Blogging

Even in Blogging, Everything New is Old

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I’ve been reading through the archives of some lively blog debates related to my own questions about the terms and tendencies of contemporary academic literary criticism (see, for instance, here, here or here). Following the long chains of arguments and rebuttals, examples and counter-examples, I’m struck with a familiar sense of futility: when so much has been said by so many so often, what can I hope to add? I’m also struck, though, by just how unaware I was that conversations of quite this kind were going on. It’s not that I did not know that the terms of criticism have long been debated,of course, including in polemical and political ways as they often are in these blog exchanges–I did my graduate work at Cornell in the early 90s, after all. It’s more that I literally had never heard of blogs until last year, and until early this year, I had no idea that there was such a category as ‘academic blogs.’ So what seemed to me like something new and experimental, like casually posting some notes on my current reading online, turned out to be entirely old and, as far as rethinking criticism goes, hardly experimental, especially as I did not know enough about the blogging scene to have any particular critical or theoretical agenda when I started.

I’m not really sure why my obliviousness to these online forums and debates–at a time when, after all, I was hard at work on other specialized reading and writing–strikes me as somehow symptomatic of more than just my own individual ignorance. Maybe the point is just that the ideal often expressed by academic bloggers (e.g. here or here) about opening up lines of communication is still a pretty long way off: at least in my immediate circles, blogging is definitely still seen as a fringe activity. In a way, it is ‘just’ (or just like) another academic specialization, in that academic bloggers know each other and link to each other and talk to and about each other, as do, say, medieval historians or Christina Rossetti scholars. I am persuaded that blogging has the potential to change a lot about our working and thinking lives (this was useful in clarifying some of the issues, as was this, to pick just two of the long and growing list of materials I’ve bookmarked), but old habits die hard and skeptical attitudes abound. Then, when it comes to joining in the debates, precisely because this form of publication and discussion is so diffuse, it feels like a particularly difficult conversation even to eavesdrop on, never mind to participate in. Also, while in typical academic publishing, with its glacier-like pace, it’s hard to feel that you are coming in too late, somehow reading these blog archives on the function of criticism makes further comment seem SO 2005…how does one ‘make it new,’ on or off line?

Professors, Start Your Blogs…

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I read with much interest Dan Cohen’s post “Professors, Start Your Blogs” (now a year old, but new to me). I appreciated his discussion of the reasons academics might not only want to blog but also justify blogging. He is particularly clear and persuasive about the merits of bringing specialized knowledge, even obsessions (if “properly channeled and focused on a worthy subject”), to a wider audience. The idea of bloggers in well-defined niches becoming “a nexus for information exchange in their field[s]” makes intuitive sense and seems to be borne out by examples, including those he gives. At the same time, he points to what he calls “altruistic reasons” for blogging, reaching out to “an enormous audience beyond academia. . . . I believe it’s part of our duty as teachers, experts, and public servants.” I agree, but it strikes me that his two kinds of reasons (call them obsession and outreach) are not wholly compatible. The high degree of specialization in academia is one of the main reasons academic research is not particularly accessible, never mind interesting, to broad audiences. My own interest in blogging is motivated largely by a desire to escape or redefine the limits of specialization, not to reproduce them in an alternative medium. Cohen’s account of what makes a blog successful exacerbates my ongoing concern, though, that there’s not much point competing with thousands of other blogs for readers’ attention unless your own site offers something distinctive, some angle or attitude they can’t find anywhere else. To use my own blog as an example, I enjoy writing up my latest reading and I find it useful posting about subjects related to my embryonic project on ‘writing for readers,’ but if my ultimate goal is to provide something that will, in Cohen’s words, “frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value,” I’m going to need to narrow, or at least define, my focus–ideally, in a way that still satisfies my desire to get out of the ivory tower and into a wider conversation.

Criticism as ‘Coduction’

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I have remarked a couple of times that Wayne Booth‘s idea of ‘coduction’ seems to me to capture something important about the way thoughtful literary criticism unfolds. I was reminded of this yet again reading Dan Green’s lastest posting on the ethics of book reviewing, in which he proposes that any review that aspires to the status of criticism must take into account what other reviewers have said. As discussed in my previous post, one distinction between reviewing and criticism is that the critic may be aiming at explication rather than evaluation, while the main expectation most of us have of a review is that it will culminate in and justify a judgment. I think Booth would argue that criticism is always at least implicitly judgmental. In any case, here’s some of what he says about the process by which “we arrive at our sense of value in narratives”:

