Additional Essays in Criticism

In her review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Hilary Plum contends that the flaw in the book’s analysis of contemporary American fiction “arises out of the genre of scholarship,” suggesting that literary scholars are inclined to stick to “what scholarship is supposed to be about, which is what scholarship has already been about.” Thus Sinykin focuses his attention on the corporate book business, which is where “scholarship” can reveal the social and cultural processes at work in “literary production,” the orientation to both literature and culture that today’s scholarship is almost always “about.” The kind of non-conglomerate, non-commercial writing published by small presses, Plum points out, is more or less irrelevant to this analysis.

Plum is certainly right that by far most formally adventurous work that resists the homogenization of fiction (a state of affairs that Sinykin collapses into the broader economic concept he calls “conglomeration) is published by smaller presses—smaller than the non-profit presses Sinykin presents as the primary alternative to conglomerate publishing—and that Sinykin almost completely ignores them. I would also agree with Plum that the constricted attitude toward both writers and readers—neither of which count for much in the book’s consideration of the broader circumstances in which a “book” comes to be—in Big Fiction is a direct function of the work of literary scholarship as it is currently practiced. But scholarship as we find it in Big Fiction is not, in its relationship to works of literature and to literary history in general, inherently the manifestation of “what scholarship is supposed to be about,” at least not simply as the extension of what it “has already been about” unless scholarship of literature came into existence only in the 1980s.

While it may indeed be the case that academic literary scholarship in its current form has entrenched itself firmly enough that it seems the authentic expression of the scholarly approach to what we call literature, some of us received a literary education under entirely different circumstances, in which the object of the scholar’s attention was not (or not only) the various contexts of literary activity but literary art itself. Literary history focused on the first term, not the second: history as the means to assess the different manifestations of the literary through time, not to subsume it to historical inquiry. Historical, political, and cultural context could serve as disparate avenues of approach to the study of literature, but all of the avenues were assumed to converge on a shared destination where the distinct views offered by these different approaches might be synthesized. This unifying, if unstated, assumption no longer obtains, mainly because literary academics lost confidence in literature as a self-sustaining subject suitable to academic study. Securing literature as the center of literary study in the first place had required the displacement of interest to criticism rather that simply “literature itself,” but over the past forty years academic literary critics have inexorably excluded literature as an artistic practice or as aesthetic experience from their understanding of “criticism” so they might focus instead on more consequential concerns, as if conceding to the original resistance to literary study as something too lightweight for serious scholars.

Hilary Plum is correct in her perception that Big Fiction is quintessentially a scholarly book as literary scholarship is currently defined in that it situates an ostensibly literary subject in an external context—in this case, economic—that is of greater interest to the author than what makes the subject literary. It is true that Sinykin often enough includes extended passages of close reading, but it is close reading of the sort academic criticism has appropriated from the New Critics without including the New Critics’ insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text. Sinykin shows how the literary works he examines reflect\ the economic context that is his overriding concern. His readings do offer interpretations, but they are interpretations that reduce the fiction of several prominent writers (E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison) to the material conditions of their publication. If Sinykin’s readings provide an angle by which we might approach an understanding of Doctorow’s Ragtime or Morrison’s Beloved, they do so by implicitly cutting off other angles as at best naïve in their failure to appreciate the determining influence of those material circumstances.

Sinykin isn’t really hesitant to assert a very wide scope for the interpretive lens afforded by the concept of “conglomerate fiction.” The term doesn’t just denote the dominance of corporate capitalism in the acquisition and dissemination of books but should be understood to encompass the actual authorship of the fiction written in the last 50 years. So pervasive is the ethos of conglomeration and so extensive are the tentacles the big five publishers send out to all the stages of book production that the writer can be seen to serve as something like the point of origin in a process that goes well beyond the scene of writing itself—which Sinykin believes has been overly romanticized—and involves so many participants under the corporation’s command that it should be said that conglomerate publishing itself is the true author of the fiction it publishes. Although Sinykin attempts to avoid interpretive overreach by emphasizing that with writers such as Morrison and Doctorow the conglomerate outlook is indirect, manifested allegorically rather than literally, it is finally difficult to know just how seriously we are ultimately to take his conceit. As a rhetorical exaggeration used to underscore the extent to which contemporary literature is subjugated to the needs of high-stakes commerce, it perhaps has some force; as a concept that accurately captures the reality of contemporary writers’ situation, it is, of course, absurd.

Sinykin’s critique does seem more justly applied to the career of Cormac McCarthy (perhaps explaining the frequent mentions of Sinykin’s discussion of McCarthy in the initial reviews of Big Fiction). Sinykin justifiably notes that McCarthy’s first five novels (through Blood Meridian gained the writer increasing acclaim as a distinctive stylist but very meager financial rewards. When McCarthy, almost in a gesture of desperation, acquired an agent and a new publisher, both of whom encouraged McCarthy to alter both his style and his Southern settings (essentially extending the Western backdrop of Blood Meridian), McCarthy’s novels, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, broke through and achieved substantial commercial success. It could indeed plausibly be said that McCarthy’s later fiction bears the imprint of conglomerate influence, but in fact McCarthy’s case seems more an instance of capitulating to commercial imperatives—old-fashioned “selling out.” No doubt there are numerous enough writers who would be willing to sell out if the financial rewards were sufficiently reliable, and probably even more quite willing to produce conglomerate fiction entirely to order at the right price. It seems improbable that many good writers are trying to create artistically credible fiction but just can’t avoid giving over their sincerely held objectives to the all-powerful hand of the publishing conglomerates.

This imprisonment in the assumptions of conglomeration is an especially inapt way to envisage the efforts of writers whose work not merely appears in small presses but can be described as adventurous or experimental. There was a time not so long ago when academic critics took a keen interest in such fiction—it could be argued that the arrival of contemporary fiction as a reputable subject of academic inquiry coincided with the rise to prominence of such fiction (eventually called “postmodern”) in the 1960s and 1970s—but the current scholarly preoccupation with sociological and cultural criticism has led to the virtual disappearance of academic criticism of experimental fiction written during the period (1980s to present) witnessing the triumph of what Sinykin now calls conglomerate fiction.

If “autofiction” and fiction written by “previously marginalized voices” do merit attention in Sinykin’s book, it is because they are assimilable in subject and theme to conglomerate expectations—both have some proven appeal to identifiable readers, and increased publication of the latter, at least, credits a degree of social conscience to the commercial publishers that softens perceptions of their otherwise mercenary business model. Innovative, challenging fiction may at one time have brought publishers a semblance of literary respectability that could be valuable, but this sort of respectability, rooted in the recognition of aesthetic complexity as a primary literary value, is now considered dispensable by mainstream publishing and dismissed by literary scholarship as irredeemably subjective and elitist.

Recognition of aesthetic achievement may indeed by subjective (although surely the concept of the “aesthetic” itself is not), but it has never been clear to me why this is perceived as problematic. While there are certainly “objective” features of literary writing and history with which the scholarly study of literature might be concerned, ultimately the purpose of a work of fiction or poetry is to engage the reader in a distinctive experience. It is entirely possible for a critic to describe the experience honestly and deliberately, but finally the experience can only be reported, not repeated among all other readers—even if we thought such a thing was desirable in the first place. This solitary nature of the reading experience (and the experience of art in general) has always caused literary scholars ambivalence: if finally a work of literature in its most essential expression doesn’t result in shareable “knowledge,” what is the point of devoting “study” to it? Even New Criticism, which was partly an attempt to meet this objection by making the method of study just as important as the texts examined, was eventually judged as too implicated in the mere aesthetic appreciation of literature, and its provisional attempt to produce something like knowledge of literature has been superseded by more radically “objective” approaches such as computational analysis and the various kinds of cultural analysis drawing on empirical description, such as Sinykin’s sociological criticism.

Given the specialized, technical, and often esoteric knowledge applied to and derived from literary texts through these approaches, it is hard to regard seriously the charge that the purely aesthetic response to works of literature is elitist. Literary academics are proficient at interrogating a literary text for its relevance to the critic’s preferred theory or extra-literary concerns, but it is clear from most “readings” by contemporary academic critics that reading closely for the qualities of artistic expression that bring literature into existence to begin with and that motivates most readers is no longer a skill much practiced, although presumably it is a skill no longer much learned (or taught) in colleges and universities. If this is so, it can hardly be regarded as an “elite” practice.

Needless to say, the disinclination to consider the formal and stylistic features of literary texts in general would make serious inquiry into those features as they are extended and transformed in experimental fiction even less urgent. And, indeed, perhaps no change in my own perception of the priorities of academic literary studies has been as noticeable as the seeming loss of interest in the consideration of formally innovative fiction (except when the apparent innovation can be made to serve as a political gesture: challenge to literary form=challenge to the political order). When contemporary fiction started to become acceptable as an academic specialty, much if not most of the scholarly criticism that began to appear concerned the generation of experimental, postmodern writers that seemed to be offering the literary variation on the rebellion against established norms that characterized the 60s more generally. The confluence of the dissident impulses of the times and the heterodox practices of the postmodernists perhaps led to the current tendency to politicize perceived experimental strategies, but neither the first generation postmodernists nor many academic critics accentuated the political: for the writers, the political implications of their work were secondary to the work’s challenges to inherited techniques—challenges that represent an attempt to revivify literary form, not to enlist form in a political gesture. For the critics, while the parallels between the audacious breaking of rules among the insurgent postmodernists and the general disregard of conventional assumptions occurring in the 60s were tacitly acknowledged, what occupied their attention was the sheer variety of the experimental methods these writers employed and the expansion of possibilities in literary form they seemed to promise. If the immediate postwar period had featured a return to pre-modernist realism as a default expectation in American fiction, the adventurous fiction of the 1960s and 1970s augured a return to the innovative spirit of modernism.

By the time I became aware of these writers and wanted to read their work more comprehensively, they were not longer so new or notorious, and the idea that one could devote “academic study” to the–as well as other branches of contemporary fiction, including those which came to overshadow postmodernism–was no longer so novel. I earnestly aspired to be become a scholar of postmodern American fiction, and to that end published a few scattered articles about writers I especially admired, although I fully intended to write more and made assorted plans to write various books in my “field,” but even before I could actually commit to a particular project I could tell that the trends in that field were shifting away from explication, formal analysis, or thematic surveys to a kind of critical writing whose ultimate object of interest lay “outside the text.” I was not an enemy of all forms of critical theory or cultural analysis, but keeping up with the changing fashions of academic criticism was not after all why I aspired to be an academic critic.

The only way to continue practicing the kind of criticism to which I was most naturally inclined was to acknowledge that it would no longer pass muster in the academic journals devoted to contemporary literature. To me it seemed that contemporary literature would not continue to be afforded the kind of critical elucidation given by modern literary study to all previous periods of literary history, at least by academic critics. It would at best be exploited for its utility in advancing other causes. It would not be allowed to advance its own cause: its value as verbal works of art. This might be still accomplished, but not through academic programs of literary study. Academic criticism had a more or less guaranteed audience, however small and confined mostly to other academic critics, although the jargon and deference to certain rites of scholarly decorum that make most current academic criticism unappealing to most readers were not then so pervasive, and much of the critical work still useful. If I was to continue to be a literary critic, and to extend my interest in experimental fiction, I would need to find a different audience,

In my subsequent efforts to do this, I have found that, first of all, interest in pushing against the limits of acceptable practice as illustrated in most seriously-minded fiction—what has come to be called “literary fiction”—by writers themselves is still quite keen. The postmodernists provided a template for literary exploration that has continued to inspire subsequent writers who are not content merely to apply the inherited methods of “craft,” but wish to modify the concept of craft to mean the artful transformation of form or style in fiction –art is not to be found in the skillful repetition of known strategies, but the discovery of alternate strategies employed with equal skill. Indeed, there might be more writers attempting this latter approach than in the immediate wake of the original postmodern era, although the very success of the earlier writers in offering new variations on fictional form requires the critic to recognize when these later writers are themselves contributing something new or inventive, or are merely reiterating an innovative move made by their experimental predecessors. Such moves can easily enough become as standardized as the conventional devices experimental writers ostensibly want to question, and, while I certainly do not set myself up as the judge of all that is worthily experimental in experimental fiction, I have increasingly focused my critical attention on assessing works of unconventional and adventurous fiction with the underlying assumption that these works are the continuation of the project to open up the art of fiction to perpetual invention and re-invention.

There do seem to be readers interested as well in critical engagement with this project (if not always my own expression of it), and there is certainly an audience for critical engagement with fiction published by smaller independent presses in general, which by necessity are the primary publishers of experimental fiction but of course do not restrict themselves to this single mode (although there are several estimable publishers whose lists are weighed more heavily toward experimental fiction than otherwise). Neither the writers nor most readers of the work supported by these presses, I would argue, are prompted by the concerns that Sinykin seems to suggest motivate those who choose conglomerate fiction. They want from literature a stimulating aesthetic experience, not bland entertainment or therapeutic comfort. They expect criticism to be of some assistance in reflecting on this experience, not be preoccupied with analyzing the commercial machinations of big publishers as emblems of the capitalist system. They are interested in literature, not the tawdry spectacles of culture.

