On the Supposed "Conservative Turn" in Literary Criticism
Also: The future of the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, the “vapid world of America’s top book influencer,” a defense of Gottfried Leibniz, and more.
Good morning! Are you tired of handwringing analyses of the “state of criticism”? Me, too. But as James Augustus St. John once remarked, “men think in packs as jackals hunt,” so here is one more piece on “criticism today” before this email returns—I promise!—to its regular haphazard aggregation of articles of varying quality.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Simon During argues that there is “a conservative turn happening in literary studies.” Even though it “hasn’t received much public attention,” he writes, this turn “is significant”: “It marks a pivotal moment of recognition in the discipline of English’s history.”
During lists a handful of recent works of criticism that argue in one way or another for English studies to abandon—or at least curtail—its current obsession with politics. He cities Helen Thaventhiran’s book Radical Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers (2015), Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (2019), Michael Clune’s A Defence of Judgment (2021), and John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) as examples of this turn and remarks that:
This conservative turn among literary academics focuses just on English as a discipline. It is, as it were, a disciplinary conservativism that asks us to conserve academic English in particular. But it is backed up by a more general tendency across the humanities.
Thus in Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber (2023), which is really about Donald Trump although his name is barely mentioned, the political theorist Wendy Brown resuscitates Weber’s conservative critique of so-called political nihilism in a way that allows us to see the current hyperpoliticization of the humanities, and its failure to adhere to a corporate project based in restraint and disciplinarity, as forms of the social-political nihilism that has underpinned Trump’s success. In a similar spirit, Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions (2023) turns to Hegel to propose that the moralism and politicization that now dominate the humanities need to be resisted. We might follow Brown’s and Bourke’s lead and apply Weber and Hegel to the literary humanities, thereby endowing a Guillory-like program of disciplinary re-establishment with a broad conceptual and historical framework and transdisciplinary oomph.
To repeat: The conservative turn is being made by people who are not, in terms of electoral politics, conservative at all. The conservative turn is only conservative in the context of the academic humanities, not in terms of wider social politics. Indeed, paradoxically, the disciplinary conservative turn belongs to the left.
During believes this turn can be a good thing to the degree that it is “understood as a course correction designed to protect liberalism against the radical right and popular authoritarianism à la Trump. This is the situation in which, today, liberalism and conservativism don’t oppose one another but combine.”
It is also motivated by “a love of literature.” The above “political dimension,” During admits, “cannot explain why English in particular is harboring such a strong disciplinary conservative turn. The most obvious reason is that while the humanities as a whole are losing ground, English specifically is bleeding students, scholars, funding. In this context, it seems to some that maintaining the discipline’s original disciplinary practices will help secure it from further depredation. Beyond that, though, something larger is at stake — literature itself.”
I obviously applaud any return to literature and have read several works (including several of those listed by During) making this case over the years. Yet, while these books may be conservative-friendly, they aren’t exactly conservative. Guillory—to give just one example—argues persuasively that critics need to return to the study of literature using the tools of the discipline (close reading). This isn’t conservatism as much as it is common sense. Some conservatives might baulk at Guillory’s claim that reading is simply a form of self-care—an activity not unlike other pleasurable practices that are undertaken in order to improve our lives, like “physical exercise, cooking, conversation with friends, [and] sexual activity.”
This, combined with the fact that the vast majority of literary criticism published today still treats literature as a vehicle for politics, makes any claim of a “conservative turn” a little ridiculous.
So why does Simon During make such a claim? Who knows? But claiming that a “pivotal moment of recognition in the discipline” has already happened does make it easier to dismiss any subsequent “recognition” as marginal, secondary, excessive. Perhaps During’s essay itself is motivated by a desire to “protect liberalism” from its favorite bugbear, “the radical right”?
Speaking of During, Len Gutkin starts with During’s theory of “cultural secularization” in a long piece about the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and the question of whether “a completely secular society create and preserve and transmit high literature” in the latest issue of Liberties. Gutkin doesn’t answer the question but ends the piece predictably ambiguously: “In the coming years, the most vital cultural institutions, whether in the academy or outside of it, will need to reckon with the terrible responsibility of preserving kinds of value and forms of meaning to which the wider culture is inhospitable.”
Matthew Gasda writes about the “vapid world of America’s top book influencer”:
Owens reads and podcasts so you can dispense with the hard work of figuring out what’s worth your precious time. She distills, she dispenses. Owens is the daughter of Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of investment-management giant Blackstone. According to Vulture and Business Insider, Owens is New York City’s top book influencer, which probably makes her the nation’s top book influencer.
She is a relentlessly optimistic advocate for self-improvement through reading, with her thumb on one of the most powerful demographics in the country (maybe the last cohort that buys books in serious numbers): neurotic Gen X women with significant disposable income. Owens is to helicopter moms what the neuroscientist-cum-health guru Andrew Huberman is to aging bachelors: a tonic for the spiritual ennui of the technocratic striver class.
