What we lose when literary criticism ends
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is, bestowed upon us by "serious critics." I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.
I am. Instead of having something for people reading to aspire to and get to something better, and people serious about books and literature, we just have each person's arbitrary "taste".
Plus leisure reading being at an all time low.
Personal taste is not a bad thing. But it's something people develop, among other things by having guidance and a compass.
Instead, today we build a god of our whims and facile enjoyment, and declare our personal uniformed and under-developed taste the ultimate arbiter.
That's basically arrested literary development.
Your odds of finding the latter by randomly sampling the mass opinion is approximately zero. But clearly it has value. So it's a quandary, how do you tear down the institutionalized gate keeping without reducing everything to superficial opinion? How do you find a better way to pull signal out of all that noise?
This doesn't mean that 'good' = 'lauded by highbrow critics', either. But it's okay to have a concept of literary quality that isn't reducible to popularity or pure entertainment value; it's okay to value things like psychological insight, or beautiful complexity, or the capacity of a book to broaden its readers' circle of empathy.
We will never all agree on which qualities matter most or which books best exemplify them. Employing these unavoidably fuzzy and subjective concepts certainly opens the door for pretentious charlatans to barge in and do their thing. We should adopt a sceptical stance toward any and all cultural gatekeepers, and exercise our own judgment. But there's still no need to flatten our concept of literary quality down into something objectively measurable.
- something can't be really popular and really good
- something can't be really good but not popular
- something can't be popular but not very good
It is, of course, also quite possible to be not good and not popular but this isn't very interesting.
Go back to 1959 then. You had serious literary critics. You also had the New York Times bestseller list. How much overlap was there? I can't be sure, since that was a bit before my time, but I strongly suspect that the answer is "not much". The public didn't pay much attention to the highbrow critics back then, either.
What the highbrow critics did was gatekeep what the highbrow people read. Or perhaps what they admitted to read, or claimed that they read. The general public may have read the highbrow reviews - aspirational high-brow-ism was more of a thing in that day than it is now, I suspect - but I doubt it swayed the public's actual buying and reading habits all that much.
It's about attention again. You are saying that we shouldn't give all the attention to a few arbitrarily selected writers. That it is better that our attention is shattered into innumerable fragments and dusted across the vast landscape of democratised content.
This is replacing literature with social media, and I can't agree it is a good thing.
No, actually what I'm saying is we no longer need some Oxbridge Harold Bloom knockoff to select those few arbitrary writers for us.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Literary criticism ended?
Leisure reading is at an all-time low, and that's even worse.
And most of the "reading" going on concerns self-help snake-oil crap, get-rich-quick books, and of course, heavy skimming.
The biggest problem with so much access to information, is it's simply impossible to absorb it all. You can read tweets from hundreds of people before you can get through the first chapter of Harry Potter.
I fear this has caused a permanent dumbing down of society
There's some selection bias here, because you wouldn't know about all the people who do read but don't post it to instagram.
A couple of years later I stumbled across Light Novels, which led to Web Novels, and eventually more fiction of other types. Nowadays I sometimes wish that I would read less. Sometimes my binge reading can get out of hand.
Perhaps there are others that have been turned off from reading? Perhaps they simply haven't come across the type of fiction that would grip them? Fiction is about entertainment after all. Books will offer you the widest variety of stories. More so than any other entertainment medium. There should be something for most people.
But at least I'm not on Facebook and Instagram!
Pick up the book on the top of the stack and read the first chapter right now. You’ll be happy you did!
At a second tier, honest customer reviews exist in kindle. Sometimes they are dreck, but you can apply critical faculties to what people say.
I agree in principle there is "less" than there used to be but there isn't "none" and I think I have bought at least three books recently purely on the strength of in-depth reviews I read online
(they were Ross King: the Bookseller of Florence, Emma Southon: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders And, the first two which I have read, had merits and issues, and the review highlighted both as I recall)
It’s been several years but the book is great and the title summarizes the work of a literary critic, at their best, in my opinion.
The more interesting part of the article is "In 2018, The Writers’ Union of Canada found that, after factoring in inflation, Canadian writers are making 78 percent less than they were in 1998", ie inflation ie a giant motherfucker, and thanks governments everywhere for fucking the younger generations out of a future.
inflation hurts the old on fixed incomes.
> Narration adds such a richness to a story.
Narration adds more elements, which can be a good or a bad thing.
That's a huge assumption to make. Did you not know that not everyone operates with an inner monologue?