Although Hilary Plum is entirely persuasive in her assessment of the limitations of Sinykin’s book, even she wants finally to frame these limitations as a failure of sociopolitical diagnosis. Sinykin doesn’t see (or want to see) the existence of this dissident corner of publishing as the noncommercial resistance to commercial dominance. It is that, but the real alternative these indie presses provide is not to the profit-driven motives of capitalism but to the non-literary (even anti-literary) attitude toward writing and reading that permeates conglomerate fiction as it has totally surrendered to the imperatives of the bureaucratic corporate system. Considerations of art or knowledge no longer play a role in this system at all (except when someone within it consciously ignores its strictures).These are the considerations that still influence what is published and discussed in the milieu surrounding small presses, and, for me, at least, they loom largest in the discussion of experimental fiction, the kind of writing that stands in the starkest contrast to conglomerate fiction.

Just how mercenary conglomerate fiction has become is made clear not just in Sinykin’s book but also very plainly in a recent essay that closely examines the court proceedings in the antitrust case brought against Penguin in its attempt to purchase Simon & Schuster (Elle Griffin, “No one buys books.”) The impression that emerges from this scrutiny of the testimony is of a corporate publishing business that both yokes itself to the logic of finance capitalism and demonstrates the utter insanity of that logic when applied to the writing of books. Why anyone who takes writing seriously would conclude that this business is worth the time and effort to “study” it escapes my comprehension. If it is necessary to regard this appalling entity as the co-creator of current literary work in order to understand culture more broadly, then I’d prefer to discount culture altogether and stick to literature. Even now, I know where to look for that.

The Mandate of Reviewers (Phillipa K. Chong’s Inside the Critics’ Circle)

The title of Phillipa K. Chong’s 2020 book, Inside the Critics’ Circle, juxtaposed with its subtitle, “Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times,” immediately announces its foremost limitation as an account of the state of literary criticism in these “uncertain times.” Casually assuming the conflation of “criticism” and “reviewing” (an assumption no doubt shared by most potential readers of a book like this), the title raises the stakes in our consideration of the scope of Chong’s study: will we indeed gain some sort of clarity about the practice of criticism at this stage of history, literary and otherwise? If Chong had simply used the subtitle as her title (which is actually more accurate to her book’s real focus), it is likely we would regard it as much more limited in its reach.

In fairness, however, Chong herself goes on to make the kind of distinction between criticism and reviewing I am suggesting should be made, although she still designates the different approaches to literary discussion as forms of criticism–journalistic criticism, essayistic criticism, and academic criticism–even if her description of the first clearly enough distinguishes it from the other, more exploratory, forms: “Journalistic critics traditionally write reviews for daily or weekly publications (i.e., newspapers) and have the widest mandate of the three forms of criticism: to review newly published fiction.” Indeed, Chong seems to narrow the mandate of reviewers (to write for newspapers), more stringently than even I would have it, since reviews by any conventional delineation of the form could and do appear in weekly and monthly periodicals (the forum for essayistic criticism according to Chong), as well as web journals and magazines. Even more narrow, of course is the restriction to coverage of “newly published fiction,” which oddly both makes the focus exclusively literary (where reviewing must be more purely a critical act) and makes the consideration of fiction by critics more like reviewing any new “product.”

By the time we have gotten to the first chapter that takes us “inside the critics’ circle,” it is manifestly apparent that the circle is a tightly encompassed one and that to the extent Chong’s sociological study of the processes of literary judgment will inform or enlighten us, it will be through a very narrow focus on the contingencies of current book reviewing (fiction only) in the United States. Moreover, the study arises from interviews only with reviewers who “had published a review in at least one of three influential review outlets,” producing what she admits is an “elite bias.” This makes Chong’s book, on the one hand, practically useless for comprehending the broad range of reviewing practices readers might encounter in the various forms of literary discussion now available, but, on the other, very helpful, even essential, in understanding why American book reviewing at the “elite” level is in its presently dismal condition (which actually it has been in for quite a long time).

In Chong’s telling, the inherent confusion that besets reviewing in prestige venues proceeds from various kinds of “uncertainty” that attends the practice. (Chong presents these uncertainties as more or less unavoidable according to established book reviewing protocols, but those protocols themselves are incoherent bordering on irrational). The first kind of uncertainty is “epistemic,” which begins in the unavoidable subjectivity of judgment but extends further to the choice of books to be reviewed in the first place and the selection of “appropriate” reviewers. The subjectivity of literary judgment is indeed an intrinsic feature of all literary criticism, but both Chong and the literary establishment she surveys proceed as if it is something to deplore and avoid. It is not. Literary criticism can exist, in fact, only as the explicit exchange of subjective perspectives. If it were actually possible to arrive at objective assessment, this would presumably be a “correct” conclusion to which all readers would willingly consent. Criticism would come to an end.

Certainly the editors Chong interviews do not seem overly concerned about “objectivity”–and certainly very little about literature–in deciding what books should be reviewed and who should review them. Although Chong’s survey doesn’t really reveal any new information about the procedures involved in carrying out these tasks, her account makes plain the extent to which American editors and reviewers adhere to a set of imperatives that, to say the least, are not much concerned with ensuring that literary merit is either identified or evaluated. The books chosen are those that are “newsworthy” or that are “interesting” to the editor or reviewer involved (subjectivity doesn’t seem to matter here), although not necessarily interesting for artistic reasons (interesting “ideas” will do). And of course the “big books” have to be reviewed, books by famous writers or that are already creating a “buzz.” Her discussion of editorial decision-making certainly justifies Chong’s declaration that “Readers may be surprised that ‘quality’ is not chief among the criteria guiding the culling process.”

Neither is choice of reviewer a question of securing the most critically cogent review. Here again the criterion is “interest,” not quality. Editors often attempt to create an artificial kind of interest by seeking out a “good match” between book and reviewer, a match that sometimes means a critic who might bring special insight into the work under review but that at other times iis based on perceived connections (often superficial) between book and reviewers, suggested by the book’s content and the reviewer’s professional or personal identity. Achieving a “good match” might thus produce newsworthy commentary of a very muffled sort, but it is external to the literary value of the work considered. Still, many book review editors consider the search for the good match to be the most essential part of their job.

Many people would say, of course, that in following these procedures in the production of book review pages, both editors and most of the reviewers they select are simply carrying out the tasks assigned to the literary journalist. And if most editors and reviewers perceive themselves to be primarily literary journalists, then there is some truth in this claim, to the extent that literary journalism is mostly an effort to report on current events. But many reviewers, at least, would like to believe that both the books they review and the reviews they write have a value beyond their transitory status as cultural news item, that both might still be read by future readers for whom the urgency of the original cultural context surely will have faded. Arguably what readers would want from critical writing in such a situation is that it illuminate the work as a literary creation not dependent on the immediate circumstances attending its reception. While certainly some reviews provide solid literary analysis transcending the contingencies of their commission, the “system” by which mainstream American book reviewing operates hardly seems one that seeks out literary merit for its own sake or that values literary criticism as a self-sufficient practice.

The choices made by reviewers themselves turn out to be almost as antithetical to the integrity of criticism as the systemic biases that govern editorial decisions–perhaps more so. In what is the most discouraging chapter in her book, Chong discusses the “social uncertainties” that putatively beset reviewers in trying to conscientiously carry out the book reviewer’s responsibilities. “Social” in this case means almost entirely the social situation occupied by most book reviewers, in which they must defensively guard against reprisal for negative reviews (in the form of a negative review in return), risk embarrassment at social gatherings, and avoid cultivating a reputation for dispensing harsh assessments, especially when “punching down” at younger or less successful writers. Reviewers admit to Chong that they try to avoid assignments that might provoke these social tensions and professional hazards, and some make it plain enough that they hold back on strong expressions of judgment, “play nice,” in Chong’s formulation. Finally the impression Chong’s survey of the practices of American book reviewers leaves is one of equivocation and evasion, when not outright dishonesty.

At times Chong herself seems on the verge of invoking such language in response to what her reviewers tell her, but instead chooses to maintain a discreet scholarly distance. In her chapter on the “institutional uncertainties” of book reviewers, she is more critical of book reviewing as a collective enterprise, noting that the reviewers she interviewed in fact had little sense of themselves as part of such an enterprise, to the point that many of them doubted that they should be called “critics.” At the same time, they are quite insistent that they should be distinguished from bloggers and other “amateurs,” although very little in their own self-conceptions as reviewers provides for such a separation. Writing for one of the “elite publications” acts a form of official approval, an “objectified signal of one’s belonging to the wider literary community”–although not a community of critics. A critic in the more rarefied sense is occupied not so much with the valuation of a text but the exercise of critical intellect more generally, which most of the critics quoted in the book insist remain outside their purview, These reviewers ultimately can’t really decide if they are simply the designated intermediaries between writers and readers, here to provide a thoughtful recommendation, or credible critical voices ready to wield an authority conveyed through deeper reading.

In my view, Chong is too hasty in making such a clear-cut distinction between the newspaper reviewing she considers in her book and the “essayistic criticism” to be found in some weekly and monthly magazines or some web journals, where she believes something closer to intellectual seriousness can be found. But while such publications (what remains of them) do publish longer and less insistently evaluative reviews and essays, many such pieces still exhibit the same features revealed in Chong’s study: a focus on “subject” beyond all other considerations, a reluctance to criticize too harshly (whether through fear of retribution or a sincere desire to be considerate), and an ultimate commitment to maintaining a literary community over advocating for literary values more generally. Of course there are critics who reinforce these values at a very high level, including in newspapers (Sam Sacks comes to mind) as well as in various other publications that feature “essayistic” reviews (both The Baffler and The Point have recently become valuable sources of such criticism). But unfortunately Phillipa Chong’s report on the assumptions shared by her more narrowly chosen representatives just doesn’t seem that far removed from the similar assumptions widely shared by of many of those who belong to what can be designated as today’s “critical establishment.”

This establishment is the logical outcome of what is now decades in which general-interest literary critics have been replaced by other writers of fiction as the go-to authors of book reviews, while fewer and fewer academic critics have been willing (or able) to cross over into general-interest criticism. At the same time, the critical tenor deemed acceptable in book reviews of fiction has followed the culture in becoming literally less judgmental–when fiction is regarded primarily as a form of “expression,” who’s to say when someone else’s expression is flawed? But judgment is not simply (or not only) an act of moral or aesthetic evaluation but is also the process of perception and analysis that precedes any such evaluation. In the current critical order, book reviewers are reluctant to invoke judgment in this latter sense, while academic critics are reluctant to engage in mere evaluation (and these days don’t exercise judgment about mere literature, which is only the conduit for the analysis of culture). A kind of criticism bridging the gap between the literary focus of popular book reviewing and the analytical scrutiny of academic criticism would be beneficial to literary culture, but it is presently without a proper place in the existing literary domain.

The Sundering of the Old and the New (John Guillory’s Professing Criticism)

John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is in every way an admirable book. It is deeply learned, sharp in its observations, unquestionably sincere in its effort to rehabilitate and reorganize the study of literature, and above all correct: literary study has indeed lost sight of its original, underlying purpose, has become too dispersed in its curricular organization, and has become helplessly caught in the shifting winds of every new and passing critical trend that comes along. It is poorly situated to resist all the demographic and institutional pressures that are destabilizing its intellectual foundations and probably threatening its continued existence as a university-based discipline. It badly needs to be reconceived and reorganized.

Unfortunately, Professing Literature is not likely to have much effect in bringing about such changes in the curriculum and objectives of academic literary study. For one thing, the book itself is short on practical, concrete suggestions for bringing them about. Most of its analysis is historical and diagnostic, providing a general critique of the current status of literature and literary criticism in the academic curriculum, providing lots of clarity about how the “profession” of literary study came into its present form but otherwise remaining content with vague exhortations about what “must” happen if it is to flourish in the future. Guillory doesn’t take names or arrest any suspects when it comes to assigning responsibility for the increasingly marginal status of literary study in the university. (Although to some extent it shares this status with the humanities in general, as the recent discourse on the “crisis” in the academic humanities would suggest.) He does speculate that the study of literature might in the near future rend itself in two, one strand branching off into the entirely topical, present-oriented focus on identity politics and social justice, while the other, much smaller, branch might still emphasize the “older” works of British and American literature. But it isn’t entirely clear whether Guillory himself favors this bifurcation or whether it’s just a concession to the inevitable given current conditions on the ground.

Guillory believes that academic critics in their latest iteration overestimate the efficacy of their politically-motivated scholarship, but while offering courses that seek to “affirm” identity or promote social justice might conceivably be more fruitful in their ultimate political effect than academic scholarship inevitably read by few people (raising consciousness at least among those who take the courses), still it is hard to see how continuing with this utilitarian approach to literature is a very promising option in securing the future of literary study. Certainly courses focusing on these issues could continue to be featured in the college curriculum, but by that time they will have little to do with “literary study” per se, which will have essentially disappeared in favor of cultural therapeutics. And at that point “scholarship” on literature will either be beside the point or a thin disguise for political homiletics. Given Guillory’s emphasis on the history of literary study’s difficulties in establishing itself as a proper “scholarly” discipline against the skeptical attitude that it belongs in the university in the first place, surely this skepticism would only be heightened in such hyperpoliticized circumstances, its status as a “discipline” only more precarious.

