imagines criticism and its institutional transmission along much the same lines as an MFA program--through imitation, mentorship, repetition, disciplined practice. It's not just about acquiring a body of doctrines.
In any case, I was really glad to see this intelligent critique of Ruby's prescriptions, even if Ruby's description of the contemporary media ecology of criticism still seems pretty pretty spot on.
the reason to dismiss _Context Collapse_ as "creative critical" "book length poem" is that it is a series of (clunky!) prose sentences enjambed seemingly at random to no particular effect
Thanks for reading and sharing your thinking on Kramnick. A few quick thoughts:
It would have taken me too far afield to go into a critique of Context Collapse which I found informative and sometimes entertaining but ultimately tedious and unfulfilling, yet, in line with Ruby’s materialist ideological stance.
I agree that Kramnick is often misunderstood, especially as how knowledge is produced through close reading. What Ruby doesn’t want to acknowledge (and is not emphasized in my essay) is that Kramnick, like Ruby, also believes criticism is a creative act (‘creative criticism’ or ‘artform’, as Ruby would have it). Kramnick quotes the critic Geoffrey Hartman about his thinking on this: “The closeness of critical writing, [Hartman] recognizes, blurs the line between text and commentary and thus is a kind of art form. ‘The line of exegesis’ is as ‘precariously extensible as the line of the text,’ each wrapping itself around the other. To write criticism is to make something new, to create ‘texts—a literature—of its own.’”
Ruby says that “Over and over again, Kramnick’s premises point toward a conclusion that he seems unwilling to swallow: namely, that criticism is a creative practice, not just in method, but also in outcome.” Yet this is not true at all: throughout Criticism & Truth Kramnick tells us he thinks: “the skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”
The issue is Ruby wants more than the kind of knowledge that is produced by close reading. As he says, “connoisseurs of creative criticism read it for its own sake—in other words, for the same reasons they read novels, short stories, poetry, and other genres of creative nonfiction.” He goes on to say (bear with me):
“It is not that producers and receivers of creative criticism do not value knowledge per se, it is that the kind of knowledge they are primarily concerned with differs significantly from one constrained by the norms of knowledge production as it exists within the institutional context of literary studies. As with the literary genres listed above, this particular conception of knowledge finds its telos in ethics, rather than in epistemology; in life, rather than in truth; in turning “knowing how” into “knowing of” rather than “knowing that.”
He does not say how (or what constitutes) knowledge that “finds its telos in ethics” would manifest itself. He goes on to say (bear with me again):
“For a criticism that conceives of itself as creative in method and outcome, innovates formally and stylistically in multiple genres, rejects the significance of the distinction between primary and secondary text, and aims at the production of aesthetic experience and ethical self-fashioning rather than truth and knowledge.” In his view, this is what “connoisseurs of creative criticism” are seeking.
But the question then arises, if you reject all the distinctions, and rule out truth and knowledge, is it criticism…or something else.
He then becomes preoccupied with propagandizing for Marraccini, claiming, as I note, that she exemplifies the type of criticism he advocates. (One of my (many) issues with her work is, as stated in the essay, that she does not innovate formally and stylistically. Ruby just gets this wrong. Everything she performs in her work was innovated by Serres.)
But enough. These are all intriguing and complicated issues. I may have more to say about them at a later date.
This is really helpful re: Ruby's misreading of Kramnick. Part of me wonders if this is due to the fact that Ruby wants to advocate for a de-institutionalized humanities -- the emerging alt-ac culture of Substack, LARB, n+1, The Point, etc. (what he's called recently "Criticism as a Way of Life"-- whereas Kramnick explicitly wants to defend criticism as disciplinary *know how* that can be be passed on in the classroom, seminar, and ultimately, through credentials like the graduate degree. I'd also be curious to know how Guillory's recent book on _Professing Criticism_ might factor into your thinking on the subject. Keep at it!
The only criticism I know anything about is rock criticism-- I grew up on it, and on legendary writers like Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Paul Williams, and all the great reviewers at punk zines like Maximum Rocknroll. But it seems to me, whatever the art, you can have a golden age of criticism only if you have a golden age of the underlying art form. Art and criticism exist in a symbiotic relationship. If the art is establishing a vital, electric connection to its audience-- a fanatical connection to it-- so will writing about that art.
Is that happening with American literature? I'm not seeing it. Not yet.
Not awfully familiar with the landscape of contemporary criticism, but I do find it somewhat ironic that this essay--a meta-meta essay, criticizing literary criticism essays that criticize literary criticism--dedicates so much of its space towards demonstrating layers of misreading without producing a morsel of knowledge that bears any resemblance to life. That's to be expected with writing so far in the stratosphere, and maybe ironically strengthens the position he argues against. I enjoyed reading this because it had pretty words and clever arguments. To a limited extent I learned a bit about reading something well. The correspondence to genuine truth, though, remains obscured, and the objective of criticism has been buried by the emotiveness of the writer.