Gerald Early reviews Zora Neale Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great in The Washington Post: “The Life of Herod the Great reads like the unfinished, damaged novel that it is. Structurally and mechanically, it needs a lot of work, despite being informed by deep research. The dialogue is frequently stilted, and the characters never become fully realized actors; Hurston steers and explains them too much. The accounts of Herod’s military campaigns feel repetitive. There are moments when Hurston seems to be using Herod as a mouthpiece or model for her own views. It is far from Hurston at her best, but it is nonetheless engrossing because of her unbridled enthusiasm for her subject, even when her passion works against her.”
Poem: A. M. Juster, “Epistle to a Former Friend”
Anthony Gottlieb attempts a defense of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I’m not sure he succeeds, but it’s interesting nonetheless: “Gottfried Leibniz was not the first philosopher to think that we live in the best of all possible worlds. He may have been the unluckiest, suffering the posthumous fate of being skewered in the best of all possible parodies, Voltaire’s Candide (1759). When Voltaire was writing, four decades after Leibniz’s death, the German polymath was renowned for his work in several sciences, philosophy, history, law, and, especially, mathematics—he and Newton had, independently, invented calculus, but it’s Leibniz’s notation that’s still used today. Over the years, Leibniz’s reputation continued to grow as more unpublished work came to light, some of which would make him the godfather of the digital age.”
More:
During his Paris years, an exhibition of machinery on the Seine prompted Leibniz to write a memo in which he really let himself go. He proposed a European network of scientific academies that would entertain the public with technological marvels, including “speaking trumpets,” artificial gems and dragons, and self-playing musical instruments. These circuses of science would be profitable—by hosting lotteries and selling trinkets—and could feature gaming houses in which hidden pipes and mirrors would be used to spy on the populace, thus providing the state with political intelligence. Substitute “Big Tech” for Leibniz’s “state” and his snooping, money-making entertainments seem not unfamiliar.
Leibniz conceded that this reverie of gadgets and wonders might sound rather odd, but such projects would stimulate further inventions. The time seemed ripe for awesome advances, and Leibniz was confident that he was just the man to scour the world for exploitable discoveries. There was treasure to be found in the work of countless half-mad inventors, if only one knew where to look. A case in point was phosphorus, which a German alchemist, Hennig Brand, had isolated from urine. Leibniz had been enthused by the potential military and civilian applications of this “eternal fire” and negotiated a deal with Brand on behalf of Duke Johann Friedrich. (In his determination to secure the benefits of phosphorus, Leibniz cut corners and seems to have tricked Brand, who subsequently compared Leibniz to a clown.) Leibniz’s other pitches to the Duke included a system of disaster insurance, techniques for mechanizing silk production, various medicinal remedies, improved watches, and designs for a novel kind of wagon.
Alfred Nicol and his granddaughter review A. M. Juster’s forthcoming children’s book: “Girlatee is the story of a young manatee (the ‘girlatee’) who becomes separated from her parents by a reckless man on a speedboat. Author and illustrator have both hit the sweet spot: this tale of adventure is neither too tame nor too scary. The look on my five-year-old granddaughter’s face when Girlatee was reunited with her family was one of sheer joy—not mere relief. When we got to ‘The End,’ she asked, ‘Are there any more stories?’”
What will happen to the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ when Macy’s in Center City closes? Peter Dobrin reports: “‘It’s one of the most important four or five organs in the world,’ said Ray Biswanger, executive director of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, which oversees the instrument. ‘People make pilgrimages to it as with no other pipe organ because of its rich sound and incredible beauty.’”
Peter Tonguette is suffering from Didion fatigue: “Three years after her death, I find myself having grown tired of Joan Didion. I am tired of the books about her and the book-length compendiums of her books. I am tired of her likeness in photographs, her presence in documentaries, and those of her sayings that have become repeated as mantras — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and so on. I am tired of her style, her sunglasses, especially when worn in studio interviews, and her popularity among influencers, magazine editors, and young women who have found their guru in a bob cut . . . It is unfair to blame an author for the success of her own work, especially a work as intriguing and revealing as Magical Thinking, but Didion can be held responsible, for better or for worse, for seizing on the popularity of this book for the balance of her writing life. Instead of producing more fiction with the interest and excitement of Play It As It Lays (1970) or fresh journalism with the originality of her classic pieces on the 1960s counterculture, Didion churned out a series of self-referential works.”
Alan Jacobs writes about contractualism and the family:
One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.
But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points.
Sebastian Milbank reviews A. N. Wilson’s Goethe: His Faustian Life: “It is impossible—Wilson is utterly persuasive on this point—to separate Goethe and his work. Yet Goethe is by no means the authoritative interpreter of his own writing. Indeed, he tended to resist such interpretation, and though he could frequently be prevailed upon to make statements about his work, these were often ambiguous and contradictory—as is much of the writing itself.”
Forthcoming: Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago, April 9): “With his new Odyssey, celebrated author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has created a rendering worthy of Chicago’s unparalleled reputation in classical literature. Widely known for his essays bringing classical literature and culture to mainstream audiences in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—in order to bring it to life in all its archaic grandeur. In this line-for-line rendering, the long, six-beat line he uses, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each Greek line without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.”