Perhaps literary scholarship (in the older sense of scholarship actually about literature) would persist in the vestigial programs focusing on the older array of canonical literary works. But it seems to me that the gap between the goals of these two approaches would eventually be so wide there would be little reason to associate them as merely separate ways of studying literature. The “study” of literature would surely be more appropriately applied to this second form of inquiry, although it also seems likely that this mode of study would come to be regarded as more or less an adjunct to historical studies, something like Classics, for example, ultimately considered a form of antiquarianism. This sundering of the old and the new might further have an effect on what is taken as “literature” in the new dispensation: since such a premium would be put on the personal and the immediate, memoirs and perhaps poetry would seem to be the more fruitful forms to examine, while fiction could become less central. The reduction of fiction to its ethical and political content is already a trend in literary culture more generally, so perhaps there will be some convergence on the idea that “literature” is a vehicle for direct personal “expression.”

The most significant consequence of assigning what we now think of as “literature” to a branch of purely historical study would be, paradoxically, the loss of “literary history” in what is still supposed to be literary study. For the inflection of genres or styles on a new literary work to be registered by readers, those readers need to have some familiarity with such genres and styles as visible historically. That history won’t disappear, of course, and readers could choose to avail themselves of it, but if the current resistance to the “coverage” of literary periods in the study of literature remains (likely it will only intensify) and eventually wins out entirely in the topical approach, it won’t be part of a literary education per se. Writers themselves would have less motivation to situate their work among the practices of writers of the past: why cultivate such influences when they are mostly irrelevant to the immediate needs of personal testimony and unmediated communication? (Again, this way of thinking about writing seems to me already well-advanced.) Literary history will extend back a few decades, including writers still recent enough that their work still sufficiently encompasses current concerns.

It is possible that nothing like what I am describing here will in fact come to pass. Guillory’s speculation about a possible future for literary study may be wholly mistaken (although it is not without a basis in current reality), and my own conjectures may just be a reflection of a disillusioned cynicism (if not a thoroughly retrograde point of view). Surely writers would not fully welcome a cultural environment in which their work is likely to become passé even faster than it does now. Perhaps the conflicts between the ancients and the moderns in literary study will not be entirely irreconcilable. Or at least the ancients won’t be banished entirely. Probably the status of both literature and literary study will persist for a while in its presently unsettled condition. The one thing I certainly do not see happening is some sort of “reform” of the currently muddled situation that leaves everyone who has contributed to the creation of the muddle very satisfied. The powers that be in the university hierarchy are likely to close the shutters on academic literary study before that happens.

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Fallen Artists (Claire Dederer’s Monsters)

Claire Dederer’s Monsters might seem to be an attempt to sort out the issues involved in the now resurgent debate about the relationship between an artist’s behavior in “real life” and the art he/she creates, between biography and aesthetic achievement, but what turns out to be Dederer’s actual subject is implicit in the book’s title. She is not interested in the questions that arise when we wonder how the artist’s life might clarify the art, but in the bad behavior of notorious artists (in the essay that is the ultimate source of Dederer’s book she more specifically identifies “monstrous men” as her ultimate concern) and the dilemma this creates for a “fan” of any such artist. Dederer seeks to write an “autobiography of the audience,” with herself and her own fandom as a stand-in.

Dederer gives particular emphasis to the controversies enveloping the careers of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, two filmmakers whose work has been important to her in the past. (Dederer was at one time a film critic.) In each case, she finds that the sexual offenses of which both men have been accused inevitably affect the way she now responds to their films, although in neither case do they entirely overshadow the purely artistic qualities the films still possess. For Dederer, the work of Polanski and Allen does not exactly lose its artistic credibility because of the filmmakers’ misdeeds, but it does lose the “love” that Dederer once had for it. While surely the value placed on all of the artistic expressions Claire Dederer discusses in her book (films, visual art, music, literary works) arises also from defensible critical standards, the appeal to “art love” and the priority she gives to our emotional responses to art do indeed evoke the attitude toward art expressed by modern fan culture.

Dederer does venture outside her own personal relationship to art to look directly at fan culture in its response to the transgressions of J,K. Rowling and Michael Jackson (although she is also a fan of the latter). With Rowling, of course, the alleged wrongdoing comes not from abusive actions she has committed but from her exercise of speech–speech that has been judged to be transphobic. Dederer expresses sympathy for those of Rowling’s readers whose love of her books have been marred by what they believe is a betrayal of what they took the books to be saying to them, but her analysis of the situation is really quite attenuated. She does not consider whether Rowling’s words really are transphobic, whether the Harry Potter books or the films adapted from those books are actually marked by some sort of hostility or prejudice toward transgender people, or why Rowling’s later publicly stated opinions are at all relevant to the aesthetic experience of those works. Indeed, the source of disappointment among Rowling’s fans seems to be that the Harry Potter books are an inspiration to those who feel shunned or excluded, so that further discussion of these questions could presumably illuminate more fully the valid (or invalid) connections that can be made between an artist’s public utterances and that artist’s work.

If we are entitled to come to our own interpretation of a work of art without deference to the artist’s perspective (his/her “intention”), then it is at the least unclear why the artist’s unwelcome views on other matters should be given any additional weight, either. If one’s “love” of the artwork must be extended to an unconditional acceptance of everything the artist might do or say, then that love is grounded on a shaky foundation. Dederer throughout the book maintains that responses to art are legitimately emotional, but if love of a particular artwork can’t withstand the encounter with extrinsic realities such as the artist’s expression of opinion, then emotion itself has prevailed over appreciation of those qualities that make the work artistically compelling. Ultimately the whole approach to art exemplified in Monsters focuses on interpretation, the audience’s way of emotionally processing and placing value on the work, rather than the actual experience of an artistic creation, during which, if the experience is genuinely attentive, issues relating to the artist’s opinions or behaviors in real life play no role.

Dederer would assert, of course, that these non-artistic factors can’t help but intrude on aesthetic experience, especially if the artist is a “monster.” This is what makes it a “dilemma.” But such an intrusion doesn’t just happen, unbidden. We allow it to happen. Even want it to. We are in the middle of a cultural phase in which morality takes priority over aesthetics, so that our esteem for the work must be accompanied by esteem for the life. Not only is the artist’s interpretation of the work irrelevant, but the artist must be held accountable to our own interpretation: the “J.K. Rowling” who wrote Harry Potter must not be the sort of person who would make questionable remarks about transgendered people; the “Woody Allen” who created all those nebbishy characters portrayed by Allen himself must in fact be in real life a nebbish who could never be regarded as a sexual predator. It’s a curious inversion of the proposition proffered by formalist critics that the artist’s life be held separate from the art so that we can perceive the latter clearly. Now we must merge the artist and the art into a seamless whole.

Dederer certainly does question the validity of this separation (citing skeptically the male friends and critics who advised her she must approach Allen’s films only for “the aesthetics”), although she does not take the reversal of the biographical fallacy quite so far. For the most part, her book is an attempt to think through the implications of the increased attention to the moral failings of prominent artists, not to erase all distinctions between biography and artistic performance. She is alert to the moral ambiguity in some cases and in others (Polanski) concludes that we must simply live with the tension between great art and compromised artist. The best chapter in the book “The Anti-Monster,” in fact challenges the facile moralism that would condemn Vladimir Nabokov simply for writing Lolita, with its truly monstrous protagonist, as if Nabokov is projecting his own attitudes in his portrayal of Humbert Humbert. Dederer’s scrupulous analysis persuasively demonstrates that in Lolita Nabokov creates a monstrous character, but this does not mean he does so as an endorsement of Humbert’s attitudes and behavior. An attentive reading of Lolita reveals that the story of Lolita is the story of a young girl’s devastation, actually not by a monster but by an otherwise unremarkable man (a “run of the mill child abuser”) giving in to his worst impulses while concocting elaborate justifications.

Nabokov may indeed have descended into his own inner darkness to conceive a character such as Humbert Humbert, but ultimately all artists must have access to this sort of darkness or their art will be incomplete, naïve about human errancy. By the end of her book, Dederer has concluded that we are all in our way monstrous (she cites her own flawed behavior), in a way perhaps like Humbert Humbert in our capacity to wreck the potential inherent in our youthful selves. She suggests that, just as we can extend a kind of empathetic understanding to loved ones who have transgressed without forgetting the transgression, we should extend the same kind of understanding to favored artists and their faults. I myself don’t really think this analogy between “art love” and love of people is altogether convincing–they seem to me completely different things, if the former is even real–but Dederer’s solution to the problem that she thinks has become more urgent for her may be the only judicious one to be found.

Dederer’s examination of this problem doesn’t really try to resolve any properly “philosophical” issues underlying it. She mostly sticks to reflection on the emotional turbulence audiences experience trying to reconcile their attachment to the art object with their disgust at the behavior of the artist. In another recently published book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, Erich Hatala Matthes explicitly does attempt to sort through the concerns about “immoral artists” from a philosophical perspective. Matthes, a moral philosopher who teaches at Wellesley College, is interested both in the moral qualities of art itself and in the implications of immoral behavior by artists, as well as whether “cancellation” is an appropriate response to such behavior. Matthes focuses more or less exclusively on the same recent controversies on which Dederer concentrates, without much if any reference to questions about the moral behavior of artists in the more distant artistic/literary past, or to any previous lines of literary or philosophical inquiry into the relationship between art and artist.

In his consideration of the proposition that an artist’s immoral behavior diminishes the aesthetic value of the work, Matthes leans on the examples of r & b musician R. Kelley and Woody Allen, specifically in Manhattan. (To judge by these two books, Allen seems to be ground zero in the discourse about fallen artists, even though the relevant charges against him go back thirty years now.) Matthes’s determination that a song by Kelley that seems to celebrate sexual exploitation is confirmed in its immorality by Kelley’s history of sexual exploitation seems like an obvious conclusion few would dispute. On the other hand, his further contention that Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn retroactively imports an “aesthetic flaw” into Manhattan because his actions give us “reasons not to respond to the work in the prescribed way ” seems to me utterly preposterous. Putting aside whether Allen’s conduct with Soon-Yi was in fact immoral (Soon-Yi herself, a college student at the time, has never suggested that it was), the notion that Manhattan “prescribes” that we accept the film’s portrayal of 40-something Isaac’s involvement with the 17 year-old Tracy as unproblematic is absurd. The film prescribes nothing. It interjects an element of moral ambiguity into the conventional narrative progression of the romantic comedy, but we are free to resolve that ambiguity according to our own moral sensibility. Plenty of people find the central relationship compelling, while others do balk at its moral ramifications. The film doesn’t require either of these responses, and to say that it does is at the very least a myopic interpretation.

Although Matthes thus does believe that we can reject the work of immoral artists both on moral and aesthetic grounds–he makes no claim that all artist immorality leads to the latter, however, nor does he think that continuing to patronize an artist’s work necessarily makes one “complicit” with the artist’s behavior–he doesn’t feel that cancellation of individual artists is the most appropriate action to take. It won’t really solve the problem, he argues, and the potential for overreach is too great. Instead, the institutions responsible for producing and curating art works should be held more responsible for creating and enforcing standards of behavior. According to Matthes, such action will minimize the number of egregious cases that now provoke cancellation.

This might seem like a reasonable proposal, but, speaking for myself, I fear such a prospect more than the occasional cancellation of this or that artist. To invest these “institutions” (publishers, museums, other arts organizations) with the ability to police the activities of artists is an invitation to interference with artistic freedom, outright censorship and the establishment of a moral autocracy in the arts. Artists are notoriously unreliable as exemplars of moral propriety. If an artist crosses a line into the clearly forbidden, put him in jail. If he merely acts in ways that you deplore, stop being a part of his audience, but don’t start imposing rules for correct artist behavior. Someday you could be the one accused of some alleged dereliction and banished into the void.

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Defending Judgment? (Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment)

Readers casually coming upon the title of Michael W. Clune’s book, A Defense of Judgment (2021), might understandably assume that it will make a case for the legitimacy of evaluation in literary criticism, the process of weighing the artistic value of a literary work. However, this title proves to be misleading in more than one way: the book has little to say about how a critic might arrive at a valid judgment, and, in the end, the method that Clune advocates and ultimately models for us is not actually judgment at all.

Clune is interested in restoring what he calls judgment to a respectable place in academic literary study, although less as a strategy for the academic critic to use than as a foundation for a revived mission of “academic education” as the justification of literary study as a discipline. Clune wants literature professors to abandon their concession to the irremediable subjectivity of judgment as valuation and freely acknowledge that some literary works (works of art in general) are better than others, more worthy of students’ attention. This would entail giving up on the dogmatic insistence on equality as the supreme value of an enlightened profession and admitting that academic expertise exists and should give the views of putative experts some additional weight. Literature professors, according to Clune, should be willing to enlist their expertise in an effort to teach their students how to appreciate the distinctive value of literature,

Clune’s critique of the problem academic literary study has created for itself through the demotion of “literature itself” to a secondary status (secondary to theory, historical context, or cultural politics) is astute, and seems to me almost certainly correct. To avow that all responses to works of literature are equally valid is to deny the very basis on which literary study entered the academy in the first place–if the professors in this “field” have no special standing by which their views on it carry extra weight, then what’s the purpose of the field and why specialize in it? Notwithstanding all of the appeals to theoretical or cultural knowledge to which literary academics have retreated while dispensing with aesthetic analysis or the explication of ideas (to cite Clune’s favored object of study), the floundering around with one new approach after another over the last 40 years of academic literary study has surely left the discipline vulnerable to the kinds of depredations inflicted on it recently–from defunding to elimination of programs to attacks on its supposed left-wing biases–such that its future is now legitimately in question. Taking stock of the purpose of literary study is certainly in order.