The Golden Age was VS Pritchett.
From Kant to Wilde and Geoffrey Hartman, aesthetic experience and truth/knowledge/judgment need not be seen in tension with each other. The danger pointed out at the conclusion, criticism as pure performance or in a different register the affective fallacy, seems merely an unwillingness to strive toward an ideal outside the self, whether it's objectivity, truth, or knowledge of something, whatever it may be (even self-knowledge). That is to say, does Pater not provide insight into, or knowledge of, La Joconde?
Could we call DFW's "Josephy Frank's Dostoevsky" art (CtL, 255–274)? I like to think so. It feels experimental, what with the introspective **asides** he peppers throughout. https://www.scribd.com/doc/164736651/Joseph-Frank-s-Dostoevsky-David-Foster-Wallace#scribd
I recall feeling (and saying) on Twitter that I felt a Ryan Ruby essay coming out was “an event” and that I enjoyed his and other critics’ work as if they were like pop stars dropping singles on an adoring listenership. But the problem wasn’t the stellar criticism of the essays it was the critics’ pugnacious behavior on the social media platform of Twitter which became a shithole over the past two years. I left there and I was glad to be away from that “social media based critical careerism” — in favor of Substack which is far better for this sort of thing. I don’t know if it is *still* a golden age of criticism that needs Twitter as a scaffolding (I hear this metaphor is an AI tell): it feels like it doesn’t matter now.
Lol I hated Ruby and that whole crew before I permablocked Twitter from all my devices -- well that's not true, I kind of loved him for acting so much like a parody of a pretentious literary critic from a Flaubert novel or something. But I think you're totally right. Many people whose work I might have liked in a vacuum and who I might have gotten along with in person I was turned off of bc I would see them getting into dumb slapfights enough times to build some parasocial mental model of a person I disliked. Ofc I probably wouldn't have heard of them at all if not for Twitter, so double edged sword I guess.
If the only point of reading literature, over genre-slop, is to get people to accept racial-balancing and reproductive-rights, then didn't literature succeed and we don't need it anymore because it's irrelevant? If literature doesn't have to convince you to vote Blue--what are the great apolitical novels?
"the only point of reading literature"
Says who?
"over genre-slop"
There is literature (non-slop) in "the genres" the same as plenty of what claims to be "literary fiction" is obvious slop, novels are historically a slop medium, after the printing press had been around a while novels were basically considered like soap operas or KPOP or some shit for dumb broads. Sharp slop v.s. nonslop divide is less pronounced in literature than in film, genre v.s. literature is basically an academic and commercial invention of the last century, borrowed from film or maybe given license back in the 20s by the emergence of film as a new mass medium which relatively heightened the status of novels, soon to be bolstered by a bunch of GIs getting government-subsidized English degrees after WWII. Anyway, for much more basic counter examples to the slop/genre dichotomy, Dracula and Frankenstein are 100 and 200 years old and obviously works of literature, Philip K. Dick is now a canonical conceptual / prose stylist, William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin, and so on.
"accept racial-balancing and reproductive-rights"
You've picked two issues totally bound up in the American 1960s which gives you, conservatively, 4,000 years and ~5 continents worth of literature which necessarily must have had different points
"literature succeeded"
The last 60 years of US history are basically a proving ground for the fact that the culture emerges from the politics, not the other way around. Clearly there has been a profound failure of all these "pro-Roe v. Wade / Brown v. BOE novels" to affect people's attitudes enough to also affect political change, because Roe has been overturned and there is bipartisan consensus on migrant immiseration plus overheating public sentiments of racial separatism, racial nationalism, white black brown and confessional. I wonder, how haven't the dim bulb reactionaries gotten TIRED OF WINNING yet? THE HIPPIES LOST! THE 60S ARE OVER!
"we don't need it anymore because it's irrelevant?"
You're too stupid to even know why this might be case, you're asking it like it's a brand new question
"If literature doesn't have to convince you to vote Blue"
Name 5 fucking novels great or not in this or any decade where the message, implicit or explicit, is "Vote For Democrats in the Presidential Election"
"what are the great apolitical novels"
Even if you're asking this as a joke it would tell everyone you are illiterate. HOw bout Moby Dick or something thatd' be a good start. The Scarlet Fucking Pimpernel. Fuck you
!
I'm so glad you agree that the right has triumphed over the wanky lefties and "culture is downstream of politics" bollocks. But sadly, I suspect it means that you and your skivvy-wearing mates want to subject us to more of the politics of oikophobic psycho-babble for years to come. Fortunately, as you say there is plenty of marvellous literature written before the leftoid wankers dumbed it all down and removed all the aesthetic joy that real literature can provide.
Subporcine white british lardhock complains about dumbing down of literature, can't name 5 books. Imagine my shock