Reactions to story from Salon

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  Criticizing the Death of Criticism

  http://www.babygotbooks.com/2008/05/22/criticizing-the-death...
  63 days ago in Baby Got Books · Authority: 58

  Two book reviewers at Salon discuss a new book, The Death of the Critic.  Many of the usual discussion points are rehashed, but then the lit blog world is thrown this bone: And believe it or not, Ive learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters
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  Shorties

  http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2008/05/shorties...
  63 days ago in largehearted boy: a boy, a girl, and his radio · Authority: 373

  Net, Blogs and Rock 'n' Roll: How Digital Discovery Works and What it Means for Consumers is a book by David Jennings. Seven Days profiles cartoonist James Kochalka. I guess Ive always had a cult following, the artist says candidly. My fame in the
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  SO MUCH TO SAY

  http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/05/so-much-to-say.h...
  63 days ago in The Elegant Variation · Authority: 366

  As we ease back into non-tour routines and raise a groggy head from the sick bed, herewith a look at what commands our attention these days ... Don't skim, there's loads of interesting stuff in here, and we're feeling a tad free-associative ... A
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  "The Death of the Critic"

  http://drheidih.blogspot.com/2008/06/death-of-critic.html
  35 days ago in Dr. Heidi · Authority: 2

  I am finally getting around to linking to this Salon essay about the prospects for professional literary criticism these days. I haven't read the book Bayard and Miller are discussing, but found their discussion quite interesting nonetheless. One key part (for me) was their discussion on the pleasure of reading good criticism--how it's almost an art to itself. This is why, of course, creative writers often make such readable and enjoyable critics. And it's why my graduate school professors put so much emphasis on the quality of our prose. Anyway, here's a choice excerpt: "I find I'm drawn to critics for the same reason I'm drawn to any writer: the quality of their prose. They can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart's delight as long as they make the words dance. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom may be preeminent in their respective fields, but I read their prose only under duress. Whereas, no matter how wrongheaded she is, I'll read anything by Pauline Kael. Or Anthony Lane or Clive James or, yes, James Wood. And thanks to McDonald's book, I now want to read more of Northrop Frye, who fired this sterling round of grapeshot at T.S. Eliot for fiddling with the canon of great writers: '...all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange. The wealthy investor, Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip.' Of course, I take Frye's thematic point -- the vagaries of taste are a fickle criterion for evaluation -- but I'm more impressed by the dazzling execution of that stock-market metaphor and that ever-so-subtle colon in the last sentence. Anyone who wants to write about writing should be able to write." One other point they touch on in the end: good criticism often reveals just how much the critic loves literature. If you can't sense that love--that genuine affection and enthusiasm for it--coming through the critic's words, then I'd be willing to be that you are less moved or persuaded by the argument the critic is making. UPDATE: A commenter provided a link to his own exchange with the book's author. Check it out--along with his review.
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  Around the Japanese web (June, 2008)

  http://www.japannavigator.com/2008/06/06/around-the-japanese...
  48 days ago in Japan Navigator · Authority: 32

  The Mainichi web site has recently published an interview with Murakami Haruki in five parts, about his inspiration in American literature, his translation work, his upcoming new novel, and the situation in the world: one, two, three, four, five. Test your poetic inspiration by participating in the 12th Mainichi Haiku Contest. The Japan Times feautures an interview with another cultural icon, architect Isozaki Arata (famous for such buildings as the Gunma Museum of Modern Art, the Hara Museum ARC, the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama, the Oita Art Plaza, and the Art Tower Mito etc). On July 27, the Hara Museum ARC in Gunma will open its new Kankai Pavilion, also designed by Isozaki and dedicated to traditional East-Asian art. Director Mochizuki Rokuro (of Minazuki fame) has made a new version of the (in)famous Abe Sada story (”Johnen - Sada no Ai”), here reviewed by Mark Schilling. When you live in Tokyo, don’t miss the Nihonshu Fair 2008, the world’s largest sake tasting event, held in Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City on June 11. Tickets are 3,500 at the door and you can imbibe from 16:00 to 20:00. Who killed the literary critic at Salon.com looks at the death of literary criticism. In the age of blogging, literary critics appear to be on life support. I would say: why don’t they start blogging themselves? And finally… don’t worry about forgetfulness when you are getting older… according the this NY Times article, less data can mean more wisdom.
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  Reviewing the reviewer: Delia Falconer on James Wood

  http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/06/reviewing-reviewer-...
  50 days ago in Eurhythmania · Authority: 15

