Are We Living in a Golden Age of Literary Criticism?
Also: A new anthology of American English, Christopher Wren’s acoustics, and more.
Are we living in a golden age of literary criticism? Ryan Ruby thinks so and makes the case in the Norwegian magazine Vinduet:
By “literary criticism” I mean any piece of writing which takes one or more pieces of writing, of whatever genre, as its primary subject, starting-off point, or raison d’être.
By “public” I mean that the intended audience for this criticism is external to academia. The persons who produce and consume this writing may also work in literature departments or have been trained by them, but the venues of distribution, the occasions and incentives for production, the self-conception and work culture of the producers, the stylistic and generic protocols involved, the quality control procedures or lack thereof at play, and the reception context are all shaped more by the historical norms of journalism than those of scholarship.
By “age” I mean roughly 2018 to the present. Although it could be argued that the fuse for the present explosion was lit ten, even fifteen years ago, this period has seen particularly intense levels of production, consumption, and circulation, especially during the years 2020-2021, coinciding with the social, cultural, and intellectual dislocations wrought by the pandemic.
Finally, by “golden” I do not simply mean the way new talent flooding the critical field and collegial competition has produced network effects that have led to an increase in quality of work across the board. Rather, we’ve seen a more profound shift, whether or not it sustains itself at the current degree of intensity for much longer. What the exemplary critical essays of the present day have in common is that they are received as literary art, providing an aesthetic experience closer to fiction than to a consumer report or even to scholarship. For whom have the last five years been a golden age? For readers of criticism, above all. These readers have constituted themselves as a public that is not merely a readership, but a connoisseurship, often reading critical essays for their own sake, and not necessarily as gateways into the books which have occasioned them.
By “age,” he means writing since 2018? Four years and few months is not an “age,” and while there are some talented young writers today, I don’t think we can say that the essays they are publishing are better than those of the preceding generation. Ruby provides a list of some of his favorite contemporary critics as proof:
Now that we’ve defined our terms, let me put some raw data or anecdotal evidence in favor of the “golden age” claim in front of you. Here is an alphabetical list of fifty critics who have produced excellent essays in English about literature in non-academic venues in the period 2018-2023: Andrea Long Chu, Dan Chiasson, Nicholas Dames, Maggie Doherty, Lauren Elkin, Merve Emre, Greg Gerke, Nathan Goldman, Tobi Haslett, Sophie Haigney, Jennifer Hodgson, Jane Hu, Dustin Illingworth, Kamran Javadizadeh, Katie Kadue, Evan Kindley, Phil Klay, Ben Kunkel, Ben Libman, Sheila Liming, Patricia Lockwood, Christian Lorentzen, Kevin Lozano, Julian Lucas, Jeremy Lybarger, B.D. McClay, Tyler Malone, Alex Marraccini, Tom Meaney, J.W. McCormack, Anahid Nersessian, John-Baptiste Oduor, Emily Ogden, Lauren Oyler, Rebecca Panovka, Sophie Pinkham, Jared Marcel Pollen, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Leo Robson, Becca Rothfeld, Dan Sinykin, Lola Seaton, Parul Sehgal, Ed Simon, Alina Stefanescu, Justin E.H. Smith, Mitch Therieau, Francesca Wade, Alex Wells, Jennifer Wilson.
This, I hope it goes without saying, is a personal list, a list of the critics who I have been reading over the course of the past five years, and whose work is providing much of the energy that underwrites my golden age claim. They range in age from their late twenties to their mid-forties, in status from emergent to established, in frequency of publication from a few pieces to over twelve per year, and in readership from a few dozen to several thousand. It is a list that could easily be doubled according to taste, or tripled if one were to include names from the two preceding generations of well-established critics from Perry Anderson and Elif Batuman to Zadie Smith and James Wood, many of whom have also published important literary criticism during this period.
