The Life and Death of the Book Review

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. [...] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics, instead taking their lead from celebrities like Oprah, or online influencers. The authoritative middlebrow cultural figures who once instructed Americans on what to read from perches at the Saturday Review and the New Yorker no longer exist (Adam Gopnik does not dictate American reading habits). The very idea of such cultural authority is widely dismissed as elitist. David A. Bell, Liberties

 

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations. Judith Butler, lrb

Judith Butler è una filosofa americana, insegna a Berkeley.

Words

vorrei segnalare una serie di interviste a docenti e critici letterari sul proprio mestiere. Sono uscite su   The Point Magazine a cura di Jessica Swoboda. Qui è l'introduzione all'intervista a Terry Eagleton, professore di letteratura a Oxford, Manchester e Lancaster.

Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.

Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April. 

sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books

 

Elena Ferrante, sempre

The enormous attention to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—first the books published in the US between 2012 and 2015 and then the HBO series that has so far covered the first two titles, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name—has obscured the fact that in Ferrante’s novelistic output as a whole, female friendship has not been a primary theme. The three intense and at times phantasmagorical novels she published before the Neapolitan quartet dealt with friendship almost not at all. Troubling Love (1992) is about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and her recently deceased mother; in The Days of Abandonment (2002) a mother of two young children is abruptly left by her husband; and while The Lost Daughter (2006) concerns two women who meet on a beach vacation, it has more to do with the narrator’s odd, impulsive theft of a doll beloved by the other woman’s daughter. Messy familial bonds have been the focus of Ferrante’s work: bonds between grown daughters and their mothers, mothers and their young children, and women and their husbands. She is interested in intimacy and betrayal, merging and separation, the peril of togetherness on the one hand and solitude on the other. Either losing oneself in another or remaining too distant can threaten the stability of her first-person, female narrators. Above all, in Ferrante’s novels, close relationships, whether hostile or loving, never truly end. Pamela Erens, VQR

Distant Reading

Un'altra, interessante e fondamentalmente positiva, critica al metodo di analisi letteraria di Moretti. Difficile selezionare una frase significativa dall'articolo. Vado con questa, anche se piuttosto banale, "We need to embrace the new technologies Moretti and the Stanford Literary Lab are exploring because they do offer incredibly powerful tools for understanding the phenomenon of literature, and will clearly enable us to say certain things about it which are just at the dawning of being explorable.  Who knows what Moretti will come up with next?" Jonathan Freedman, thenewrambler.

James Wood sul suo nuovo libro

Il nuovo libro di James Wood - The Nearest Thing to Life (Jonathan Cape) - è quasi un'autobiografia: "Wood’s new book is as much autobiographical as critical: why should there be a difference, because the books whose vital “lifeness” he extols saved his own life when he was growing up as a minister’s son in Durham? The atmosphere at home was strict, high-minded, earnestly evangelical. “I was escaping from things,” Wood said, “hiding from things, but also discovering things that might be prohibited. Though my parents didn’t run a despotic regime, novels gave me a freedom to think and to be that was not found within the gospels.” Peter Conrad, guardian.

What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

What Would Lynne Tillman Do? è il titolo dell'ultimo libro di Lynne Tillman, una raccolta di saggi, edito da Red Lemonade. L'introduzione, apparsa sul New Yorker, è di Colm Tóibín. "Her aura as she moved onto the stage was both casual and nervous. It was clear that she had done this before. She was not going to stumble or fumble to get the audience on her side, but that confidence was matched by a guardedness, an unease, and a way of maintaining a distance that might have been theatrical. I was not sure. In one of her books, she writes of a character: “Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly, and turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.”
She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate". newyorker.

Should literary criticism be an art or a science?

Joshua Rothman cerca di rispondere a questa domanda, usando Franco Moretti e il suo metodo, "... my guess is that, while many critics will admire Moretti, relatively few will follow him. The technical skills are learnable; English majors can take computer-science courses. But the sacrifices, intellectually and, as it were, artistically, are too great. Moretti, it seems to me, has set out on a one-way mission. In ordinary literary criticism—the kind that splits the difference between art and science—there is a give-and-take between the general and the particular. You circle back from theory to text; you compromise, or ennoble, science with art. But Moretti’s criticism doesn’t work that way. Generality is the whole point. By the end of his journey, Moretti may be able to see all of literature, but he’ll see it as an astronaut on Mars might see the Earth: from afar, with no way home". newyorker.

Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine

Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine è il titolo del libro di un marito filosofo e una moglie psicanalista, Simon Critchley e Jamieson Webster, che scrutano Amleto attraverso la lente di Benjamin, Freud e Lacan, sperando di dire qualcosa di nuovo non solo sul dramma di Shakespeare, ma anche su di noi. "The book’s ultimate purpose, though, is to speak about love, “as husband and wife.” Critchley and Webster call their book a “rash lovers’ risk,” pursued “for the love of nothing, for the nothing of love, for the love of Hamlet.” lareviewofbooks. Il libro è uscito da Pantheon.

Yale negli anni '70

Il dipartimento di inglese di Yale negli anni '70 in un interessante articolo di Mark Edmundson.
"Theory, it seemed, was a Trojan horse that had made its way inside the gates of Yale. I thought that Yale had been strung up on a paradox of its own devising. Yale wanted the most brilliant minds in the world. Good. Now, in Derrida and de Man, it had a couple of them. Yale’s status was guaranteed. But to this ascendancy there was a cost. The best thinkers in the humanities happened to be opposed to all that Yale, at its most dismal, represented. So I took an interest in these debunkers. I followed their work. I plugged in and tried to cover a few of their tunes". chronicle.

Daniel Mendelsohn on Criticism

Da un'intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn su come concepisce la critica letteraria:
 
I want to end by asking you about your experience of teaching. Do you think it might be worth teaching undergraduates not only how to write academic essays but also how to write criticism of the kind one finds in magazines and popular journals?

First of all, I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism. prospectmagazine.

Literary Lab

Sarcastico e scettico, John Sunyer del Financial Times, su Franco Moretti e i suoi metodi di critica letteraria. "Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction.
For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch “big data”, or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights. ft.

How does a book end up reviewed in the New York Times

How does a book end up reviewed in both the New York Times Book Review and the newspaper’s Arts section, while the the book’s author is writing essays for the paper (and sometimes even being profiled for it)? New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan explains how Times fiefdoms divide their assignments: “The Times’s three staff book critics—Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner—make their own decisions about what to review. They do so without regard to, or knowledge of, what the editors of the Sunday Book Review, a separate entity, may have assigned or have planned.” nyt.

Zoë Heller on Salman Rushdie

Rushdie in 1988

Zoë Heller pubblica sul New York Book Review un'affilatissima critica all'ultimo libro di Salman Rushdie, il memoriale scritto in terza persona, Joseph Anton. Tanto da meritarsi The Best Hatchet Job of 2012 (Hatchet Job of the Year is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style. Most of all, it is a public celebration of that most underpaid and undervalued form of journalism: the book review).
Assolutamente da leggere. Ecco quel che dice, tra le altre cose, "At various points, Rushdie seems to grow tired of defending the special rights of fiction and moves on to advocating for the extra-special rights of serious, or important, fiction. “He hoped for, he often felt he needed, a more particular defense like the quality defense made in the case of other assaulted books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita….”
One is struck here, not just by the implied disregard for the free speech of other writers who might not qualify for “the quality defense,” but also by the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce, and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit. Throughout this memoir, Rushdie claims kinship with any number of great literary men—men who, like him, suffered for their genius, but whose fame was destined to outlast that of their oppressors ..." nybooks.

Dogfight

Il 19 novembre Michiko Kakutani, critica letteraria del New York Times, ha pubblicato la sua recensione al libro di Calvin Trillin, Dogfight (Random House) - una divertente satira delle ultime elezioni americane in versi - anch'essa in versi. Eccone un assaggio:

This book lacks a certain je ne sais quoi
Some Trillin rhymes are unnecessarily blah.
Maybe the poet’s tired of pols and their game
And so fallen back on lines that are lame.
Still, a weary Trillin is better than none,
So this isn’t a book the reader should shun. nyt.

Katie Roiphe su Sweet Tooth

Le recensioni di Katie Roiphe (nella foto) sono sempre molto intelligenti, mai banali. Ecco quel che dice dell'ultimo romanzo di Ian McEwan (anche lui sempre molto intelligente e mai banale), Sweet Tooth: "There is no shortage of excellent, richly imagined books about female protagonists written by male novelists (think of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, or Norman Rush’s Mating, or Ian McEwan’s Atonement), but there are very few instances of male novelists writing about writing about female protagonists.