Even in my first intuition of ‘this new one,’ whether a story or a person, I see it against a backdrop of my long personal history of untraceably complex experiences of other stories and persons. Thus my initial acquaintance is comparative even when I do not think of comparisons. If I then converse with others about their impressions–if, that is, I move toward a public ‘criticism’–the primary intuition (with its implicit acknowledgment of value) can be altered in at least three ways: it can become conscious and more consciously comparative…; it can become less dependent on my private experience…; and it can be related to principles and norms…. Every appraisal of a narrative is implicitly a comparison between the always complex experience we have had in its presence and what we have known before. (The Company We Keep, pp. 70-71)

It’s not that the ‘primary intuition’ (especially of a reader with an already rich ‘personal history’ of literature and criticism) is invalid; it’s that putting that intuition into dialogue with other ideas enriches it and complicates it, and makes it better–more “serious,” to use Green’s word.

Just as a bit of an aside, this idea that criticism is not finite or absolute but always in process, part of an ongoing conversation, is what makes a medium such as a blog seem appropriate for it. Conventional academic publishing inhibits any real exchange of views, first because its pace is so unbelievably slow that by the time anything you write appears in print you can barely remember what you said or why you said it, and second because you have to at least sound as if you think what you’ve said is definitive. Hardly anybody reads most academic criticism, either, even within the academy (half the time it seems the real audience is the person who reads only the title, on your cv…).

More on the Purpose of Criticism

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Some time ago I posted some thoughts on Cynthia Ozick’s Harper’s essay “Literary Entrails” (see “Academic Criticism Criticized”). Belatedly, I notice that there was a good posting in response to it at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading which concludes that “Ozick’s better criticism . . . would add another reason to read, a further way to engage a book once it had been closed and to continually re-think and re-evaluate books that have been around for a while. This might not bring any new readers into the fold, but it might make better readers out of those who already do so. Over time, I think that would make books better for everyone.” I like the idea that the critic’s role is to keep us engaged and to encourage us to “re-think and re-evaluate” what we have read; as both this author and Ozick emphasize, the pace of reviewing can be too hasty to allow for a “slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature.” For myself, I have been finding it exhausting trying to keep pace at all with the texts and topics addressed in litblogs and literary journals: I’m starting to look forward to the start of the teaching term in September because I will be back to worrying obsessively over a small handful of books, and to feel grateful for “the canon,” however unstable or elastic its definition, if only because the very idea of a canon implies that there is no obligation to pay attention to everything!

Meanwhile, at The Reading Experience, Dan Green has some good things to say about the distinction between reviewing and criticism: “The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to “read” more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic’s primary task.” I like to think in terms of appreciation rather than evaluation, because it sidelines the issue of taste. I can appreciate a work of fiction for being artful, well-crafted, original, historically significant, etc. without actually liking it (Pamela, anyone?). Yet I am unlikely to devote a lot of critical time (or classroom time) to any text that I am not personally convinced has value, whether artistic, intellectual, social, or some combination. We value different books for different reasons, after all. I’m not sure I’d want to convince anyone of the quality of, say, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, though I enjoy reading and teaching it and consider it an important example of Victorian social problem fiction. On the other hand, I find I am prepared to expend a great deal of energy convincing people of the value of Bleak House or Middlemarch! Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. In any case, I like Green’s comment that criticism is “a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention.” Like the comments at Conversational Reading, this one reminds me of Booth’s idea of “coduction,” which seems to me an excellent model of the way our judgments of literature are in fact formed and reformed.

Blogging Reservations

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Today’s New York Sun includes a short piece by Adam Kirsh on The Scorn of the Literary Blog. Kirsh is mostly writing about the much-noted rivalry between “professional” reviewers and literary bloggers, in the context of the also much-noted decline of book sections in print journalism. I don’t have much to say about these broader contexts, but I am interested in Kirsh’s remarks on the limitations of blogging as a form of literary criticism:

The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

That last bit seems disingenuous, as the links in fact take us to electronic versions of the longer pieces which are themselves seamlessly integrated into the web versions of journals, which include many features typical of blogs, including opportunities to comment and links to other related materials.

I agree that it makes a difference that “literature is not news” and that this distinction has implications for the kind of criticism that works on blogs. Literature can be news, in the sense that new books come out all the time and one function of book reviews is to let readers know about them. But not all kinds of literary criticism serve this market-oriented function. It’s not obvious to me that all blogs do either: many of the ones I’ve been reading don’t aspire to that kind of timeliness, but rather offer commentary on a range of reading material. If a book is not news, does that mean writing about it lacks relevance? It lacks urgency, I suppose, but surely not interest.