It is almost as if Ruby thinks that the number of critics makes for a golden age of literary criticism. I enjoy reading the work of some of the writers above, but the question is: Is it better than the work of writers preceding them over the past 50 to 100 years? Are they better critics and prose stylists than T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom, Gary Saul Morson, George Steiner, Clive James, John Simon, Hugh Kenner, Arthur Krystal, Frederic Raphael, Lionel Trilling, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Jeffrey Meyers, Anthony Daniels, Dana Gioia, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dennis Donoghue, Joseph Epstein, and so on, and so on?
Not even close.
Some of our best contemporary critics—Joan Didion, John Simon, and Terry Teachout—have recently died. They came of age in an era when magazines reigned supreme. That era is no longer. But for some reason, Ruby thinks that what has replaced it is as good or better:
The venues where they publish include major general-interest magazines and literary reviews based out of New York and London (e.g., New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, Paris Review, New York magazine, The Nation, the New Left Review, and New Statesman), as well as a more recent generation of little magazines or public-facing academic outlets (e.g., Bookforum, The Baffler, The Believer, n+1, The Point, The White Review, Music and Literature, Public Books, Post45, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin), but also a number of print and online venues which have emerged during the golden age period proper. These include online supplements to established print venues (e.g., the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog and the new prose vertical at Poetry magazine) as well as the relaunch of publications (e.g., The Yale Review, The Oxonian Review, Jewish Currents, Gawker, The Dial), but also entirely new print and online publications such as Liberties, The Drift, Socrates on the Beach, the Cleveland Review of Books, and the European Review of Books. Three other types of venue which have emerged at this time are also worth mentioning: the Substacks of individual, better-established critics; literary podcasts; and finally book-length critical essays of around 100-150 pages aimed at a general readership and published by small independent presses or university presses such as Verso, Sublunary, and Columbia University Press.
There are some good publications listed above—The London Review of Books, The Point, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Harper’s—but others are shells of their former selves. Much of the writing in The Paris Review and The New Yorker is mediocre. I can’t read The New York Review of Books anymore—politics has pushed everything else to the margins. I am sure Ruby is aware that Vinduet, where his piece was published, used to be a print magazine but is now only published online. He knows—as he notes later in the piece—that Bookforum has been shut down. Why does he mention it here? Or Gawker?
We are not living in the worst of times for literary publishing, but there are fewer opportunities to get paid today—and paid well—for prose nonfiction than at any time in the past 100 years. Substack has been an interesting development, and who knows what things will look like in the future, but right now ain’t no golden age.
Speaking of literary criticism, I am thrilled to announce that John Wilson will be writing a monthly fiction chronicle for Prufrock. More later this week!
If you are not a paid subscriber to Prufrock, why not give it a try? In addition to John’s monthly column, you will receive three emails a week, pointing you to the best in books and arts across the Web, as well as a weekly poem and photos of the day.
In other news, Damien Hirst has no problem with AI since he’s never been interested in art in the first place and is happy to use whatever he can to separate rich dupes from their money: “The Beautiful Paintings, Damien Hirst’s most recent project of A.I.-generated works, has proved a lucrative venture for the British artist and his technological collaborator, HENI. In a nine-day sale that ended on April 10, Hirst sold 5,508 paintings (5,109 physical artworks and 399 NFTs) and generated $20.9 million in revenue. The project is a digital remix of Hirst’s Spin Paintings from the 1990s and outsourced considerable creativity to collectors—albeit channeled through artificial intelligence. Using HENI’s dashboard, collectors could determine the colors, style, size, and shape of the work they wanted to generate. The Beautiful Paintings claimed to push the boundaries of art and wow people, though, in reality, the experience of click-tinkering on HENI felt reminiscent of customizing a pair of sneakers on NikeID in the early 2010s.”
The life and work of Osip Mandelstam: “When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag.”