The solution to these problems that Clune has in mind, which he illustrates in the second half of the book, might return literary instruction back to literature, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually involve judgment in any noticeable way. Clune offers readings of works by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Gwendolyn Brooks, apparently seeking in all of these cases the literary ideas they disclose–ideas that, we are to infer, can be discovered only through the kind of close scrutiny exemplified by Clune’s analysis. The interpretations that emerge from this analysis are interesting and perceptive–Clune’s contention that Bernhard’s Woodcutters both accepts the “postmodern” critique of art as compromised by social relations and evades it by shedding the “social” altogether is particularly provocative–but they are interpretations. The only form of judgment at work is the initial judgment that this text is worth your attention, and the focus is almost exclusively on ferreting out the theme, the idea that Clune wants to make available to examination. If these readings are to contribute to aesthetic education, they would do so without much reference to the aesthetic as an existing property of literary works.

I am not suggesting that Clune ought to be advocating the use of the classroom as a space in which to pronounce literary judgments. I am perfectly content with interpretation as a classroom method of teaching literature, but at the least Clune’s invocation of it makes these concluding chapters seem anticlimactic, the application of what turns out to be a familiar strategy in a book that initially promises a radical reorientation of a discipline desperately in need of occupational resuscitation. If Clune’s method was adopted (which doesn’t seem that likely), at least it would have the virtue of returning ostensible teachers of literature to literary qualities as the focus of instruction, but I don’t see much evidence that today’s cadre of literature professors has much interest in such a restoration. However, a reluctance to use the classroom as an opportunity to reinforce a particular judgment of quality in a literary work–lets all gather round and appreciate this text–is not inherently misguided.

Making judgments about quality is of course considered one of the appropriate goals of book reviewing, but even here, judgment is often applied. . .injudiciously. Most reviews offer value judgments, but the majority of them are blandly affirmative, as if the mere act of writing a novel or collecting a set of short stories is in itself a praiseworthy act, the substantive artistic achievement of the work notwithstanding. Many render their judgments, positive or negative, without much reference to the relevant qualities of the work that might validate the judgment, while others spend most of the allotted space summarizing, as if merely telling us what happens or identifying the characters should obviously demonstrate that the critic’s verdict is justified. I myself spend a good deal of space in a review–most of it–describing the observable features of the work, but examining the formal order of the work, assessing how it is put together, is not the same thing as summary. It seeks to discover the artistry of the work (or the flaws), not reduce it to its most conventional elements.

If A Defense of Judgment does not finally provide a compelling alternative to current practice in academic literary study, it does help to make clear that the original (and still most coherent) justification for the study of literature in the university was rooted in the assumption that some kinds of imaginative writing were more worthwhile than others, and that by contemplating such works students would indeed acquire profound if intangible knowledge not available elsewhere. They would learn how to recognize great works of verbal art. This justification has been dismissed out of hand as incorrigibly elitist by most of those in the current “profession” of literary study. Given current cultural conditions, in the United States, at least, it is hard to see how that original warrant could ever be revived, even though on its current trajectory, the future of literary academe is most likely one that ushers in its demise.

Thunder and Illumination (The Role of Criticism)

Grievances against critics often stir up debate about the proper role of arts criticism, and, indeed, a recent complaint by an American actor prompted the British critic and editor Lola Seaton to contemplate this question, focusing mostly on book reviewing. In her New Statesman article, Seaton frames the issue as an inquiry into the relationship between critic and author, but her real subject is the critic’s own underlying conception of reviewing itself as a literary form.

Seaton offers the critic Adam Mars-Jones as an especially rigorous exponent of the review as a self-sufficient composition. The goal of a review, according to Mars-Jones, is to address a “potential reader” who is “being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment” although “a reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way.” In Seaton’s words, criticism “is not an unerring ranking system but a form of personal expression, and a good review is not right (or not only right) but convincing, fresh, entertaining, satisfying, perceptive.” In my words: according to this view, a reviewer has autonomy in his/her judgment, separate from any consideration of the author of the work, but also can assert an autonomy separate from any ultimate consideration of the work under review, or any particular critical principles that should be applied to it. If the review is “satisfying” as a piece of writing, it has succeeded in the only requirement this notion of criticism imposes.

Seaton suggests that reserving some consideration for the author might temper the potential abuses of this approach to reviewing, but otherwise seems to accept the Mars-Jones position as an accurate accounting of the goals of criticism. She brings in other critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick, who seem to agree with the Mars-Jones view (although Hardwick is really more concerned that the critic’s autonomy result in “the communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself”), and she quotes approvingly James Wolcott’s characterization of reviews at their best as the source of “thunder and illumination.” Ultimately Seaton does seem to side most with Hardwick, suggesting that the author and the critic should be a “mutually advantageous collaboration,” the author and critic “reciprocally at work at shaping taste.”

I am myself unsympathetic both to the idea that the critic’s job is “shaping taste” and to the underlying assumption that the critic’s overriding task is to “guide towards pleasure and to provide it,” to act on the one hand as a judge and on the other as a performer. The latter two functions are in conflict with each other, the attempt to combine them often responsible for empty “snark” or overwrought, vacuous praise. But the alternative to a labored liveliness is not to assume the gatekeeper’s role, to fancy oneself a high cultural influencer or a guardian of eternal verities. All of these roles are really an attempt to elevate the critic to a position of prominence equivalent to the writer, but I don’t see why this is necessary. The writer and the critic have different jobs to do, although they certainly do converge around the literary work the writer has offered. But the writer has indeed offered us something with a claim to being a work of art, a compelling work of nonfiction, or a contribution to some intellectual discipline. At this point, the writer can’t really expect to be able to control the responses to the book, and the critic provides (or ought to provide) an especially well-considered response, drawing on that critic’s presumed knowledge and experience.

In my view, the critic should be expected not to educate the reader’s taste or to engage in rhetorical display but to bring to the literary work his/her fully engaged attention and be able to describe the salient features of the work that careful reading discloses. If the critic’s appraisal is to have weight beyond facile judgments that treat works of literature as if they were just another consumer good (albeit of a culturally refined sort), evaluation is actually secondary, even subservient, to the depth of such description. The critic does not owe the author a positive judgment, but does owe both author and reader the application of whatever intelligence and insight that critic can summon in the attempt to more keenly discern the work’s fundamental features. A particularly scrupulous exposition of the work’s character can itself serve as an implicit assessment of its success or failure, without the addition of a conventional act of judgment at all. To perceive the literary work’s formal and stylistic elements clearly is at the same time to recognize its achievement.

Some might regard the kind of critical approach I am advocating as too fussily “academic,” but academic criticism has in fact long since abandoned interest in aesthetic evaluation as something that is unavoidably subjective and irredeemably hierarchical. If book reviewing is to be the only remaining source of what was once known as literary criticism, and reviewing is to be regarded more as an exercise in self-expression than a focused contemplation of literature, then for me criticism has essentially ceased to exist. Of course there are critics who defy the current strictures in academic criticism against “formalism,” as well as those among reviewers who resist the pressure to act as a judge or a consumer advocate, and offer astute, closely observed literary criticism. It is, however, discouraging that such critics stand out as exceptions to the general practice.

It won’t be surprising if I say that I myself identify with these recalcitrant critics who persist in considering the aesthetic standing of the literary work itself to be the object of their attention, not its convenience as a cultural index or as a prompt for the critic’s own discursive fancies. I have written the kind of criticism that attempts to explicate what it is like to read a work or an author while also as fully as possible approaching the work on the terms it sets up for itself. This does not entail insisting that all concerns “outside the text” are irrelevant, but it does presume that considering such concerns–cultural, historical, political, biographical–is not the immediate task the critic should perform, as has become the default assumption in most academic criticism, although they inevitably influence the “content” a work of fiction turns to its own purposes through form and style. Reducing a literary work to what it might “say,” might “tell us” or “reveal” is not, in my view an act of criticism; no amount of “close reading” devised to arrive at such formulations can make this activity “critical” in any way that is adequate to the allusiveness and indirection inherent in both fiction and poetry that distinguish them from ordinary forms of expository discourse. Admittedly I have adopted my particular critical strategy in part because I focus so much (not exclusively) on adventurous or experimental fiction, which especially requires, it seems to me, an approach emphasizing description and explication. Although in most cases I do make clear the extent to which I think an “experiment” has succeeded or not, such a judgment is really not very meaningful unless it is accompanied by evidence of careful reading. If I had more interest in covering the contemporary literary scene as a whole (which might possibly have gotten me a larger audience), perhaps I would have developed a style more agreeable to Adam Mars-Jones, but I don’t think this would make me a better critic. I might have more book review assignments than I have right now, however.

The Novel Could Be Dead (Mark McGurl’s Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon)

Taken together, Mark McGurl’s three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author’s attempt to perceive the entire “literary field” of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl’s and the rise of “digital humanities,” embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to “see it all.”

The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a “literary field” is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants–writers, critics, publishers–occupy a “position” in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the “field of power” from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic–“cultural capital.”

I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu’s. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the “literary world,” but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in “material” concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn’t really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)

McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an “elite” preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the “art novel,” which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl’s books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon’s success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don’t realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.

This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and “naïve” literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their “hermeneutic” skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed “new knowledge” (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar’s time for mere “appreciation.”

There are indications throughout McGurl’s three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl’s real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in “genuinely historical materialist terms.” In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl’s account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that “unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics.”

Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of “empirical traits and characteristics”! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature–the experience of the actual “traits and characteristics” a literary text offers–could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.

These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl’s sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration–although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities–and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene–and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain–he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current “literary field,” since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called “mainstream”–either commercially or culturally–nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.

Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl’s book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of “LitRPG” novels, or the “alpha billionaire” subgenre of romance novels, or that “there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature.” While I’m willing to take McGurl’s word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I’m less willing to concede they are part of “literature”) and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon’s book-related services, that McGurl’s intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon’s annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon’s digital machinery.

McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon–or at least that is Amazon’s rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure’s influence, and, while the nature of this influence can’t necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.

Thus the title of McGurl’s book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon’s maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place–and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl’s classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most “literary fiction”), “epic” and “romance,” reduces the current “literary field” to simple binaries that don’t remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as “just another genre” in McGurl’s simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of “cultural critic” to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded–an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. “Maximalism” and “minimalism” as terms employed in McGurls’s analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.

McGurl’s adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon’s business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won’t get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon’s status as a provider of “service” at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn’t seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.

For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills–and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs –the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon’s presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.

McGurl’s account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of “literature” will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise.

What They Refer To (Jess Row’s White Flights)

If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of “whiteness” comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn’t have much to say about Lish’s own writing), Lish, in Row’s analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an “innocence” in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this–White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission–but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case.

Row sees Lish as an inheritor of modernism’s antagonism to “ordinary language,” which finds its expression in Lish’s by now familiar formulation of an approach to style that has come to be called “consecution.” This style is best known in the work of acolytes such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Sam Lipsyte, but Row extends it to cover other writers not necessarily associated with the practice as most memorably described by Lutz in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”: Ben Marcus, Don DeLillo, and even Raymond Carver, all of whom have had some association with Lish. Indeed, the chapter in White Flights devoted to Lish’s influence is framed by a consideration of Lish’s editing of Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (originally titled “Beginners”), in which Row examines one particular excision (out of many, we now know) of a brief passage in the original relating an anecdote told by a character whose role is much diminished in the final, published version.

The anecdote is related to one of the characters, a doctor, by a patient named Henry Gates who, along with his wife, is in the hospital after a car accident (it is part of a more extended episode about these characters, which Lish cut from the story). It is a somewhat sentimental reminiscence of the patient’s experience dancing with his wife on wintry evenings in their home in Oregon, presumably meant to add “color” to the portrayal of this character. Row interprets Lish’s act of removing such color as an effort to erase this character’s social status as poor white (a status shared by Carver while growing up in Yakima, Washington), and thus to eliminate the markers of whiteness in the character. Lish himself, of course, would presumably contest this interpretation vociferously, attributing the cut to the same impulse that led him to so severely pare down so many of Carver’s drafts in the first place, an attempt to gain more forceful impact through subtraction of extraneous details, to achieve a kind of bleak objectivity by following the principle that less is more.

But we can’t really know from Row’s account what Lish hoped to accomplish in his editing of Carver because Row does not allow Lish–or anyone else who might offer a form or style-based assessment of the effect of his editorial judgment–to explain his choices. Instead he asserts the “violence” of Lish’s amputation of Henry Gates from “Beginners” with little analysis of Lish’s (or Carver’s) motives beyond bad faith and quickly moves on to discussions of Roman Jakobson’s examination of aphasia, of the genealogy of “white trash,” and of other writers contemporaneous with Carver, some associated with Lish, some not; occasionally he returns to Lish and his pernicious effect on Carver (on American fiction in general), where he amplifies his original contention that Lish’s editing of “Beginners” impeded Carver’s development as a writer engaged in interrogating whiteness. “What was Lish doing when he struck the story of Henry and Anna Gates from ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?’” Row asks during one of these detours back to the ostensible subject of the chapter. “He was erasing, or policing, in part, a gesture toward the particularity of Carver’s own whiteness.” But again this claim goes mostly unsupported, as he immediately (in the very next sentence) begins a lengthy survey of Raymond Carver’s background and the turn in 1980s fiction to “a new kind of American regional writing.”