It’s also true that “bite-sized commentary” is common, but I’ve been reading a number of blogs that offer more of a mouthful–not in every post, perhaps, but often enough to make it seem unfair to dismiss all blogging as inevitably superficial. The literary posts on Amardeep Singh’s blog, for instance, can be quite extensive and detailed, as can those offered by The Reading Experience or The Little Professor.

Not coincidentally, I’ve used as my examples blogs maintained by writers who are are highly trained as professional readers and writers (two of them are English professors, one is a ‘reformed’ academic). While academic credentials are not the only things that can establish someone’s credibility as a literary critic, it’s hard to argue that the opinions of these three lack “authority,” even when offered in these less formal venues. Further, they set an example of thoughtful, historically-informed commentary that helps expose the inadequacy of the “anyone can say anything” culture of Amazon.Com reviewing and the many more slap-dash reading blogs. It’s hard not to see their efforts as complementary to those of the “professional writers” whose work Kirsh prefers.

And precisely because, as Kirsh says, “the whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly,” surely the bloggers who offer their expertise as generously as the three I’ve mentioned are doing us all a great service by putting their literary encounters out there for the rest of us to learn from and participate in.

Wish List and Back Lists

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I haven’t done much serious reading since finishing An Equal Music; I was so absorbed by that novel that I haven’t been able to settle on what to follow it with, so I’m taking a break with a little Joanna Trollope. The problem is not lack of choice, though, but a surfeit of attractive options, including not just the books already ripening on my shelves but my wish list of books I’m eager to read for one reason or another but have yet to get my hands on. Currently leading this wish list:

  1. Ian McEwan, Chesil Beach (is it just me, or between Saturday and his new novel, does McEwan have a bit of a “Dover Beach” thing going on?)
  2. James Wood, Life Against God
  3. Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
  4. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
  5. Anne Tyler, Digging for American
  6. Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
  7. Elizabeth von Arnim, Enchanted April
  8. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
  9. Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
  10. Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

A number of these are fairly recent novels I have been reading a lot about in review sections and lit blogs. Some of them are older novels that I have learned about or become curious about belatedly. In fact, one of the questions that has been on my mind as I explore the world of literary writing online is how to break out of the ‘new releases’ or ‘hot properties’ cycle and find out about books you did not hear about back when they first came out. I have been frustrated sometimes when I’ve been motivated by the hype around a new novel to snatch it up and read it with great expectations only to find it disappointing (this is frequently my reaction to books I buy on the basis of glowing reviews in The Globe and Mail, a caution I now take with me to the bookstore). But there seem to be factors in the book industry, and certainly in the big chain stores, that make it difficult to discern which books are standing the test of time.

I think this problem relates to a question I asked earlier about whether lit blogging must be a form of literary journalism. Are blogs in fact best or most useful if they are opportunistic or occasional, offering timely responses to new material? If book reviews are buying guides, then there’s some reason for them to address primarily new options, and lots of reasons for them not to spend time on out-of-print options, though there are a lot of titles in between these two extremes. Blogs seem to be (or at least can be) less tied to the book market, more driven by literary than by commercial interests. Maybe this is even a particularly valuable thing bloggers can do, keeping “backlist” titles from going stale.

The Occasion for Blogging

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There has been a lot of public discussion recently about blogs in the context of the decline of book sections and book reviews in newspapers; much of it has consisted of attacks on literary blogs from more traditional writers and sources and defensive responses from bloggers (see, for instance, this response on The Reading Experience to an LA Times column that promised contemptuously to write “in language even a busy blogger can understand”). I have sympathies on both sides of this fence, as I agree that while anyone can write a book review or literary commentary, not anyone can write one that has interest and merit. In general, my position is simply the more people out there reading books and writing about them, the better all round. The more specific issue I’ve been wondering about is whether blogging is really only suited to be a form of literary journalism, focused on new releases and current authors in the way that book reviews are, or whether it is possible or useful for blogs also to write more in the spirit of literary scholarship or criticism of past literature. I’m also thinking more about the nature of literary blogs more generally, while well aware that so far I have still become aware of only a fraction of the options and styles out there.

One typical feature of successful blogging is apparently that it is incessant: unless they are constantly updated, it seems blogs lose their currency, their momentum and, presumably, their readers. I have already found that, at least for someone with other work to do, the rapidity of thinking and writing required to put up new posts even once or twice a week makes drafting and polishing impossible, which inevitably affects the kind and quality of writing you can do. This situation would differ, of course, for someone working full-time on a blog. It could also be overcome, or ameliorated, by writing off-line and not posting anything until it has been tidied up, though this too assumes that blogging is not a sideline to a “real” job. It may be as well that depending on the kind of site and voice you are trying to establish, you can take your time and post longer, more thoughtful pieces. It’s not as if there are deadlines, after all, and besides, who’s really reading most blogs all that frequently anyway, much less one like mine that hardly anyone even knows about? I started quite deliberately writing without a lot of second thoughts, to free myself up from academic hyper-self-consciousness, but all those first impressions are starting to seem inadequate, especially when the book at issue (The Map of Love, for instance) is quite complex, formally and thematically. I’m reaching a point at which I need to consider what I hope to accomplish by writing my posts in the first place and maybe experiment with some more in-depth analyses. But to do that, I would have to take the time and justify it professionally.

