Literary critics aren’t dying, but they are threatening suicide…again.
The December 31st, 2010 episode of the New York Times Review of Books podcast focused on a conversation on the relevance of professional literary criticism, especially in respects to the ‘everyone does it’ mentality associated with Amazon book reviews, Facebook statuses, and amateur lit crit blogs. Though the entire conversation was extremely interesting, the following point was especially intriguing. Said Katie Roiphe, a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, about the current position of a critic in relation to what so many people want to call today’s death of literature (slightly paraphrased; dates are my insertions):
It is tempting to say that we live in this dangerous death of literature, but the critic has always said that. If you go back to Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), if you go back to Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) and their generation. There is something romantic for the critic to see themselves as this lone, embattled defender of the culture against the vast desert that is our uncaring population. It’s an appealing stance, but I think we have to recognize that it is a romantic role that we embrace and somehow take on. In the end, the books remain, the critic remains, and I think that the idea of the death of the critic or the death of literature is just an eternal one for the critic, sort of a fascinating one for the critic.
The concept of historic consistency when it comes to traditionally un-mainstream mediums has always fascinated me. It seems very generational-centric/ego-centric to think of our time as somehow more unstable or somehow better off in terms of literature. But even when I hear such a concise, and example-laden, view of this fallacy as quoted above, I still can’t help but dismiss it. Do I just want to be a part of a suddenly underdog industry? Or has the industry always been a consistent underdog? Or does the term underdog not apply?
Be sure to read the corresponding essays from each of the episode panelists:
- With Clarity and Beauty, the Weight of Authority by Katie Roiphe
- The Will Not to Power, but to Self-Understanding by Adam Kirsch
- Translating the Code Into Everyday Language by Sam Anderson