Row’s procedure in this chapter ostensibly on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish is representative of his method in White Flights as a whole. It is a frustrating blend of criticism, autobiography (in this chapter Row also ponders his own background, as well as his enthusiasm for certain indie rock bands), and digressions on various writers, theorists, and scholars that perhaps provides some rhetorical variation, but also ultimately muddles the book’s focus and makes tracking its argument (if if does indeed have an argument) a challenging task. This approach is especially disconcerting in the chapter on Carver and Lish, since Row makes generalizations about both writers that are entirely disputable–and in Lish’s case, arguably question his integrity–but offers so little evidence the dispute can’t extend beyond bald assertions. (He does this. No, he doesn’t.) No doubt such an approach well serves Row’s impressionistic purposes, but criticism needs more than cursory impressions.

Thus the case Row makes for the baleful influence of Gordon Lish unfolds mostly through insinuation. He does not say that Lish has dubious racial attitudes, but certainly implies as much:

While the past four decades have seen the emergence of “multicultural literature”–that ambivalent phrase, full of coded resentment–as a significant, even dominant, element of the American literary scene, Lish has operated in a parallel aesthetic universe that deals neither in culture nor multiplicity.

“Whether Lish deliberately avoided working with nonwhite writers is a significant question for his biographers,” Row additionally avers, but, conveniently enough, claims this is not the question he wants to pursue. (Presumably just the intimation will do–again without any evidence to suggest such a charge might be true.) Lish’s baneful influence resides in the way his aesthetic permeated writing workshops, where white writers (including Row himself) learned to absorb “a radical practice of shame.”

I confess that this is the element of Row’s critique of whiteness in contemporary fiction that I find hardest to understand. It seems to be rooted primarily in Lish’s editing of Carver’s fiction, but Row also draws on Mark McGurl’s analysis in The Program Era, which applies the concept of inherent shame to minimalism more broadly: “If the modern world is a world of risk, a ‘Risk Society.’” according to McGurl, “then minimalism is an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful.” Presumably this hyper-carefulness represents a reluctance to indulge in emotion, which is prompted less by an aesthetic preference for understatement (resulting in a “beautiful” surface) than a fear of emotional exposure, which in this context is interpreted (by McGurl) as “shame.”

Although it seems just as likely that such emotional reticence reveals a desire to avoid sentimentality in art rather than emotion per se, it is at least possible to construe the restrained “cool” of minimalist fiction as a fear of emotional disclosure (although in most cases it is really a fear expressed by the characters in the fiction rather than by the author). But Row wants to transform this restraint more broadly into a kind of embarrassment about “identity,” using Don DeLillo (whose association with minimalism is, to, say the least, rather obscure) as his quite puzzling example. While it has been claimed that DeLillo’s work shows few signs of his Italian-American heritage, Row claims to the contrary that Underworld, for one, “vibrates with an ethnic consciousness that may be suppressed by historical and cultural forces, but is not extinguished and is all the more powerful for being so powerfully repressed, not only in one narrative, but throughout DeLillo’s early career. Yet to say so surrounds the book, its characters, and DeLillo himself with radiating waves of shame.”

I find this interpretation literally unfathomable. Is this shame about being Italian-American? About being white? I must say I find the first possibility extremely implausible, and I don’t understand how the second would have any bearing on our reading of Underworld. Further, what possible connection could any of this have to the initial kind of shame attributed to Raymond Carver? Row seems to be positing an extraordinarily dispersed “shame” among white writers, so dispersed it becomes a shame without an object–or at least without a purpose that would explain why we should consider it in interpreting their work. When Row also invokes the concept to describe the “shaming voice” of critics who once warned him off of overly tendentious or sentimental writers, the term has been extended beyond any useful meaning as a tool of analysis.

Even if we accepted that something like shame subliminally influences some writers’ choice of subject or representational strategy, by the time we have gotten to the end of this chapter and its summative conclusion about shame–“White writing is a covenant, a shared understanding, about what is sayable and what is unsayable and not allowed”–we have come a long way from the opening gambit adducing Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver as an episode in need of explication. Along the way, much mischief has been attributed to Lish, an outsize authority bestowed upon him, with very little in the way of credible evidence to support either. To be sure, anyone not previously much familiar with Lish’s career would probably from Row’s account adjudge him to be a nefarious figure nevertheless, responsible for perpetuating very retrograde attitudes among American writers.

It is likely, however, that the real object of Row’s disdain is not Gordon Lish himself but what he represents, that antipathy for “ordinary language,” his belief in the literary as artifice. As Row also puts it:

The faith Lish professes–and it’s clearly a faith–has to do with an immanent quality of words and sentences, a kind of radical non-instrumentalism, which insists on treating words not as dependent on what they refer to but as entirely self-sufficient and beautiful in themselves.

While I would not go so far as to say that Row presents Lish as a postmodernist, a proponent of the formally unorthodox in fiction, he does here cast him as an aesthete, someone more interested in the beauty to be made of language when cultivated for its own sake in literary works than in its objects of representation. Aestheticism is highly out of favor in today’s literary/critical climate, its self-imposed detachment from social realities possible only as a move unavailable to writers and readers entangled in those realities. Lish is someone indifferent to such readers (and writers who want to reach them), who doesn’t appreciate that sentences are not self-sufficient but need to be sent “out of their loneliness and back into the world where they belong.” Is a concern for the aesthetic qualities of literature–the belief that literary art is first of all art–inherently an insular, protected outlook that allows indifference to “the world” and its injustices–and therefore available only to white writers? Aren’t Gordon Lish’s attempts to transform “ordinary language” actually the same attempts, in principle if not in their particulars, made by all writers, fiction writers and poets alike, in their shaping and figuration of language beyond the straightforward effort to “communicate”? Aren’t these sorts of transformations the very essence of literature? If Jess Row wants American fiction in the future to be “reparative,” I can’t see at all how asking writers to abandon literature contributes to the cause.

Hiding in Plain Sight (Albert Rolls’s Thomas Pynchon: Demon in the Text)

It has always seemed to me that of the two most notorious literary recluses of the late 20th century, JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, it was Salinger whose whereabouts provoked the most interest. Perhaps this is because Salinger was more visible in the early part of his career, and his withdrawal thus seemed more puzzling, or perhaps it was just that Catcher in the Rye had been such an overwhelming success (fleeing from which may have been one motivating factor in his behaviour) that fans wanted more of the author’s comments about it. (Eventually Gravity’s Rainbow may have achieved such status with Pynchon readers as well, but it took a while for Pynchon to gain cult-like status.) Certainly, Pynchon’s work seemed more esoteric than Salinger’s, but at the same time his elusiveness was, if anything, more complete. Yet ultimately few strenuous efforts to expose his whereabouts comparable to the stalking of Salinger were ever really reported, even in his later years when he was essentially hiding in plain sight in New York City.

In a way that is not true of Salinger and his work, Pynchon’s fiction has seemed sufficiently enigmatic that readers have been preoccupied enough with interpretation that inquiry into the author’s biography could be taken as less urgent. Further, both the subjects and situations of Pynchon’s novels (perhaps less with the early stories) appear far enough removed (historically, geographically, personally) from what we do know of Pynchon’s biographical circumstances that even those who might be intrigued about Pynchon’s withdrawal from a public role as author and his reasons for persisting in his seclusion perhaps wonder whether acquiring more information about his life would be particularly helpful in coming to terms with the work. Still, a book such as Joanna Freer’s Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture seems to demonstrate pretty firmly the influence of the 1960s on Pynchon’s preoccupations as a writer, so presumably more familiarity with his attitudes and activities during this time at least would shed some light on the source of those preoccupations.

Albert Rolls’s Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text reinforces Freer’s focus on Pynchon’s endorsement of countercultural values, but doesn’t merely read the fiction as an engagement with them. Instead, it attempts to identify Pynchon’s own sublimated appearances in the fiction as a ‘demon in the text’, through whom the dynamic energies at work in the fiction are prevented from dissipating into a kind of interpretive entropy, kept circulating as literary possibilities when their source in the short-lived promise of deliverance represented in the actual American counterculture has gone into eclipse. For this reason, Pynchon’s public persona must remain cloaked in secrecy, or the continued efficacy of the textual persona is threatened. Nevertheless, Pynchon’s autobiographical presence is still detectable in the fiction’s particulars. Rolls shows that in ‘Entropy’, Pynchon’s situation in his immediate post-collegiate years is reflected in the pairing of Meatball Mulligan and Callisto, the former of whom is depicted in the story as pursuing the most appropriate strategy in confronting the entropic disorder in his apartment, choosing to ‘engage’ with it rather than retreat into isolation as Callisto does. Pynchon, as well, chose a form of such involvement, according to Rolls, in attempting a career as novelist – the equivalent of confronting the ‘disorder’ with which Meatball contends – rather than staying at Cornell and perhaps becoming an academic. Paradoxically, such academic isolation no doubt would have precluded the ‘enclave of privacy’, as Rolls puts it, that Pynchon the novelist has maintained.

From Rolls’s perspective on the way the ‘life’ inflects the work in Pynchon’s case, it would seem that Pynchon’s fiction is a near-reversal of TS Eliot’s dictum that a literary work is an ‘escape from personality’. To the extent we can determine the ‘personality’ of Thomas Pynchon, it can only be found in the work, as the writer has deliberately escaped from the kind of public presence that might allow us to deduce a personality at least comparable to that which we might attribute to other writers of his stature. Of course, that personality must remain a construct, imputed by the critic – or the critic-biographer – who with Pynchon has to settle for ‘available information’ – even derived from ‘rumor’– and proceed by asking, ‘What shape can be traced over the cluster of information that one finds’.Thus the biographical critic posits an authorial shaping presence embedded in the fiction, but that presence has already been shaped by the fiction fashioned by the critic.

Does this necessarily invalidate the insights – primarily the insights into the implications of the work, but also the life – that this biographical fiction helps supply? Not really, to judge by the readings Rolls provides in his short book (100 pages, but 35 pages of notes), not just of the early fiction but also the later works Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. (Against the Day and Mason & Dixon receive much less attention presumably because their historical settings less obviously display immediate autobiographical connections, especially those expressive of Pynchon’s ties to the counterculture or of the nomadic life in which Pynchon persisted in the years after the success of Gravity’s Rainbow). The attention given to Inherent Vice, as well as Vineland, is, of course, on the one hand entirely expected, since they are the novels most directly reflective of the counterculture era itself, but on the other is simply welcome acknowledgement of these books as centrally important Pynchon novels, since both of them have been accused (the latter by no less than David Foster Wallace) of being relatively lightweight entries in the Pynchon oeuvre. In these novels ostensibly nostalgic for the lost promise of the counterculture, we actually find, as Rolls has it, recognition ‘that a pure adherence to the Dionysian principle is as problematic as a rigorous acceptance of the Apollonian principle. Rigorous adherence to either principle alone leaves one unliberated, caught in a mode of being from which escape is necessary’.

Rolls takes Pynchon’s mediating ‘demon’ figure in Vineland to be the investigator Takeshi, in Inherent Vice, protagonist Doc Sportello himself. Each of these characters act as the ‘liberators’ of those around them, facilitating the escape into a more unobstructed consciousness of the socially and politically imposed narratives in which they find themselves enclosed. While focusing on the roles these characters play in the larger narrative of entrapment and confusion Pynchon has devised in all of his novels provides a perfectly sound critical pivot around which to render a plausibly synoptic view of Pynchon’s work, however, it still seems germane to ask whether finally it is necessary to identify these characters specifically as stand-ins for ‘Tom Pynchon’, the actually existing individual with all of his ‘real’ experiences. For Takeshi and Doc to serve the function they do in Rolls’s reading of the novels does not, it seems to me, require they autobiographically correspond to any particular motivating circumstance or any specific ‘phase’ in Pynchon’s life. We need not know anything at all about Thomas Pynchon (even less than we do know) to appreciate the ‘demon’ figure (more precisely an identifiable character type) as a device used in the novels to illustrate a process of discovery that propels all of their plots – although some characters are better able to act on what is discovered than others.

Certainly, a case could be made that this orientation to his characters and their dilemmas is what Pynchon in fact wants from readers, else why otherwise take such pains to hide his biographical circumstances in the first place. Of course, it may be just as likely that Pynchon recognised that in the vacuum of information readers (and critics) would confront, they were likely to fill it with what speculation and purposeful interpretation (including misinterpretation) can summon. One could argue as well that among the possible allegorical readings of Pynchon’s epic quest narratives is that they mirror the reader’s own attempt to encompass Pynchon’s novels with an interpretive resolution to their own persistent mysteries, both the aesthetic and thematic indeterminacy inside the text and the historical/biographical uncertainties outside. The enigmatic aura surrounding both Thomas Pynchon’s work and his life may be mutually reinforcing, so that the very attempt to use the latter to illuminate the former seems a precarious endeavour, works of imagination understood through inference and supposition substituting for verifiable fact.

Rolls is entirely correct that the best a biographer of Pynchon can do is draw such inferences from ‘available information’ – even if this effort in effect amounts to a ‘metaphorical quest’ – and The Demon in the Text actually serves as a useful guide to the trustworthy sources of that information we do have about Pynchon’s life. From the letters to college friend Kirkpatrick Sale and to his publisher (of V) Corlies Smith and agent Candida Donadio, to the Pynchon collection in the Harry Ransom Center, to the non-fiction pieces written by Pynchon himself, to the 2013 essay by Boris Kachka that may be the most sustained piece of reliable biographical writing on Pynchon, the book sifts through this material so that the applications of the life to the work (and to some extent vice versa) that Rolls makes never really threaten to themselves escape into pure conjecture. Since the book addresses an academic audience (at least in the sense it assumes already existing familiarity both with Pynchon’s novels and the generally accepted biographical details of his life), it does not really offer the casual or novice Pynchon reader with an organised account of the known facts of Pynchon. But finally The Demon in the Text does reinforce a view that Pynchon’s work reflects not just his erudition or attention to historical detail but his extended response to the cultural and political realities of his time.