  Reviewing the reviewer: Delia Falconer on James Wood Novelist, essayist and reviewer Delia Falconer has a generous, incisive and, er, critical review of US uber-critic James Wood's How Fiction Works in last month's Australian Literary Review here. In light of the recent !!death of literary criticism!! meme circulating through the internets Falconer's review questions the work that 'the real' does for Wood and the seemingly static and heavyhanded grasp this ground has in mapping modernities that are experienced as fragmented, discontinuous, or as proliferating mises en abyme (the period formerly known as post-modern) : While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to "wake up" a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema), Wood could only read this new "genre" as a kind of perversity or, worse, a showing off. (He has chastised DeLillo elsewhere for turning the novelist into "a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry".) This episode exposed a fundamental weakness of Wood's criticism: the fetish status it accords to the "real". It is clear, reading Wood's wider oeuvre, that he has a deep-rooted impatience with books that go outside a certain psychological verisimilitude; nor does he care for writing that usurps the critic's job by incorporating elements of commentary into a more self-conscious narration. Instead Wood places the naturalistic realist writing of Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert at the centre of his pantheon; writing in which the authorial presence never breaks the tranquil surface of the book. Falconer's seems to be a Walter Benjamin rather than Georg Lukacs based reading of the dialetic between cultural (literary in this case) form and historical change. Lukacs mourned the victory of modernist form over 'life' in his writings on the historical novel, and was antipathetic to Brecht's estrangement techniques. Benjamin sought to align historical experience with cultural forms that were responsive to changes in technology and modernity. Wood would appear more on the side of Lukacs than Benjamin in Falconer's estimation. One question arising out of this death of literary criticism meme is whether or not literary criticism should seek to model its evaluative criteria on the affectiveness of the reading experience in promoting a moral-emotional thinking that rings with truth, or seek to model these criteria more on how effectively the form mediates such content whereby both form and content are affectively and sociologically alive to the milieux of the novel's circulation. Falconer and indeed James Ley, I would suggest, tend toward the second method. Pavlov's Cat has praised Ley as one of the best practitioners of the art of fiction reviewing at the moment. Falconer's often more meta-critical reviews operate in a different space to Ley's although both inflect their criticism and reviews through a Benjamin-esque knowledge of the historical instantiations of forms of novelistic realism. Ley's ABR essay on the politics of guilt in Andrew McGahan's fiction uses Leavisite and New Critical close-reading techniques to turn the finely grained registering of the emotional imprint of McGahan's novels on the reader toward a consideration of how the affective-moral level of the novels is re-figured by the narrative forms in which they are presented: The essence of McGahan’s art is narrative. His recent novels have turned towards genre in part because of his skill at shaping them at a macro level; they seem familiar because they are so solidly and traditionally constructed. Significantly, the move toward genre is also a move toward self-consciousness: the moment of recognition when a narrative is exposed as a purposeful, self-contained structure with its own internal logic that works to shut out conflicting viewpoints. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín once remarked upon the similarity between his nation’s history and a work of sentimental fiction, ‘full of love stories with ill-fated lovers dying with a smile’. There are times, he argued, when ‘the crucial moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth-century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is broken by the society he lives in’. The point of his observation is that once this generic quality has been recognised, it opens up the possibility of transcendence: it becomes possible to understand history in other, more realistic and nuanced ways; it becomes possible to see how history is not like a sentimental fiction. This is part of the motivation behind The White Earth’s attempt to incorporate some of the prominent themes in recent Australian history within the overarching framework of a gothic narrative. The novel wants to make us aware of these ideas’ generic qualities, the manner in which certain ways of perceiving are perpetuated, and how this influences the shape of contemporary public debate. This is an insightful and elegantly expressed argument about the politics of literary form. Ley manoeuvers his close-reading of the emotional tenor of McGahan's oeuvre into an argument about the politics of narrative genre. This is less self-consciously theoretically informed than Falconer's reviews, and the argument here insinuates itself more because of a voice that moves at a slower pace over less texts (one effect of close-reading)which buttresses the assuredness of any judgements. I like both reviewers for different reasons. Anyone who witnessed Peter Fitzsimmon's contribution to the ABC First Tuesday Book Club last night and was reminded of the debates about the historical-ness of historical fiction that Kate Grenville's The Secret River aroused would find essays by both Ley and Falconer on this subject instructive. [Falconer's essay was orginally in Eureka Street and reprinted in one of the Black Ink. Best Australian Essays anthologies (2002?). Ley wrote a shorter piece for the rear page of the Weekend Australian Review on the Miles Franklin nominees where he considered how narrowly defined historical fiction, as it was produced, had become in Australia.] However, Ley's voice doesn't always persuade by insinuation. Sometimes the snark must be let loose. Here's a choice cut - harsh but fair - from early in the same piece on McGahan's fiction: Writing politicised literature can be a treacherous business. It is not the first task of a work of prose fiction to act as a vehicle for a narrow political message. Novels that attempt this are regularly disfigured by their sense of moral self-importance. Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars (1998), for example, is so distorted by its politics that it develops, absurdly, into a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, in which a naïve young man discovers that he is right about everything. There is a strong tendency in a work that takes sides in some specific political controversy for it to leach the humanity from those characters who represent the unfavoured viewpoint, and to paint them as fools and knaves. Even the best-intentioned narrative inevitably warps reality to conform to its agenda to some extent, but when this is crudely done it stifles the dissonance that is the lifeblood of fiction. The novel shrinks into itself, starts to believe in the imperviousness of its own rhetoric, and ends up being effective only if it tells you exactly what you want to hear. This renders its fictional qualities redundant: Perlman wrote a novel, but everything he had to say might have been adequately expressed in a terse letter to the editor of The Age. Ouch! Posted by Michael Christie
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  Smooth operator