Another notable feature of the blogs I am most familiar with so far is their focus on fairly new releases and on the state of the current book and literary worlds. A next step for me will be looking around for people who write about the literature of the past. Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet…books such as John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one’s experience of reading “the classics.” One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as “Moralist for the 21st Century.” But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast.

A number of my posts have been in the spirit of “work in progress” notes, thinking aloud though (maybe oddly) in public–partly in the hopes, of course, of eventually getting some input (a fading hope). At this point, especially with my sabbatical coming to an end, I need to start putting my thoughts together about what I’ve been learning by reading and (in this modest way) writing outside the academic box.

Thoughts on This Project–and a Question for You

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I began writing up my quick ‘notes on current reading’ about a year ago , partly for fun, partly as a way to answer questions from friends and family about what I’d been reading lately and what I’d thought about it, partly as an exercise in non-academic writing about books. I didn’t (couldn’t) take a lot of time over my comments, and indeed I decided not to allow myself to rethink and revise, to free myself from the many forms of self-consciousness endemic in professional criticism. For some years, though, in my professional capacity, I have also been brooding about the nature and purpose of that professional criticism. I wanted to increase the value and relevance of the research I was doing, and to bring to my scholarship the kind of excitement and motivation I feel about my teaching. On my sabbatical this term, I have been continuing to think about this issue, and trying to imagine an alternative form of literary writing that might be of interest and use to a wider audience than the narrow readership of a typical academic article or monograph. As my previous posts here indicate, one way I have been pursuing this question is through reading books about books aimed at general audiences. I have also begun exploring web resources, including online magazines and literary blogs. Of course, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of such sites now; every one I arrive at points me towards more and more.

On one hand I have been finding all of this very stimulating. It’s wonderful to see how lively and widespread the virtual conversation about books is, as well as to see that there is a big market for intelligent books about reading. It is also a salutary reminder, as if I needed one, of how small the academic literary world is, or can be, and how specialization works against the kind of general knowledge and broad cultural awareness that characterize the best of the sites and books I’ve looked at so far. It’s even a bit shaming to realize how oblivious I was to all this activity.

On the other hand, I am starting to get something of the same sense of futility here as I did with academic criticism, though for different reasons. If academic criticism fails to engage a wide audience because it is too specialized, too professionalized, too removed from the interests of ‘common’ readers, all this other material seems unlikely to engage a wide audience because there’s just too much of it. How can someone filter through it all, especially when much of it is updated daily? While the academic peer review system serves very different purposes than those embraced by reviews and blogs, out in cyberspace it’s an intellectual free-for-all, and the ease of setting up a place to comment (even I could do it!) makes it possible for anyone to put forward an opinion as if it should be considered on an equal footing with anyone else’s. Further, even supposing someone has the smarts and the training to offer insightful commentaries, how likely is it that blogging is the best way to express them, given the apparent pressure to say something pretty much every day? What really are the expectations here? What is the purpose of all this chatter?

I’m not about to retreat to my Ivory Tower, but I do feel a certain queasiness setting in. I’ve found a number of sites that strike me as worth keeping an eye on, but it’s hard for me right now to imagine making a great effort on, say, my own blog–because it’s hard to imagine it standing out, whatever approach I took, among all the others.

One other note here: In my reading around, I have noticed that my own impatience with literary criticism is echoed emphatically by a lot of writers out there, many of whom are not just impatient but positively vitriolic about English professors. Daniel Green of the blog The Reading Experience, for instance, writes about “academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict the miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons” (see his article “Critical Conditions” at the Center for Book Culture). Ouch. While I find a lot of lit crit dreary to read, I do think there’s something to be said for expertise. Green talks about seeking a middle ground for “sustained and careful, but also lively and accessible criticism,” to which I say “hear hear” and let’s not underestimate the training and education it takes to be truly “careful.”

This post actually represents a break from another resolution I had made, which was to keep my blog about books, not about me. I’m curious though, in case anyone does read these pages: what does a widely read, intellectually serious lover of literature want from literary criticism? What makes a review, or a blog, or any commentary interesting and useful to you?