The Reading Experience

Taking Up the Slack

The most recent issue of The Antioch Review (Winter 2004) is devoted entirely to poetry and, more importantly, the criticism of poetry. Included are lengthy and insighful discussions of Eavan Boland, Charles Simic, and Frank Bidart, among others. Although at an earlier phase of recent literary history these essays might have been considered "academic," they are, relatively speaking, free of jargon and external agendas. This is an especially important point to make, because what is now called "academic criticism" is all but unreadable and concerned with everything but works of literature. Although poetry criticism is actually in less dire straits than the criticism of fiction in most academic journals, nevertheless we have come very far down a very dark road since the days when New Criticism and other approaches emphasizing "literature itself" were the coin of the academic realm. Not that I necessarily wish to see the return of New Criticism or some new variant--I have written critically of the limitations and flaws of the original proponents of the New Criticism. But what has been lost in the abandonment of this kind of formalism is any serious attention to the intrinsic value of reading works of literature as opposed to all other "texts." This is too high a price to pay. Mainstream literary journalism has by no means taken up the critical slack, and one of the few ways by which serious and sustained literary criticism might by saved is for literary magazines like The Antioch Review to print engaged criticism alongside the creative writing most such publications now emphasize. To this end, The Antioch Review should be commended for its efforts in this issue, and other journals should be encouraged to emulate them.

Addendum: See also the Pleiades Book Review, a new online service of the Pleiades literary magazine.

Statement of Purpose

When I first began thinking about creating my own weblog, I thought I wanted to add another "literary weblog" to those so usefully surveyed by the Literary Saloon, the best of which include, in my reading, the Bookslut blog, Maud Newton, Golden Rule Jones, and the Saloon itself. But I eventually concluded I did not want just to provide yet more links to the daily literary news, perhaps with my own biting comments. Instead, I would like to test the proposition that the internet, in the form of the so-called "blogosphere," can provide a forum for a new kind of literary criticism, more compacted and concise, perhaps, than conventional print lit/crit, but serious criticism nonetheless.

Literary criticism is greatly in need of revitalization, as mainstream publications confine their coverage mostly to gossip and the book business, their book reviews becoming more and more perfunctory when not being eliminated altogether, while the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of "cultural studies" and other forms of political posturing. I would hope, in fact, that this blog could work as a kind of bridge between the blogs and other general interest literary publications and what was once called "literary study"--which in my mind is simply the willingness to take works of literature seriously.

I would like, then, to provide consideration not just of individual works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, etc. but also important developments in the literary world more generally, issues being debated in the literary press, as well issues related to the craft of writing. I will do so on a regular if not always daily basis, the idea being not to keep abreast of the literary version of breaking news but to pause and consider these broader issues, as well as the overall direction being taken in today's literary world.

Those looking for the latest and newest in the morning's papers might thus be disappointed with this blog. I hope, however, that I can substitute for the breadth of coverage found in the other literary weblogs (which I myself read almost every day) a little more in the way of critical depth, although I also hope readers find my comments to be lively as well as engaged.