In Ian McEwan’s tricky and captivating new novel Sweet Tooth, he takes as his complex subject the male writer entering a woman’s consciousness (or it might be more accurate in this case to say breaking and entering a woman’s consciousness). ...
Even the sensitive, artistically attuned, intellectually sophisticated male writer sees a woman in a very different way than she would see herself. The gap McEwan investigates is enormous and fascinating, and if we truly want to understand sexual politics, we need to read, instead of ironic blogs and Caitlin Moran and faux sociology, more novels like this one". slate.

In difesa del romanzo breve

O novella, come si chiama in inglese. A prenderne le difese è Ian McEwan, la cui prima "novella" è stata criticata in maniera antipatica. Lui addirittura definisce la "novella", "the perfect form of prose fiction". Non so se sono d'accordo. Amo i romanzoni, ma anche i romanzi corti e i racconti. Sono tutte forme possibili e non intercambiabili di narrativa. Dettate da esigenze interne, direi. La "novella" ha comunque una tradizione gloriosa. "It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of “Death in Venice,” Henry James by “The Turn of the Screw,” Kafka by “Metamorphosis,” Joseph Conrad by “Heart of Darkness,” Albert Camus by “L’Etranger.” I could go on: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Joyce, Solzhenitsyn. And Orwell, Steinbeck, Pynchon. And Melville, Lawrence, Munro. newyorker.

Critical Thinking

Post dedicato ai docenti di scuole americane, che devono essere challenging (che significa poi in pratica?) e sviluppare il critical thinking (che è?). Ecco come quest'ultimo concetto viene definito da Paul Gary Wyckoff, professore di scienze politiche all'Hamiltono College, NY.
1. The ability to think empirically, not theoretically.
2.  The ability to think in terms of multiple, rather than single, causes.
3. The ability to think in terms of the sizes of things, rather than only in terms of their direction.
4. The ability to think like foxes, not hedgehogs. 5. The ability to understand one's own biases. insidehighered.

Daniel Mendelsohn di nuovo sulle recensioni

The Millions (TM) intervista Daniel Mendelsohn (DM) sulle recensioni.

TM: There is a formula for criticism in the piece which says that knowledge + taste = meaningful judgment, with an emphasis on meaningful.  What makes a critique meaningful? As you point out, a lot of people have opinions who are not really critics and there are lots of people who are experts on subjects who don’t write good criticism. If everyone is not really a critic, where is the magic?
DM: It’s a very interesting question. It is magic, it’s a kind of alchemy. We all have opinions, and many people have intelligent opinions. But that’s not the same. Nor is it the case that great experts are good critics. I come out of an academic background so I’m very familiar with that end of the spectrum of knowledge. I spent a lot of my journalistic career as a professional explainer of the Classics—when I first started writing whenever there was some Greek toga-and-sandals movie they would always call me in—so I developed the sense of what it means to mediate between expertise and accessibility.
You use the word magic, which I very well might make part of my stock Homeric epithet about criticism. It’s intangible, what goes on. I know a good critic when I read one.
It’s a hard thing to nail down, but that’s why I described it as a kind of recipe. Look, it’s exactly like a recipe. Three people can make grandma’s noodle kugel but only Grandma’s noodle kugel tastes like Grandma’s noodle kugel. themillions.

Stephen Burt

When I asked Stephen Burt’s parents if they worried about him when he was young, Burt’s father, Jeff, replied by asking me if I was Jewish. I told him I was. “Well,” he said, “to ask Jewish parents if they were worried about their children — it is a statement of fact! But were we more worried about Stephen than about the other children? The answer is yes.” ...

“What would happen to him?” Jeff remembered thinking. “What would he become? Who would marry him?”

What he became was, among many other things, one of the most influential poetry critics of his generation. Burt is 41, a professor of English at Harvard, heir to the intellectual mantle long held by giants like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. He is also an avid science-fiction fan, the founder of a short-lived indie-pop zine, an authority on women’s basketball, the husband of Jessie Bennett, with whom he has two sons, and an unabashed cross-dresser. nyt.