  http://marcopolli.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/smooth-operator/
  51 days ago in ângulo · Authority: 3

  “[W]hen I think about the [literary] critics I love the most, they’re not necessarily the ones I agree with, they’re the ones I’d like to date. I argue with them, but when they’re gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in ‘Against Interpretation,’ argued for ‘an erotics of art.’ Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they’re missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas?” Será? Bem, de qualquer modo, está interessante este debate entre dois resenhistas da Salon sobre o livro The Death of the Critic, de Ronan McDonald. Eles vão além do simples “blogues e resenhas da Amazon estão matando a crítica”. [PS. Essa música, Smooth Operator, tem um dos versos de letra mais peculiares: "He moves in space with minimum waste and maximum joy"]
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  Are Academics To Blame For The Fall Of Critics?

  http://www.miamiartexchange.com/maex_artblog/?p=922
  52 days ago in MAeX Artblog · Authority: 9

  Are Academics To Blame For The Fall Of Critics?: “Has the role of the professional critic become obsolete in an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and blogs? A new book, “The Death of the Critic,” says no, and argues that there are still reasons to regard some opinions as better than others. We asked Salon’s own book reviewers, Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, to consider its case. The issue of whether time and technology have passed the professional critic by is being heatedly debated across all cultural genres. ‘The culprit is none other than … cultural studies! By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function — the right to say this is good, this isn’t, and here’s why.’” (Via Salon.com.)
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  Bleak House

  http://griersonhuffman.com/blog/bleak-house/
  53 days ago in Grierson Huffman · Authority: 1

  Bleak House May 31st, 2008 In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

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