literary criticism

BuzzFeed Books Won’t Kill Literary Criticism — But Book Snobbery Might

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This post by Michelle Dean originally appeared on Flavorwire on 11/8/13.

So here’s the thing: yesterday BuzzFeed Books named its new editor, a sometime friend of mine named Isaac Fitzgerald. I knew Isaac as the Managing Editor of a literary site known as The Rumpus, where I was a weekend editor for several months in 2012. 

Yesterday, he gave the following quote to a media reporting site:

BuzzFeed will do book reviews, Fitzgerald said, but he hasn’t figured out yet what form they’ll take. It won’t do negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

It’s likely that you, dear readers, have not have been following the latest scintillating round of slapfighting in book critic circles about the “state of criticism.” It’s always a subject of dubious interest to the general population, I think, but let me explain briefly anyway, because the debate is crashing into the perennial concern about the declining popularity of books in our culture, and we all care about books here at Flavorwire, so.

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

How Copyright Law Protects Art From Criticism

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This post by Noah Berlatsky originally appeared on Pacific Standard on 9/29/14.

Aesthetics aren’t supposed to affect the law. You can’t dump a bucket of fishheads on Kevin Costner, even if he is a festering boil on the body of American cinema. You can’t hack Amazon and delete every copy of every Pearl Jam album, no matter how ludicrous the bellowing of Eddie Vedder may be. Ruth’s Journey, Donald McCaig’s authorized sequel to Gone With the Wind, which will be published later this month, may be wonderful or it may be horrible or it may just be blasé. But, no matter its quality, you’re not legally allowed to sell pirated copies of it.

The rationale here is easy enough to follow. The law is supposed to apply to everyone equally. Aesthetic judgments are contradictory and individual. Some benighted people may even like Kevin Costner or Eddie Vedder. Ruth’s Journey, told from the viewpoint of Gone With the Wind‘s Mammy, looks fairly tedious to me from reviews, but other folks may love it. That’s why, in a famous copyright decision dealing with banal advertising art, Oliver Wendell Holmes declared:

It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits.

Holmes’ admonition is often cited in intellectual property cases, and it’s widely seen as the correct legal position on copyright issues. Courts, everyone agrees, shouldn’t be ruling on whether Kevin Costner or Eddie Vedder or Ruth’s Journey are good art or bad art. Courts should enforce copyright regardless of how good or bad the copyrighted work may be.

 

Click here to read the full post on Pacific Standard.

 

Why Book Criticism and Literary Culture Needs a Poptimist Revolution

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This post by Elisabeth Donnelly originally appeared on Flavorwire on 8/28/14.

When bestselling author Jennifer Weiner was profiled by The New Yorker in January 2014 in an article called “Written Off,” writer Rebecca Mead made sure to outline Weiner’s two audiences: one, the loyal readers of her books, who propel them onto the best-seller list, and number two, a pricklier sort, consisting of the “writers, editors, and critics… who have given Weiner a parallel notoriety, as an unlikely feminist enforcer.” The short version is that, through Twitter (and her following, which currently numbers about 93K), Weiner used her platform to needle such august institutions as The New York Times Book Review and everyplace else with mediocre VIDA counts regarding the amounts of space they give to reviewing and considering the three books that “matter” for the season written by male authors like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, while simultaneously ignoring the span of women’s writing, and, additionally, commercial fiction.

Like any provocateur’s performance, it was equal parts annoying — if you see book reviewing as advocacy for the little guy, a review of a Weiner novel is certainly not part of that performance — and righteous truth. It’s sexist that book critics can ignore Weiner while making sure to cover the next book by a Stephen King (who bridges “commercial” and also gets literary cred all the time).

 

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Jane Austen Read Her Reviews… and Kept Notes on Them

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This post by Sal Robinson originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 5/22/14.

Some authors refuse to read their reviews. And then there’s Jane Austen. Who not only, it turns out, listened to what her friends and acquaintances had to say about her books, both positive and negative, but also took notes on it.

Austen’s notes are part of a cache of 1,200 documents that the British Library have drawn out of their Victorian and Romantic collections and are now highlighting on their website with all kinds of supplementary bells and whistles—contextualizing essays, documentary films, and images of primary sources ranging from manuscripts to illustrations to advertisements, broadsides, and the occasional dancing manual.

Austen appears to have compiled the reactions of her readers from letters, hearsay, and direct conversations and recorded them on a set of closely written pages around 1815, before her death at the age of 41, two years later.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Literary Criticism in the Era of the Clickbait Headline

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This post by Jason Diamond originally appeared on Flavorwire on 5/15/14.

This probably says more about the type of conversations I have when I’m not sitting behind a computer than anything, but I’ve spent plenty of time in bars debating whether book reviews are of any value to anybody, from the reading public to the author who might look to critics for notes on what to improve. (If you are that special kind of literary masochist, then good on you. Go on doing what you’re doing). As someone who writes about books, as well as the type of person who enjoys reading criticism — to the point where I’ll read books full of book reviews from decades ago — I’m always going to stick up for book reviews. I’m always going to want to read them, and I wouldn’t mind always writing them. Reviews are important. Without them, the literary balance is thrown off, and the bar can be lowered to astonishing levels.

The thing is, people really don’t talk about reviews all that much. They might read them, but for the most part, unless it’s some intense Michiko Kakutani takedown over at the Times, discussing reviews doesn’t really compare to talking about which Stark was killed on the latest episode of Game of Thrones in terms of culturally relevant conversation topics. I wish that wasn’t the case, but in this tweet-a-second world, book reviews have had to fight really hard to stay in the conversation, especially on the Internet, where an Amazon review can make any casual reader feel like they’re John Leonard.

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.