Update: More on Academic Blogging

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Renewed discussion is breaking out about academic blogging among those who have been doing it for a while; here are some additions, then, to my earlier list of links.

  1. “A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs” (Adam Kotsko, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
  2. “An Enthusiast’s View on Academic Blogs” (Scott Eric Kaufman, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
  3. “Academic Blogging Revisited” (Joseph Kugelmass, The Valve, November 1, 2007)

There are many points of interest in all of these pieces. In light of my own meandering reflections on generating “dialogue and exchange” through blogs, I was struck by Adam Kotsko’s remark that “having a productive conversation in an online format is very hard work, which is why it happens so rarely.” I think, too, from my own experience and from conversations with non-blogging (but often blog-reading) friends and colleagues, that a lot of academics are so accustomed to working in relative isolation and communicating about their research or scholarly practices exclusively with other specialists, if at all, that there is a kind of culture of secrecy (some might call it privacy) in the academy–aggravated by our defensiveness about how we are perceived by non-academics–that makes many academics anxious about expressing themselves publicly. There’s also a fear of exposure: you’ll say something careless and expose your ignorance, or you’ll expose your views to those who disagree with you and have to answer for them, or you’ll expose yourself to ill-conceived and ill-tempered attacks from those who don’t understand the nature of academic scholarship, or to cranks (academic or not) who read without charity, take you out of context, etc. These factors discourage academics (many of whom are reclusive bookworms at heart, after all) from engaging in online conversations when the benefits (professional or other) are uncertain or elusive. I know I take a deep breath before clicking “post,” either on my own blog or as a commenter on someone else’s (the latter is more stressful for me by far). But I think Joseph Kugelmass points towards where things might go when he mentions the widening acceptance of social sites such as Facebook as an example of people coming on board with something that initially seemed fringe or irrelevant. There was a time that some of us can remember when e-mail was a strange new medium and listservs seemed like cutting-edge ways to reach across distances and form academic communities. But I wonder if any active academic today is not linked electronically in some way to others. Some form of blogging may well be equally ‘normal’ and common in the near future. As far as benefits go, one possibility is that such a development would work against the excessive specialization and resulting fragmentation typical of today’s humanities departments; one of the commenters at Inside Higher Ed makes the point that “often, we’re not even interested in what our colleagues are doing,” something with which surely many of us would ruefully agree. And if it brought differences of view and style out into the open, would that be such a bad thing? Affinities and serendipitous connections might emerge as well. The string of closed office doors in my hallway up here does not make this place look much like an intellectual community. Blogs at least open windows. More “interfacing” between academics and a wider public seems to me like a good thing as well, if only to counteract the bizarrely excessive hostility some people show towards us. (Maybe we fear that if they knew us better, they would not like us any better? Are we so bad at explaining ourselves that we feel safest not even trying?)

In the Midst of Middlemarch

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I haven’t had the time or mental energy to detach from the press of teaching and other ‘real’ work to post here for a few days, not least because I’m immersed in Middlemarch, which I’m studying with two different classes. So here, in lieu of my own words, is some of Chapter 42 for you. Lydgate has just broken to Mr Casaubon the news that his heart condition may lead to his sudden death.

Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death — who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die ” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die — and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward — perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion.

Dorothea approaches, hoping to offer comfort, or at least companionship. “But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardour, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder.” As she fears, he rebuffs her: “There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her.” He retreats to his library, she to her boudoir, where he (presumably) wrestles with his mortality, and she struggles with her anger and sorrow. “In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.”

Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle, while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike. The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a resolved, submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet her husband — her conviction that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work, and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger with sad remonstrance. It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows — but the resolved submission did come; and when the house was still, and she knew that it was near the time when Mr. Casaubon habitually went to rest, she opened her door gently and stood outside in the darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs with a light in his hand. If he did not come soon she thought that she would go down and even risk incurring another pang. She would never again expect anything else. But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking.

“Dorothea!” he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ” Were you waiting for me?”

“Yes, I did not like to disturb you.”

“Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”

When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

This Week in My Classes (October 29, 2007)

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It’s all Middlemarch, all the time this week (and next week, and the week after that). And even so, I know I will end up worrying about all the things we didn’t talk about. In my undergraduate lecture class, we’ll focus today on the novel’s structure and how it reinforces important ideas and themes. In particular, we will examine the complex chronology of some key sections, looking at the way the narrative goes back in time in order to bring us to an event from a different perspective. One of my favourite examples is at the end of Chapter 27 (the chapter which, appropriately, begins with the famous pier glass passage). It’s a chapter mostly chronicling the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond; it concludes with Sir James Chettam’s servant stopping Lydgate as he walks with Rosamond, to take him to Lowick. As we learn, he is needed there because Casaubon has had some kind of heart attack. In Chapter 27, the incident is important, not as part of Casaubon’s story, but as part of Rosamond’s (more evidence for her satisfied theory that Lydgate is a cut above her other Middlemarch suitors) and part of Lydgate’s (a sign that his practice is beginning to flourish, despite his having alienated some of Peacock’s former patients by his innovative methods). The incident (we figure out later) takes place in March. But Chapter 28 begins in January, taking us back to Dorothea and Casaubon’s return from their dismal honeymoon and then following the stories of her growing disillusionment, his creeping jealousy about Will Ladislaw, and his diminishing health–bringing us up to the attack in Chapter 29. “But why always Dorothea?” asks the narrator as Chapter 29 opens–and of course the novel models the morally necessary movement of our attention and sympathy among different points of view. I often invite the class to come up with some kind of graphic representation of many people arriving at the same event (our class meeting, say), but coming from many different perspectives and all having slightly different experiences. The results, usefully, tend to look either like a tangled web or a giant hairball (the latter once they realize the advantages of working in 3-D for showing simultaneous but different strands). How can a narrative recreate these effects? I usually end up quoting Carlyle’s remark that “narrative is linear, but action is solid.” The formal challenge for the novelist is substantial, as are the mental demands on the reader. Later (probably next week) we will look at another pattern of repetition in which a place (such as Dorothea’s blue-green boudoir) or an event (such as the first time Dorothea sees Will and Rosamond together) is revisited in light of new information. In these cases we have internal or mental movement working to the same ends as the chronological and other disruptions in today’s examples.

In my graduate seminar, the discussion will be less choreographed, which means I can look forward to some surprises–always refreshing with a novel you teach often. I know we will begin with a presentation on Dorothea and women’s education, which is a promising lead in to many key issues in the novel. Our secondary readings for this week are primarily contextual: George Levine on George Eliot’s determinism, and Bernard Paris on her ‘religion of humanity.’ We are certainly getting a third distinct model of authorship: we have worked with Charlotte Bronte, who (at least as quoted in Gaskell’s biography) emphatically demanded freedom for her imagination and refused to write except as the spirit moved her; then with Elizabeth Gaskell, whose strongest motivation is social reform and reconciliation; and now with a writer whose vision of fiction is highly philosophical. In her commitment to the novel’s capacity to cause change, even improvement, GE is closer to Gaskell than to Bronte. Levine argues that to GE “a belief in the possibility of some kind of occurence not usually produced by the normal workings of the laws of nature became to her one of the positive signs of moral weakness. . . . [she] believed it morally reprehensible to rely on the unlikely or unusual, even if there is a remote chance that it might happen” (272). I don’t recall any specific comments from GE herself about this aspect of Jane Eyre, including Bronte’s own defence of the mysterious communication between Jane and Rochester (about which Gaskell quotes Bronte saying, “But it is a true thing; it really happened”). (In an 1848 letter, young Mary Ann, having just read Jane Eyre, sounds a critical note: “I have read Jane Eyre, mon ami, and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good–but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might want to discuss how far her concept of the nobility of self-sacrifice has shifted by the time she gives us Dorothea’s “submission” to Casaubon’s needs, characterized in Chapter 43 as the reassertion of a “noble habit of the soul.”) The Levine and Paris articles are both from the early 1960s: given my recent fretting about the pressure to turn our critical attention to ourselves, or to a text’s unconscious aspects (the things it says without knowing or meaning to) rather than to the conversation it is overtly trying to have with us, these are interesting examples of rather different priorities. I certainly think that they are more broadly valuable than some of the more esoteric readings of Middlemarch: any responsible reader of the novel needs, or would benefit from, some grasp of its philosophical underpinnings. But we’ll be looking at some samples of other readings that work against the grain as well, including another “classic” with J. Hillis Miller’s “Narrative and History,” and we’ll ‘go meta’ ourselves when we consider the vexed status of the novel among feminist critics.