But it hardly seems possible that he might have done otherwise. Surely a writer cannot live outside his time and place, certainly not a writer like Pynchon, whose work resonates so distinctly with the felt urgencies of the literary era it occupies. Thomas Pynchon seems the epitome of the writer for whom biographical readings – however tenuous they might have to be in the first place – are destined to offer ever-diminishing returns. Eventually we may learn more about Thomas Pynchon’s life, but about the work this is likely to tell us only what we already know.

Beyond the Narrative Arc (Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode)

In the epilogue to Meander, Spiral, Explode, a book that ostensibly tries to make a case for unconventional form in fiction, Jane Alison writes:

So often, fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling. They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities. But the mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters. . . .

This is not an uncommon accusation against experimental fiction, but usually it is made by people without sympathy for formally adventurous fiction, not writers who have just otherwise expressed approval of work that seeks out alternative narrative strategies in a book about such strategies. It almost seems as if Alison is worried that readers might confuse the kind of writing she has discussed for that arid “game-playing” sort of fiction with which “experimental writers” are most often identified.

But exactly how “often” does experimental fiction sacrifice “feeling” for formal invention? Who exactly does Alison have in mind as writers who “toy on surfaces” (which is a rather peculiar complaint in a book that extensively praises the work of Nicholson Baker), or produce “purely cerebral affairs”? Perhaps it is unfair to ask the author to name names in a brief epilogue such as this, but since Alison does include among her book’s exemplary cases a few writers (B.S. Johnson, David Foster Wallace) who could be (and are) accused of being too frivolous or too “cerebral,” her insinuation that a certain (vague) kind of experimental fiction is too bloodless makes the question seem apposite. If Alison’s analysis can be applied to, say, David Markson (also a focus of attention in one of the chapters), then presumably we might find as well that “postmodern” innovators such as John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, or Steve Tomasula (the sort of writers I suspect are the targets of Alison’s indictment) can be approached through her interpretive frame. That Alison doesn’t give us the particulars we need to adequately assess the distinction she’s making ultimately means we can’t really fully assess the scope of her whole critical project in Meander, Spiral, Explode.

The closest we can come to making such an assessment of Alison’s assertion is to consider the emphasis she puts on “feeling,” on “human complexities,” and “core human matters.” Presumably these are essential elements missing from game-playing experimental fiction and that she is assuring us we will find in the works she explicates in her book. Indeed, since formal experiment characterizes both these works and the other, flawed kind of experiment, it must be this concern for feeling, the attention to “core human matters” that most distinguishes her chosen writers and their works. The effort to “experiment formally,” then, is, or should be, one that finds the right form — beyond the usual “narrative arc” — to communicate feeling and render human complexities, presumably the true goal of art. While it is tempting to adduce a list of experimental writers (the “wrong” kind) whose work is profoundly concerned with “human complexities” and “human matters,” that would again only belie the fact that Alison gives us no examples with which we can contrast the treatment of “complexities” and “matters” to be found in the works her book endorses.

It seems quite likely that Alison could not actually provide many — if any — compelling examples of experimental fiction that avoids “human complexities” or ignores “core human matters.” But, putting aside how we determine what qualifies as a “core” concern or how we register a human complexity, is it in fact the case that fiction should be devoted first to the delineation of its “human” content, to the cultivation of “feeling”? Why would the exploration of the formal possibilities (in all their complexity) not be just as crucial to the integrity of fiction as evoking emotion in the reader — arguably more so, as it is the shaping of language into dynamic form that confers on fiction the status of art in the first place? If Jane Alison truly intends her book to be a primer on how to “keep making our novels novel,” as she puts it at the end of her epilogue, it would seem advisable not to at the same time imply that such novelty (which is nothing if not itself a significant “human” achievement) should still be secondary to its content, the content that reliably appeals to emotion and restricts itself to established “core” themes.

The kind of formal experiment Alison is eager to encourage is pretty much encapsulated in the book’s title. Meander, spiral, and explosion are forms of spatial movement, although Alison also discusses additional such forms: waves, “wavelets,” fractals. These are all forms that mirror forms of organization in the natural world. One could say that while Alison seeks alternatives to the kind of traditional arc that is described by Freytag in his famous “triangle,” her counter-forms nevertheless reinforce the conventional practice of realism by stressing form as itself a “mirror of nature.” This is not to say that all of the writers she examines in illustration of these could adequately be described as realists (although many of them could), but Alison finds even those works that might otherwise seem the farthest removed from traditional realism to be less daunting in their departures from convention than we might think. “Cloud Atlas got lots of attention for its postmodern, metafictional cleverness,” she writes, “each story being nested within the next makes the ‘reality’ of any dizzying. But I think this contrivance is the least interesting thing about it.” Further: “I insist that Cloud Atlas is not only clever, not only designed, but earnest and moving. Its playful elements add to its depth.”

Again, it seems peculiar in a book ostensibly defending (and trying to advance) adventurous formal arrangements in fiction to decry as “contrivances” devices that contribute to the effort to reconfigure form. Cloud Alas, it seems, would have been one of those books that settle for being clever, merely “designed,” if it didn’t transcend its cleverness to become “earnest and moving.” Being “playful” in its effects is acceptable if those efforts augment the work’s “depth,” which clearly Alison values most of all. Formal experiment is only useful for Alison if, as in Cloud Atlas, it can enhance the “earnest” qualities of a novel, and its use diminishes it if the playfulness is in effect “merely literary.” Whether David Mitchell would be content with the perception his novel is “earnest and moving” above all, or whether he might like his design, his “metafictional” ingenuity, to be appreciated as well (else why apply it in the first place?) seems to me a question whose answer seems obvious enough.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is not without value as a briskly written, compact overview of the various spatial strategies writers have successfully employed, and might continue to be fruitfully employed if writers had a more synoptic view of them, along with a few models of the way they can work. Many of the illustrative readings are enlightening about the works discussed: Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus as a “wave” (as well as the underlying redescription of a narrative arc itself as more usefully perceived as a wave); Raymond Carver’s “Where I’m Calling From” as a “wavelet” (“seemingly small undulations” of story); Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever as an “explosion” (or “radial”). Others are less evocative, or the text in question might just as accurately have been placed in one of the other categories, or described in other terms entirely. Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, for example, does not readily seem to fit Alison’s characterization of it as a “meander.” While it is certainly true that the novel “gives us elaborate dilatory detail” that constantly interrupts the miniscule “forward motion” it ultimately gains, it is finally hard to regard this as a “meander.” It seems more like a deliberate subversion of the very notion of “forward motion,” a playful (but also urgently serious) displacement of that expectation most readers bring to reading a novel. Alison proposes the intriguing interpretation that the form of The Mezzanine actually mirrors its content, whereby “we experience a slight rise of forward motion, then a flattening digression, another slight rise, then a flattening digression . . . in the shape of an escalator” (riding which, of course, is really the novel’s only “action”). But it seems to me that this novel wants to arrest all sense of “motion” (as much as is possible in a medium made of sequential words); if it has a spatial rather than a chronological form, the movement of The Mezzanine is not “forward” at all but outward, in an attempt to expand the few minutes of its narrative clock time and its protagonist’s place in it to a kind of sustained instant of experience.

Finally, however, it is probably not so important whether Alison precisely identifies each of the spatial forms, or that writers have the “correct” name for them. To the extent that her book convinces writers there are indeed credible alternatives to the reflexive preference for Freytag’s “arc,” alternatives that do not imply a fall into formlessness but challenge inculcated expectations without necessarily alienating readers, Alison will have served a worthy purpose. But the book never really destabilizes the notion of “story” itself as the ultimate object of the fiction writer’s craft. Meanders or spirals do not, at least in Alison’s analysis, abandon narrative in its very loosest sense — a prose description of “what happens” to one or more characters — or deflect attention away from the “content” the narrative embodies in any significant way. In fact, it is in Alison’s account precisely the writer’s “craft” to embody the content by the most efficacious means available. (Form suits content.) Thus, Meander, Spiral, Explode is finally not really a book about formal experimentation in fiction but at best an effort to encourage a freer approach to form that forestalls a complete acquiescence to stale routine.

That the book’s intended audience is primarily writers seems fairly unambiguous. Although the analyses provided could be of interest to some readers not themselves writers (especially readers of some of the more “difficult” writers, such as Sebald or Robbe-Grillet, readers who have found their work foreboding), the book would likely be most useful as a supplementary text in a creative writing workshop. Perhaps this also accounts for Alison’s at times somewhat breathless prose and frequent reliance on figurative phrasing rather than a more analytical critical language. One could wonder, though, whether this gives the book greater accessibility or underestimates most writers’ (and writing students’) tolerance of more critical rigor. A book that considers thoroughly the principles animating the impulse to “experiment” in fiction, and looks at all the formal strategies adventurous writers have attempted, would surely be a service to readers and writers alike. That book has yet to be written.

Contexts of Reception (Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History)

Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History is a book with a provocative premise addressing an important subject that ultimately does justice to neither. North contends that academic literary study has settled into a stagnant and unavailing practice that aligns it entirely with ‘scholarship’ at the expense of ‘criticism’. Further, the putative goal of this scholarship in a by now thoroughly politicised discipline – to act as a counterforce against the dominant neoliberal ideologies – is one that scholarship in its current form is actually unable to meet. Indeed, North maintains that the historicist/cultural studies approach that now dominates academic literary scholarship (to the virtual exclusion of nearly everything else) arises from and reinforces the neoliberal status quo and that only a return to criticism, with its greater attention to the aesthetic nature of literature, can in fact reorient academic literary study in such a way that it might have the capacity to ‘intervene’ and effect real political and cultural change.

Unfortunately, North’s argument, as conveyed through his attenuated institutional history (the title of the book is misleading, since it offers a history of the shifting fashions in academic literary study, not a history – political or otherwise – of literary criticism per se) does little to clarify the stakes involved in distinguishing between criticism and scholarship, to explain exactly what North has in mind in his use of the term ‘aesthetic’ to identify the literary value currently absent in the dominant mode of literary scholarship, or what its presence would add. Nor does he specify how the ‘close reading’ he advocates would differ from the versions that in his account helped lead to the banishment of aesthetic criticism from the realm of literary study in the first place. Finally, North offers virtually no defence of the fundamental assumption of the book that literary study as an academic discipline has as an ultimate justification its role in achieving political transformation, in creating a more just world order. These flaws ought to be palpable to readers devoted to the ‘historicist/contextualist paradigm’, but those of us inclined to agree with North’s premise even before reading his book should be even more disappointed that he fails to make a case for the need to intervene in academic literary study to restore literary criticism to something like its formerly more central place.

It is possible, of course, to believe in the centrality of what North is calling ‘criticism’ and not to care much whether it has a place in the academic study of literature at all, at least when such study is formally consolidated in an actual academic system. Criticism predates its inclusion in university curricula, and it will endure long after college professors have given up entirely on the notion that their interest lies in what was, after all, designated as ‘literature’ not that long ago – largely for the purpose of gathering together otherwise disparate forms of writing for ‘study’ in the first place. If criticism understood as the attempt to describe and assess a literary work in order to grasp and ‘appreciate’ it as ‘literary’ is no longer much evident in the academy, it continues to be practiced in publications associated with the general literary culture – it could be argued, in fact, that it is flourishing online in a way that itself begins to return to criticism some of the credibility it initially gained from its ascension to academic status but subsequently lost when its ‘subjectivity’ was deemed too insubstantial to support a properly academic discipline devoted to the creation of ‘knowledge’. If the sort of criticism whose primary purpose is to measure the strengths and weaknesses of a literary work on its own terms, to register the critic’s informed but inevitably unhistoricised response, is not welcome in academe, that aesthetic sensibility and critical judgment continue to be cultivated by serious-minded writers about literature seems apparent enough in the range of critics featured in these publications, many of them writers clearly impatient with the pervasive expectation that mainstream academic journals will almost exclusively feature scholarship (according to North’s delineation of the term).

North is certainly correct that ‘academic criticism’ in the strictest sense is now literally absent from literary study at the highest levels. North contends that criticism was discredited not because of its inherent unsuitability to academic study but through its appropriation by the wrong sort of people, the sort who wanted to convert it into a convenient means for elevating their own tastes and in the process reducing criticism to a tool for determining the relative ‘greatness’ of writers and works of literature. This betrayal was performed by the New Critics (the great collective bête noire in accounts usually given by those eager to hasten the transition to the post-criticism era) in sympathetic concert with FR Leavis, who together took the strategy of close reading introduced by IA Richards and wrenched it out of the context in which the latter had developed it, thereby rendering it as the method of choice for the most conservative and elitist forces in the academic hierarchy. This is a very familiar story, retold by North in the usual condescending way, differing only in that he exempts Richards from blame, maintaining that his notion of ‘practical criticism’ was intended to ground the study of literature not in an autonomous text but in the full context of the reader’s cultural position. ‘Before anything,’ North writes,

‘Practical Criticism is an attempt to examine as precisely as possible the actual relationships existing between works of literature and their most important context: their readers. Once we have put aside the idea that Richards is an early New Critic, we can begin to see that he is concerned everywhere to put the text into some productive relationship to its context of reception.’