Harry Mount writes about Christopher Wren’s architecture and acoustics: “To commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death on March 8, 1723, I recently chaired a talk in St Mary Abchurch. It’s one of the loveliest of his City churches, built in 1686 on the footprint of its predecessor, which had burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London in 1666. ‘As well as being a great architect, Wren was a tremendous engineer and scientist, and brilliant with acoustics,’ I said confidently. At this, a distinguished-looking elderly lady in the audience put up her hand and said, ‘No, he wasn’t. I haven’t heard a word any of you have spoken for the last half hour.’ At the end of the talk, the vicar of the church confirmed this. ‘You have to talk very slowly,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, the words bounce into each other in the dome.’ The Archdeacon of London, also at the event, said the acoustics in Wren’s masterpiece—St Paul’s Cathedral—also weren’t great.”
David Skinner reviews a new anthology of American English: “Ilan Stavans, a multilingual Mexican-American writer and professor of humanities at Amherst College, has compiled an exuberant anthology of polyphonic splendor to illustrate the sweep, diversity, and wide register of American English. The People’s Tongue begins in the 16th century with a letter written by Anne Winthrop, mother of the Puritan John Winthrop to whom we owe the phrase ‘a city upon a hill,’ and ends with writings of rapper Kendrick Lamar, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, and linguist John McWhorter. It is a needed anthology, compiled, it seems, with all the enthusiasm and questioning and curiosity one would hope for.”
In praise of the folk song: “When I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas, I lived in a rented farmhouse and owned a horse. I knew people enrolled in the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, a curriculum based on classical Greek and Roman texts. Some students, inspired by their readings of Theocritus and Virgil, decided to spend a semester at a farm in Marysville, Kansas, where they would live close to the land. They also thought they should farm with horses—genuine horsepower. I boarded a horse for my friend Eva Tarnower, who was part of the humanities program, and another for John McDonald, who later founded Boulevard Brewery. The three of us agreed to loan our horses to the program for a semester. We weren’t sure they would return better educated, but they’d certainly be well used. We chose the traditional way to transport the horses 150 miles to the farm: we’d ride. So, in the late summer of 1973, we set out with bedrolls, my guitar, a small amount of cash, and a couple changes of clothes each: Eva on her horse Flower, her friend Roger Williams riding John’s mare Jo, and I on my little Morgan/Shetland horse Cuck. We were relying on the kindness of strangers for pasture, food, and barns to sleep in. And rural Kansans were generous: we were well-fed and slept mostly in beds; our horses were given grain and shelter . . . The trip took five days. Our singing helped us through the long hours.”
A personal history of panic: “I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class . . . I was sitting under the fluorescence when it happened. The first time, technically. Though I could tell it was the first time only in retrospect, looking back from the third time. My right hand on my desk, my left hand fiddling with a pencil in the air. Mr. Streeling’s voice booms: Open the textbook, page 96. The textbook lies next to my hand on the desk. Next to the textbook is a large blue rubber eraser. Hand, textbook, eraser. Desktop bright in the fake light. My hand, I realize slowly, it’s a . . . thing. My hand is a thing. Hand, textbook, eraser. Three things. Oh. That’s when I forgot how to breathe. Ty saw it happen. He was sitting across the room. But he saw me, and he gave me a look like what the hell. Watching me trying to remember how to breathe. It wasn’t going well. I was sucking in too much air, or I wasn’t breathing enough out. The rhythm was all wrong.”
The politics of ChatGPT: “On the OpenAI website, the creators state that ChatGPT is trained to ‘reject inappropriate requests.’ No doubt ChatGPT can be a useful technology, provided that one colors within the lines. However, it’s worth exploring what, exactly, the makers of ChatGPT deem ‘inappropriate.’”
I subscribed to the New York Review of Books for 42 years. The first time I saw the thing I knew it was for life. I did not realize that the death of Robert Silvers and the ejection of Ian Buruma meant the end for me also. I subscribed to Micah's site last night because I have enjoyed his smart, sane and wide-ranging coverage of the culture, not to mention the pressing need to find in this moment something other than a dumpster fire of progressive follies.