George Eliot and Prayer

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Further to my earlier post on George Eliot as the ‘friendly face of unbelief,’ here’s a passage that stood out to me as I was rereading Middlemarch this weekend for my classes:

Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time, unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice —

“Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else. — And I mind about nothing else — ”

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal — this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life. (Chapter 30)

It’s a charged moment in the novel for several reasons, not least because it sets us (and Lydgate) up for the painful contrast between Dorothea’s desire to do something if at all possible, and Rosamond’s later indifference to her role in Lydgate’s financial crises (“What can I do, Tertius?”). But it also nicely, and subtly, illustrates George Eliot’s appreciation for religion (as distinct from theology, we might say) as a yearning to have and receive help and guidance in our “fitfully illuminated” lives–and her commitment to redefining it in secular terms. Dorothea is deeply religious, and George Eliot never belittles her for seeking understanding and connection beyond what she can readily see in the world around her. But, as this example implies, prayer (appealing to supernatural forces) is the resort of those who are “alone,” or who fail to understand the primacy of the human connections and resources available in their “embroiled medium.” Her impulse to prayer is rightly channeled here into an appeal to a “kindred nature,” one with the secular wisdom to advise her, at least in this medical crisis. The “cry from soul to soul” repeatedly proves more valuable in the novel than any appeal to doctrine or to supernatural authority: Rosamond, for instance, is famously brought to a sort of ‘confession’ and even ‘salvation’ (though limited in scope) by Dorothea’s climactic visit in Chapter 81:

Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing error. She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond’s, and said with more agitated rapidity, — ” I know, I know that the feeling may be very dear — it has taken hold of us unawares — it is so hard, it may seem like death to part with it — and we are weak — I am weak — ”

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force. She stopped in speechless agitation. not crying, but feeling as if she were being inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own — hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect — could find no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea’s forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck.

“You are thinking what is not true,” said Rosamond, in an eager half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea’s arms round her…

To do better–to act morally–they need each other, a sufficiently strong sense of human fellowship and need, and a sufficiently strong sense of responsibility for the outcome of their actions. There’s no need in this scenario for the supernatural. In fact, as George Eliot argues in several essays and reviews (and implicitly in all of her novels) religious doctrines such as belief in an afterlife actively work against “genuine feelings of justice and benevolence.” To go back to my first example, the impulse to prayer is simply the form taken by a natural longing for help and connection, validated and given form by historical tradition but, as our society and our moral philosophy matures, properly redirected to each other.

Ian Rankin, Exit Music

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Not long ago I observed that I would be sorry to see the last of Ian Rankin’s surly Scotch-soaked detective, John Rebus. Having now read Exit Music, my anticipated regrets are confirmed; Exit Music shows both Rankin and Rebus in characteristically good form. I don’t have much to add to what has been said about it already in reviews and other blogs (Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor, for instance, has a nice post on it), except to remark that this series exemplifies the challenge writers in this genre face with characterization–most of the characters, for plot and suspense reasons, need to be a degree opaque–as well as the best way they find out of it, namely the series characters, whose characterization can be enriched across many volumes even as, as characters, they change and develop. In this series, of course, it’s not just Rebus (who doesn’t really change much, actually, though we know him better and better), but Siobhan Clarke who offers the human interest and complexity that move the books beyond the superficiality to which ‘puzzle’ mysteries are vulnerable. At the same time, Rankin keeps a careful balance between personal and procedural developments. The close engagement between Rebus and Edinburgh’s history and politics, a thematic preoccupation since Knots and Crosses, is in full play here as well; in fact, Rebus’s brooding here about the city’s “overworld,” which he finds as threatening and corrupt as its “underworld,” reminded me very much of that first novel. Because we end up having relationships with series characters across long swathes of our own lives, Rebus’s brooding on the way his work has dominated his life and identity, and therefore on what and who he will be after retirement, couldn’t help but make me reflect on my own choices–and my own aging…in this respect at least, I appreciate Sue Grafton‘s decision to keep Kinsey Millhone back in the 1980s (no cell phone, never mind an iPod), though probably that is also one reason, among others, why that series seems to me rather to have stagnated.

A Critic’s Library

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ReadySteadyBook points us to this interesting series at Critical Mass: “Each week, the NBCC will post a list of five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries.” Writers surveyed so far include John Updike, Morris Dickstein, Cynthia Ozick, Colm Toibin and Katha Politt; Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis is an unexpected crowd favourite, while some point to works of fiction or poetry rather than criticism or theory. If the question really is which books would be most useful to a practising critic, I think I’d incline towards reference books as much as exemplary scholarship or criticism. How about these five?

  1. The Oxford English Dictionary.
  2. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.
  3. Joseph Williams, Style: 10 Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
  4. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.
  5. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.