It is entirely defensible to argue that Richards has never really been accurately identified as a New Critic, although his initial example in focusing close attention on the effects of a work (specifically poems) was a real enough influence on critics such as Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom. However, Richards’s approach is more appropriately understood in its correspondences with the philosophy of art advanced by John Dewey, which is similarly experiential and focused on the pragmatic – what is meaningful in works of literature is to be found in the reader’s encounter with the text, not the latter’s abstraction into an autonomous aesthetic object. Although North champions Richards as the potential source of renewal in contemporary literary study, it seems unlikely that Richards himself would have much approved of North’s use of his example to advocate for literary study as a site of political transformation. Richards believed that close reading could reveal cultural and psychological forces that should occupy the critic’s attention, but he hardly thought this attention would best be concentrated on narrowly conceived political interests. Richards’s own interest in the aesthetic extends to its effect on the reader’s whole sensibility (culturally-inflected, of course), and while he does not, as Dewey does, emphasise the particular qualities of the experience itself, Richards is surely not so instrumentalist that he regards the aesthetic quality of literature to be valuable primarily because it might help to subvert global capitalism.

That this should be the object of academic literary study is an axiom embraced by the current establishment that North does not relinquish, despite his analysis of the shortcomings of the present scholarly paradigm. Indeed, North spends much time throughout the book reassuring scholarly readers that he is a dedicated foe of neoliberalism, trying to convince those readers that a renewed commitment to the aesthetic is actually the better strategy for overturning the neoliberal order. It might be possible to imagine a generation of readers more intensively educated in the close reading of literature as way of becoming more appreciative of its values, coming to realise that those promoted by market capitalism are in contrast shallow and destructive, that instrumental ambitions are not the only kind possible, but this would ultimately entail that these very readers also reject the underlying assumption that Joseph North himself clings to in this book about the role of literary study, since it too in its current incarnation (which North wants to modify, not abolish) understands its ostensible subject, literature, in strictly instrumental, utilitarian terms.

In fairness to North, perhaps it is this immersion in the ‘humane’ qualities of literature that he has in mind as the source of literary study’s potential to bring social and cultural reform. However, if so, North never really clearly identifies the mechanism by which social or political action is a necessary consequence of a curriculum of literary study with aesthetic analysis at its core. Most of the book is taken up with an institutional anatomy, tracing the ascendance of the historicist/cultural studies model back to Raymond Williams, whom North credits with justifying the shift from criticism to scholarship, and examining several scholars who, originally scholars of the knowledge-producing sort, began to struggle against the totalising dominion of the new scholarly model. They sought to escape it, if not back to the discredited modes of moral and formalist criticism associated with Leavis and the New Critics, then toward some different relationship with literature that acknowledges the possibility of relating to it as other than a conduit for cultural analysis. In North’s judgment, none of these attempts (by, among others, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Isobel Armstrong, and Lauren Berlant) managed to fully depart from the reigning paradigm (but, then again, neither does Joseph North), and so the task remains to find the means to finally do so.

Whether academic literary study manages to regain its focus on literature considered as literary art, separate from or in addition to its utility as a window on culture, is finally not a very interesting question in itself. As North additionally points out, academic criticism has evolved as a series of shifts from one favoured method to another, united only by the conviction that the latest is the one true way to study literature. This is not likely to change even if aesthetics retakes the field and a new cohort of close readers emerges. That both aesthetics and close reading might remain relevant concerns to readers and critics is of more consequence, however much the original relocation of ‘criticism’ to a home in the academy joined the two in a seemingly permanent association, so that whatever falls out of academic fashion must accordingly be disavowed more generally. Joseph North objects to the New Critics because of their reactionary politics and their elevation of favourite writers to the status of unquestioned greatness. But there is nothing about the kind of close reading introduced by the New Critics that necessarily entails right-wing politics, nor requires the creation of an imperious canon of great writers. ‘New Criticism’ can’t be revived under that name – its reputation is no doubt inextricably tied to its founding figures, who did indeed distort the underlying precepts of close reading in ways that made the principle of ‘disinterestedness’ seem transparently hypocritical – but North’s book most usefully demonstrates, through the very contortions by which it seeks to identify an approach to literary study that allows for attention to ‘literature itself’ but that is also politically acceptable, the extent to which the loss of focus on literature as first of all an object of aesthetic regard has itself left academic literary study floundering in its own self-imposed futility.

Declaring Allegiance (AO Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism)

In Better Living Through Criticism, AO Scott first of all demonstrates that he is eminently qualified to be the chief film critic of The New York Times. On the basis of what the book reveals about Scott’s breadth of knowledge, interpretive skill, and belief in the importance of criticism, we would be justified in concluding that this own reviews, whether we ultimately agree with them or not, are written from a comprehensive understanding of the history and purpose of criticism and with a seriousness of intent that goes beyond the simplistic thumbs up/thumbs down approach to which reviews of popular art in mainstream media are especially prone, as well as the widespread conception of a review as primarily a form of consumer advice. To the extent that we can take Better Living Through Criticism as a brief on behalf of the kind of criticism AO Scott practices, the kind able to provide ‘better living,’ both for critics and for readers, it is accurate enough to call the book a success.

However, if it does succeed in clarifying and, to a degree, justifying the work of a critic such as himself, that very success highlights of the book’s most severe limitations as a guide to criticism at the moment. The case for the sort of job AO Scott does increasingly applies only to AO Scott and a handful of other critics who have the opportunity to practice a general interest criticism that can be expected both to be taken seriously as an attempt to reckon with works of art (popular or ‘high’) and to do so while reaching a relatively wide audience. As review space in newspapers continues to dwindle, coverage of the arts in general consigned to anodyne puff pieces acting as ersatz advertisements, and print magazines increasingly continue to become ‘niche’ publications, with fewer and fewer niches available to arts criticism, the widespread assumption might be that online publications have taken up much, it not all, of the critical slack. But while it is true that numerous web-based journals (not to mention blogs) have now established themselves as dependable sources of intelligent criticism (in some cases exceeding in its scope and substance what was previously available in print publications), these journals generally have small audiences and their focus is inevitably more narrow, more oriented toward readers with a pre-established, in some cases even selective, interest in the form or subject under consideration. The criticism on these sites is more likely to take for granted that such readers understand and appreciate the importance of criticism than does Scott, who assumes readers skeptical not just of his judgment of a particular film or book but of the very enterprise of passing judgment as a profession.

It would not really be quite accurate to say that in Better Living Through Criticism Scott attempts to convince this skeptical reader of the value of criticism, since he doesn’t really make an argument at all in the book, its second and even more crippling flaw. Scott ostensibly addresses six different topics in the book’s six chapters, but not only do these topics not exactly cohere in a discernible line of argument, but each of the chapters is very discursive, ultimately allowing him to cover a lot of ground, from the history of criticism to the philosophy of beauty to the perennial debate over the role of form vs. content, but this also exacerbates the problem that originates in Scott’s extreme reluctance not just to advance a unifying argument but ultimately to take a firm position on any of the issues he raises. Scott sees the wisdom of both sides of most critical debates and typically advises that we accept both, or neither, which for him essentially amounts to the same thing. Sometimes his caution seems nearly metaphysical:

It doesn’t matter. Actually, it matters a great deal. It matters more than anything. You are guaranteed to be wrong—to insult good taste, to antagonize public opinion, the judgment of history, or your own uneasy conscience. And there is no beautiful synthesis, no mode or method of criticism that can resolve these contradictions. They cannot be logically reconciled, any more than a safe, sensible middle path can be charted between them. Still less is it possible to declare a decisive allegiance, to cast one’s lot with the party of form or the party of content, the armies of tradition or the rebel forces of modernity, the clique of skeptics or the church of enthusiasts.

In seeming to assure us that it does indeed matter that critics are so habitually wrong, Scott appears to posit error as an unavoidable condition of the critic’s situation. Yet surely it also matters exactly how a critic is wrong. Precisely by asserting a ‘decisive allegiance’ to a particular philosophy of criticism, a particular method, a specific conception of art, the critic commits to the necessity of demonstrating that philosophy or method can reveal why the work of art itself matters, why the reader/viewer/audience should pay attention in a particular way. If the critic succeeds in either or both of these goals, he/she has gotten in right, but only in that, provisionally, the effort has paid off for some readers. If the critic doesn’t succeed, the approach could be wrong (especially if no one finds it convincing), or it could be that the critic hasn’t done justice to it. (It also remains possible, it must be said, that the reader has gotten it wrong.) A good critic isn’t offering a judgment or interpretation to be tallied as right or wrong, correct or incorrect in the first place, merely a perspective acute enough to be considered fully and fairly, along with all others. Readers are free to take the critic’s offering more or less seriously, but if hardly seems an affront to art, or an abrogation of the critic’s duty to an ethereal ideal of ‘objectivity,’ that a critic would cast lots with one set of critical principles rather than others.

It is as if Scott can’t abandon the conventional journalistic imperative to ‘cover’ a subject by reporting on both sides of disputes about it, without interceding to provide some normative appraisal. But Scott seems to experience this obligation as a struggle, not between the points of view surveyed but within himself, represented most obviously in the inter-chapters included in the book, presented in the form of a dialogue between the two sides of critic AO Scott. These dialogues ultimately leave the book even more rhetorically fragmented, as even the disconnected points Scott does make in the other chapters prove debatable to his skeptical questioner, the ultimate effect of whose questions is essentially to chastise Scott for his presumptions and pretensions in making those points to begin with. These inter-chapters succeed mostly in diverting attention away from criticism as an intellectual vocation and focusing it instead on AO Scott, a paradoxical move for a book that otherwise hesitates to assert a strong thesis or declare a distinctive critical position.

One proposition that Scott is willing to affirm relatively early in the book is the notion that criticism is not just a skill or a craft but itself art, although he is predictably diffident in stating it: ‘Will it sound defensive or pretentious if I say that criticism is an art in its own right?’ he asks in the middle of a paragraph. But he continues:

Not in the narrow, quotidian sense in which art is more or less synonymous with skill, but in the grand, fully exalted, romantic meaning of the word. That the critic is a craftsman of sorts is obvious enough; I want to insist that the critic is also a creator.

It is a surprisingly bold claim, but unfortunately Scott’s digressive expository strategy doesn’t really allow him to support it. Instead he relies on testimony form the like-minded HL Mencken, but since Mencken’s assertions are themselves not very persuasive, Scott’s own case remains unproven. Mencken contends that only by going beyond the ‘material’ provided by art works and ‘adorn[ing] their theme with variations of his own’ can the mere ‘reviewer’ become an actual critic. Putting aside the fact that this is an entirely incoherent conception of criticism (in maintain that a critic can’t become a critic until he stops being a reviewer, it empties ‘criticism’ of its meaning in relation to works of art), nowhere in Better Living Through Criticism does AO Scott lay claim to such a conception, confining himself throughout to the assumption that reviews fully qualify as criticism.

Scott seems to me on much firmer ground, however, when he stops grasping after ‘art’ as an honorific boost to his craft and defines criticism in more restrained terms: ‘[C]riticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood . . . properly understood is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name—the proper name—for the defense of art itself.’ The direct defence of art – at least in the cumulative sense, through criticism taken as a whole – can only occur through forms of argument and analysis, that is, by using language instrumentally to accomplish a purpose beyond its own fashioning. A work of art has no obligation other than to be itself. A work of criticism that expects to be admired for its own ingenuity or aesthetically fine style (which is not to say that criticism can’t ever be admired for such qualities) in my view has in so doing abandoned the primary obligation of criticism to indeed defend the integrity and value of art, often by defending it in the particular instance of a particular work or artist.

If criticism ‘contends against [the other arts] for their own benefit,’ it does so to challenge art to fulfil its potential, not to set itself up as competition. If it can be ‘in fact larger’ than the other arts considered separately, that is because criticism at its best attempts a synthesis of artistic history and principles to enable its critique of individual forms and specific works. If ‘there is more of it’ than of actual works of art, this is due to the interest so many of us take in art, and our need to account for that interest, not a free-floating compulsion to ‘adorn’ art with critical accessories and flourishes.

Surely the rise of, first, the blogosphere and, subsequently, a relative abundance of online arts reviews and critical web journals attests to this interest. If the sort of critical voice represented by AO Scott is likely to be less commanding as the centrality of such cultural touchstones as the New York Times continues to erode, we might still look to these new cultural voices – more muted perhaps, but in general much more interested in books or movies or music than in assuming the role of critic-artist – to successfully demonstrate the ongoing value of criticism.

The Singularity is Near (Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature)

The very title of Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature announces it as a deviation from what has become the usual sort of academic study of literature. No subtitle indicating that whatever work literature does for the critic is in the service of something other than itself? “Representation as Political Resistance”? “Style and the Cultural Determinants of Language”? Just the “work of literature,” in isolation from its historical and sociological context, as if such a work might actually be approached on its merits as, well, art, or some other reactionary, now discredited and outdated practice? Heavens to Betsy!

Attridge makes it clear soon enough that “work” in this book can be understood both as a way of identifying a poem or novel (“a work of fiction’) and as the labor involved in the work’s actualization (its “performance,” as Attridge has it). Still, the focus of his analysis is unmistakably on the experience of reading literature: “Can we do justice to literature?” Attridge asks. “More specifically, can we do justice to literature as literature when the institutions within which we engage with it—as teachers, students, researchers, and critics—exert constant pressure to treat it instrumentally—to reduce it to a set of rules, or a source of information, or a deployment of skills?” What complicates the attempt to do justice to the literary work (that is, if it is truly “literary”) is the difficulty of grappling with its “singularity,” the “particularity of the work’s power, intellectual and affective.” Singularity occurs not in fixed features of the text (which Attridge regards simply as the words printed on a page) but as an event, an “act-event,” Attridge’s coinage intended to capture the activity of both writer and reader. “Singularity” refers more broadly as well to literature as a whole, accounting for its “distinctiveness among linguistic practices, allowing us to appreciate what is different about a novel or poem in comparison with a letter, a factual article, an opinion piece, a sermon, a historical study, a scientific treatise, a philosophical argument, an after dinner speech.”

Attridge’s concept of singularity was first introduced and developed in his 2004 book, The Singularity of Literature, and he describes The Work of Literature as a supplement to that book and an extension of its argument. Fortunately, for readers unfamiliar with the earlier book, Attridge provides a recapitulation of sorts in the form of a self-interview comprising the first chapter of the new book. In this chapter the reader will learn not just what Attridge means by “singularity” but also how writers display “invention” to invoke “otherness,” the latter of which (although Attridge also uses the term “alterity” as a term for this) is for Attridge the defining feature of the reading experience, bringing to the reader’s awareness the absolutely different, something never before apprehended “because the modes of encounter made possible by the state of things. . .do not allow for it.”

. . .Otherness is not just out there, unapprehended because no-one has thought of apprehending it, or because it bears no relation whatever to existing forms of knowledge, but because to apprehend it would threaten the status quo.

“Status Quo” does not refer simply to the reigning political order but includes all existing categories of thought, cultural, psychological, or aesthetic. The disclosure of otherness represents for Attridge the singular value of literature (and to an extent, art more generally), taking the place of aesthetic beauty, moral suasion, or political enlightenment in other accounts of the efficacy of art and literature, not least because those kinds of value can be affirmed in many other, non-artistic endeavors and experiences. In the subsequent chapters, Attridge further pursues questions posed but not fully explored in The Singularity of Literature, especially the salience of the alternative approaches to literature that have dominated academic discourse over the last several decades and within the context of which Attridge’s theory must compete for recognition and respect. What is the proper role of the critic of literature? How does historical context shape our response to the literary work? To what extent does cultural difference affect our reception of the work?

Attridge answers all of these questions by maintaining throughout that literature’s singularity, for both writer and reader, is, while unavoidably conditioned by context and culture, always present to the reader approaching the work as an artistic expression, in fact must be present if the work is to be experienced as such. (Some works no longer afford this kind of experience, while others, not originally written to afford it, can begin to do so.) It is not that a work of literature can only be encountered in its singularity—all literary works can be read for many other purposes (as historical document, as cultural symptom, etc.). But Attridge insists that they exist as “literature” only when they are allowed to manifest in the “event” of conscientious reading open to the unknown and unexpected. Although he also repeatedly acknowledges that literary writing can be considered from other perspectives for a variety of motives, Attridge clearly believes that it is the transformative power of poetry and fiction that most warrants our attention to it, that, indeed, justifies creating the category of “literature” in the first place.

To illustrate how the various concepts employed in his theory might be applied, Attridge offers a number of close readings of specific works, from Emily Dickinson’s poem “As imperceptibly as Grief” to Alaa al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building (2004). These readings are uniformly effective in the context of this book, demonstrating both that Derek Attridge is a skilled and discerning reader and that terms of the theory as he defines them can indeed be coherently applied. But the very success of these readings in exemplifying Attridge’s own apprehension of literary invention and its revelations of otherness raise questions about how his method could be transferred to the formal study of literature. Arguably New Criticism gained the prominence it once had because the strategy of close reading proved effective not just in generating a distinctive kind of academic literary criticism but also in organizing a classroom in the still-developing discipline of literary study; however, for this strategy to really succeed, analysis should lead to conclusions that can be generalized, even if only toward a broadly shared “appreciation” that nevertheless is anchored in manifest features of the work at hand. Attridge’s mode of analysis discourages us from thinking that a literary work actually has manifest features to which all readers will respond in a similar way.

For Attridge, the “text” is simply the otherwise inert printing of words. The “work” is the text as brought to life by the reader, whose experience of its singularity is itself singular. Attridge speaks of the possibility that the teacher might “encourage and leave a space for the encounter with otherness,” but it scarcely seems plausible that a curriculum of literary study could be justified according to how felicitously it enabled its students to register the singular experience of reading assigned literary works. If the kind of close reading associated with New Criticism was ultimately discredited because the appreciation it was intended to foster seemed hopelessly indistinct as an object of knowledge, it is hard to see how the kind of approach implied by Attridge’s description of the reading experience would be perceived as rigorous enough to become a generally accepted practice. Indeed, however much notions like the “autonomy” or the “singularity” of the literary work (Attridge rejects the former as a denial of reality, it should be said) are legitimate names for the artistic integrity many of us feel a work of literature should be granted at some point in our consideration of its value, using the literature classroom (the literature curriculum more generally) simply to reinforce this particular value, the possibility of a potentially transformative experience, can’t finally be the solely sanctioned strategy for “teaching” literature. There is, after all, a difference between studying literature and reading it, and there would seem little need for formal programs in literary study if joining a book discussion group might work just as well.

That Attridge underplays the practical applications of his theoretical construct suggests he knows those applications are problematic. Thus The Work of Literature ultimately seems more preoccupied with ethics than with either pedagogy or aesthetics (certainly not formalist aesthetics), in the process locating the book comfortably enough in currently respectable academic discourse after all. Attridge’s precepts are expressed in unequivocally ethical language—“doing justice,” “responsible” reading—even in the final chapter recasting the activity of readers and critics as a form of “hospitality”: “effective hospitality to the literary work involves informing and energizing one’s conscientious, careful, rule-governed reading with the unlimited, unpredictable force of unconditional openness to whatever might arrive.” It would seem that for Attridge academic criticism can provide in its attentiveness and solicitude, its scrupulous accountability, a model ethical project, his book becoming an extended gloss on the ethical theories of Derrida and Levinas. Literature itself, it turns out, is most valuable in making this sort of ethical and reading and criticism possible, provoking the question whether Attridge doesn’t de facto stress the instrumental convenience of literature himself, prizing it more as a source of ethical reflection or inquiry (including the inquiry resulting in this book) than for its intrinsic value as aesthetic expression.

It might be said further that Attridge’s analysis of literary value and its embodiment in the event of reading, to the extent it relies on widely-accepted ethical concepts (“hospitality” is rather unconventional in its bearing on literary criticism, but the term identifies an attitude toward reading the ethical status of which is readily apparent) is also dubiously faithful to his own stated preference for a criticism that recognizes literature’s singularity, pursuing ends that could not be accomplished just as well using other kinds of illustration, other rhetorical means. Surely the ethical considerations that inform Attridge’s analysis could be explored in numerous contexts apart from reading poems and novels. If Attridge makes a good case for the singularity of literature as realized through the reading experience, his book itself serves as a less persuasive model, except in isolated flourishes designed to reckon with that singularity in its tangible expressions.

The most tangible element of a literary work’s artistic expression –its formal and stylistic features—would presumably correspond to what Attridge designates as “invention,” but just as (deliberately, it seems) he defines “otherness” as broadly as possible, he also does little to specify what characteristics constitute invention, or whether some forms of invention might be aesthetically superior to others. We can get some sense of how he measures it by looking at his sample readings, such as the discussion of Emma Donoghue’s novel, Room (2010) at the conclusion of Chapter 3. Attridge asserts that Donoghue accomplishes “something new” in her novel related from the perspective of a young child, but exactly what is new about it is never made clear. The novel is somewhat unorthodox in that the child’s at times opaque language is allowed to be the novel’s center of discourse, but that hardly seems an innovation, however much it does condition the reader’s perception of the story’s immediate circumstances. Ultimately the novel’s language and its oblique narration serve the fairly standard function (standard in contemporary fiction) of delaying the full revelation of setting (a single room in which the child and his mother have been imprisoned by a rapist abductor) and creating a kind of mystery plot. Donoghue’s invocation of her character’s verbal reality may be done skillfully enough, but that it represents some kind of advance over, for instance, The Sound and the Fury is not a sustainable claim.

Attridge’s case is not strengthened by the arguably circular reasoning employed in his elucidation of the connections among his central concepts: “A work that is inventive is necessarily one that introduces otherness and is singular; a work that brings the other into the field of the same is necessarily singular and inventive in its handling of the available materials.” The notion that a work of literature has managed to introduce something unprecedented and heretofore unknown because it is inventive in a particularly “literary” way seems perfectly sound, but when “otherness” is defined so loosely that the perception of it can only be subjective (“It’s ‘other’ to me!”) then invention comes to seem a rather indeterminate activity—since I feel the work reveals an unfamiliar subject or technique, it must be inventive because, according to Attridge’s formula, the two qualities always appear together. In his readings of passages from poets such as Milton and Wordsworth, Attridge is quite persuasive in showing how specific elements of these passages can lead to a recognition of invention, but when such features are irretrievably tied to the “act-event” disclosing otherness, it is not at all certain that different readers will respond to them with the same sort of faciltity.

However attuned to the subtle effects of literary language Attridge proves himself to be in his close readings, there is also a certain modesty to them, in keeping with his assertion that “a critical method should be no more powerful than is absolutely necessary for the task it is called upon to carry out.” Attridge explicitly poses such modesty against the criticism of someone like Christopher Ricks, whose considerable skills are “deployed to move, delight, and persuade” more than they are used to convey the critic’s direct experience of the work at hand. Attridge suggests that the critic instead pause to ask, “does what I am pointing out really matter in my experience of the works?” This seems at first a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but when “experience” in effect overrules the claims that might be made for the existence of more or less objective—or at least stable—features possessed by the literary text that predispose the reader’s experience, it merits further reflection. For one thing, the notion of “my experience of the works” here seems surprisingly static. Does criticism so easily capture that experience, as if recording a unitary reading, unalterable in its results? As a way, perhaps, of making the concept of “singularity” seem less absolute, Attridge stresses that it is subject to change according to time and circumstance, that a work can gain or lose it, so it is curious he would enjoin the critic against attempting to “move” or “persuade” the reader, to introduce critical matters that might, for example, modify and enhance some readers’ future experience of the work.

Even if we were to accept that the experience of reading can be regarded as something unified and discrete, how, finally, would we determine what “really matters” in an assimilation of that experience? Is it what matters to the integrity of the experience, or is it what matters in our attempt to do justice to the literary work itself? Perhaps Attridge would say there is no way to separate the two questions, since they are both answered in the affirmative and describe the same phenomenon. But for the critic’s attempt to be either just or unjust, the “literary work itself” must have palpable qualities that are not simply functions of the reader’s perception. There must be the possibility that some critics might do greater justice to the work than others, even the possibility that some critics might simply get it wrong. “Getting it wrong” is not something that applies to the act of reading taken purely as a psychological state; the retort, “That’s the way I read it” is impossible to counter with an admonition to read better, not unless it is acknowledged that the “text” exists as more than a rumored presence enabling the act-event of literature, that the singularity of literature begins in the writing, the very material medium through which all literary art is irreducibly given its form.

The Singularity is Near (Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature)

The Organized Effects of the Program (On McGurl’s The Program Era)

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that “far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy–and a times great brilliance–by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers” is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the “tremendous energy” and frequent “brilliance” that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn’t necessarily claim that a “vast” number of energetic and brilliant writers have been “students and teachers” in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O’Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing “program” to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor is to say that, on the whole, the “program era” has produced “a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing” to say that, however “multifaceted” it might be,” this body of work is “rich” all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by “the program,” even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly “rich.” I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced “excellence” of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program–to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before–there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing “improved” American literature as we get—it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in “literary ambitions” this inevitably entailed, and to encourage “habits of self-conscious attention to craft.” Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs—the “workshop” method—is shown in particular to have resulted in the “excellence” of the system, although the focus on “craft” has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the “literary fiction” that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman’s critique (London Review of Books) of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise makes some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl’s book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to “a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems,” unavoidably considered and addressed those problems, and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement. Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she’s not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman’s indictment (Los Angeles Review of Books), he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the “complex” problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman’s reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren’t germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn’t much different from many other academic studies of postwar or “contemporary” fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as “systems novel” or “radical innocence” or “dirty realism” as candidates. (“Black humor,” “metafiction,” “minimalism,” and, indeed, “postmodern” began as such terms.) McGurl proposes “program fiction.” As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl’s analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, “contemporary literature” is by definition undefined. The literary “fields” predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can’t help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates—the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author’s affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of “program era” as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn’t quite fit McGurl’s notion of “technomodernism,” his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

“Program fiction” becomes in McGurl’s analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally “program era” doesn’t suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of “the program” and those “aesthetic problems” swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) “Creative writing” did not entirely replace “fiction” and “poetry” as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way—number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of a program’s graduates, etc.—poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to “write what you know” or the impulse to find one’s “voice” or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims he makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction, and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete. A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing—particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the “little” magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history—past, present, and future—needs scrutiny as well.