On the other hand, if the real question is not which five books would be most useful for the broadest range of critical work but which five books exemplify your critical ideals, or which five books most provoked you to think about critical issues, or which five critical books you felt taught you the most about how to read (whether or not, in the end, you agree with them all the way), the list would look quite different, maybe something like this:

  1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (or Natural Supernaturalism).
  2. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic.
  3. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
  4. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
  5. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction.

But of course five is really not enough: I’d want to get in at least some of James’s critical prefaces, and some of Woolf’s Common Reader, and George Eliot’s essays, and probably The Great Tradition, because what it does, it does well, and maybe Lukacs’s The Historical Novel…So what would your top five be (and how would you choose to understand the question)?

If a blog falls in the forest and nobody hears it…

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Some assorted and preliminary follow-up thoughts to my previous post on blogging as a spectator sport:

  1. While I certainly find some value in blogging for myself, in sorting out my thoughts more carefully than I sometimes do in a notebook, for instance, because of the chance that someone else will read them, and in the practice it gives me in writing often, and in the excuse to write about books and topics not strictly work-related and in a relatively informal way–while I like these and some other aspects of blogging, I am disappointed in it at this point as a medium for dialogue and exchange. To be sure, the format readily allows for plenty of back-and-forth, through comments and replies or through linking, cross-posting, and cross-referencing. I certainly don’t get much of that here, myself. It’s true that as far as I know I have very few readers, and I don’t post much that’s edgy or controversial–but I do sometimes ask questions of my (imagined) audience, and sometimes it would just be nice to know what someone else thinks, whether of something I’ve read or of an issue I’m puzzling over–to have some constructive but casual conversation. I can think of two factors that militate against me in particular, in this regard: in the first place, there are over 75 million blogs now, so it’s no wonder that things are quite quiet over here; and in the second place, the kind of conversation I imagine is hard to come by in the ‘real’ world because the people I’d like to talk to are very busy, and I’m sure the same is true in the ‘blogosphere.’ But my question about the possibilities of dialogue-through-blogging is only partly about my own case, because (sensibly) my expectations remain about as low as my profile. The thing is, as I mention in the post I’ve linked to above, even the busy discussions on some of the most established ‘academic’ blogs are dominated by a small number of avid participants, while the rest of us basically eavesdrop or ‘lurk.’ The more political the topic, the more likely it seems to be to engage people. (Though there are always surprises: I think the longest comment thread I’ve come across anywhere is still this one , with 210 comments on the first round and 53 more on the next…)
  2. One aspect of this situation that I’ve been thinking about is the tension between generalization and specialization that academic blogs perhaps illustrate. It’s difficult to provoke comments on a specialized topic, except from other specialists. Non-specialists may be interested in reading or using your material, but they are unlikely to add to it. (I’m thinking, for instance, of the posts on The Little Professor about Victorian anti-Catholic texts: this is just not a topic on which many people can, or would, chime in, though now I know where to go if I want to learn something about them.) But if your offerings are general enough to interest a lot of people, they may lose their value in establishing a community of expertise, or in contributing to the development of your professional work. And if, as in some of the cases I linked to in my earlier post, they tend towards current events and political controversies, they may not be the kinds of conversations you are keen to participate in, especially publicly, or especially if you’re not American and don’t follow all the latest headlines.
  3. Further to that last point, I’m starting to notice a divide in blogging between two kinds of literary sites, which I would roughly divide into ‘bookish’ and ‘academic’–and the academic ones really don’t seem that literary, in the sense of talking about, well, literature, as opposed to politics, philosophy, theory, and criticism. (I know, I know: talking about literature always involves politics, philosophy, and theory, etc….) I ‘m thinking especially at this point of The Valve, subtitled ‘A Literary Organ,’ after all. The bookish ones seem quite contemporary in their focus, so for those of us who spend most of our time reading loose baggy monsters from the 19th century, well, once again but for different reasons, we aren’t really equipped to jump in–and there too, I don’t see that much discussion, to return to my first point. A third category would be the ‘academic specialty’ site, like Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog or The Long Eighteenth, or Blogging the Renaissance, all of which do seem to represent a virtual community offering its members fellowship and mental stimulation–but within established boundaries (that is, I don’t see them as trying to bridge any gaps between specialists and generalists–which is not to say that I think they should, just to observe that their aims seem rather different than the aims of The Valve).

I realize these remarks are rather rambling (it’s been a long day) but I wanted to get some of them down, not least because I volunteered to give a short talk in my department next month, sort of a ‘show and tell’ about academic blogging and I’m trying to pin down my impressions. I’d be curious to know what others (especially but not exclusively other bloggers) think about how well blogs do or can work for fostering dialogue, or about how much (or whether) commenting matters to the value of blogging. I’d also be happy to learn of other models of academic or literary blogs.

This Week in My Classes (October 22, 2007)

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1. 19th-Century Novel. Today we begin three weeks on Middlemarch. To me, this is what going to university should be about: this novel challenges us intellectually and philosophically, and it is aesthetically and formally brilliant. As if that’s not enough, it’s also very funny (“‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James. ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader”). I’ll open today with a lecture on George Eliot’s very interesting life as well as an overview of some key ideas governing her fiction (realism, determinism, sympathy). Then we’ll get started on the particulars of Middlemarch itself next time, probably with a focus on Dorothea’s marriage and the ways it (and, of course, its treatment by the narrator and in the narrative) highlights the central issue of (mis)interpretation.

2. Victorian Women Writers. It’s week two on North and South. Last week we ended up talking quite a lot about the obviously crucial scene in which Margaret confronts the striking workers on the steps of Thornton’s mill. One of the key interpretive questions about the novel is the relationship between the private or romance plot and the social or political plot. We read some interesting articles on this last week and no doubt our discussion of it will continue, now that everyone has read to the end of the book. I hope we will also focus on what the novel says about the problem of women’s vocation: one of this week’s critical articles puts the novel in the context of the Crimean War and makes a number of connections with Florence Nightingale, which is interesting. As we begin Middlemarch in our seminar next week (yes, I get to work on it in two classes at once, which I call luxurious!), we will also be able to put Margaret’s efforts to find meaningful occupation up against Dorothea’s. Does Margaret perhaps fare better than Dorothea in the end, at least in this respect? Is that a problem, in the end, for Gaskell’s social analysis?

“Proud Atheists” Pinker and Goldstein Interviewed

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There’s an extremely interesting interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein at Salon.Com:

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other’s work. I was a great fan of Steve’s work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve’s work that we first came to know each other. I don’t know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think — particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology — that I said, “I don’t think I’ve had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume.” And he very modestly said, “That can’t be the case.” But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I’ve certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn’t just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism — the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know –which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness — how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively — is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca’s fiction and her philosophical writings.

Read the rest here. I am keen to read Goldstein’s book on Spinoza, not least because of his influence on George Eliot.

“An Actual Literary Critic”?

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Thanks to Dan Green for pointing us to this thoughtful piece on James Wood. Though I have read only some of Wood’s extensive critical output, I have certainly been impressed at both his compelling close reading and his commitment to taking literature and its forms and effects seriously; as I mostly share his apparent prejudices in favour of realism, character, and moral seriousness, I don’t really mind what DG calls his ‘aesthetic conservatism’ (frankly, in these “everything’s a text” days, I find it refreshing) and I’m certainly in sympathy with the idea that whatever his prejudices, the ‘evangelical zeal’ he brings to his criticism raises the level of the debate for all of us. As usual, I find myself fretting when I read comments like this:

In a world in which it seems that every year there are fewer and fewer readers, perhaps any serious dialogue about what makes good literature good and bad literature bad is, after all, good. In an interview, Pulitzer-prize winning novelist of The Hours (and director of the program where I am pursuing an MFA in fiction) Michael Cunningham said that “in the scattershot climate of contemporary literary criticism,” he is thankful for “an actual literary critic.”

I guess that makes a lot of us ‘virtual’ literary critics? But I think I understand the standard Cunningham is invoking here. If you conceive of a critic as someone with a public role, a kind of intellectual and literary intermediary between writers and their broadest audience, there’s no doubt that most academic critics do not fit this model. Most histories of criticism acknowledge that ‘once upon a time’ the situation was different; here’s Brian McRae, for instance, from Addison and Steele are Dead:

For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given importance because of its impact upon morals and emotions. For the present-day academic critic, literature no longer is a public matter but rather is a professional matter, even more narrowly, a departmental matter.

Of course, writers of this history vary in their attitudes, some celebrating, some accepting, and some deploring the development of today’s highly specialized, professionalized ‘discipline’ of literary criticism. But there’s no doubt that one result of it is that academic criticism has become largely uninteresting and irrelevant to a lot of readers. Most of the time we do write for a kind of ‘virtual’ world, hoping that some day someone will happen across our small contribution to some sub-field and find it valuable. I’ve been challenged before to explain why our scholarly work should be expected to appeal to non-specialists when the research of academics in other fields is not. I’m still thinking about this question, which I still believe is not adequately answered by pointing to current disciplinary norms or professional demands.