Who?

In the April 25 New York Times profile of novelist Steve Stern, we get this from Harold Bloom:

"I started to read Stern thinking I would just dip into it," Mr. Bloom said in a telephone interview from his home in New Haven. "But he has gusto, exuberance, panache; this is immensely readable and vibrant."

And then Mr. Bloom asked, "Who is he?"

I have great respect for Harold Bloom as a literary critic. If anything, his response to Steve Stern only reinforces my high opinion of his critical acumen. But that Bloom was unfamiliar with Stern's work not only indicates the degree to which Stern is unjustly neglected by the current literary scene, but also how little we should in general rely on English professors, "literary scholars" more broadly, for insight about contemporary literature. Bloom keeps up with current writers more thorougly than most academic critics--especially for a critic whose specialty is Romantic poetry--but that a writer as accomplished as Steve Stern remains unknown to him speaks volumes about the essential disconnection between literary academics (excluding creative writers) and the larger literary world populated by writers and readers of contemporary work.

In my opinion, a good case can be made that the operative definition of what constitutes "literature" in the first place should come from the practice of current writers. They--and their readers--have inherited the literary tradition studied by academics and are expanding and modifying that tradition through their ongoing work. Thus critics and scholars interested in understanding the literary impulse, the nature of literature and the possibilities of literary form, ought to be attending to contemporary writers.

But this is not what happens, of course. Through academic study the procession of writers and works that make up literary history are carved into periods and "specialties," and academic scholars, even those most up-to-date on reigning theories or critical approaches, usually spend their time becoming experts on these periods. I know from experience that many such scholars think of "their" writers as the most interesting or rewarding writers one might study, and tend to regard contemporary writers as so much fluff, a sad decline from the standards set in the Renaissance, or the 18th century, or even in the first half of the twentieth century. In this context it would not be surprising at all for most English professors to respond to the names of even more well-known writers than Steve Stern with Bloom's "Who is he/she?" (A notable exception in the blog world is Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor), who specializes in Victorian literature but who frequently posts very intelligent reviews of current fiction on her weblog.)

Over the past thirty years or so an academic specialty called, strangely enough, "Contemporary Literature" arose partly as a reaction to this attitude on the part of literary scholars. It was designed by those who helped establish it as an academic discipline to bring more attention to contemporary writing, to demonstrate that it, too, was worthy of serious academic attention. For a while this happened. Current writers were the subjects of numerous very good scholarly books in the 1970s and 1980s, and courses in contemporary literature came to be taught in most English departments. But even this "specialty" in contemporary literature has, in my opinion, turned out to be mostly unhelpful in creating real interest in current writing and in contributing to anything that could be called a "literary culture" in the United States. It, too, has been carved into various sub-specialties, has become atomized and fragmented. Scholars of postmodernism don't often have much to say to scholars specializing in feminist writers, who don't generally have much to say to those studying minority writers, and none of these academic critics usually speak much to the creative writers.

Thus the last person you should probably approach for an informed opinion of contemporary literature would be an English professor. The best you will probably get is someone like Bloom, who is willing to read current writing and take it seriously; at worst you will get outright disdain or condescension. (Which doesn't mean the professor will refrain from making a pronouncement on the writer or work in question.) Most literature professors don't think that much about what "literature" might be as a vital, continuing practice, only about what it was at some time in the past. The word has indeed meant different things to different people at different times. "Historicizing" is a perfectly nice thing to do, and sometimes it tells us interesting things about the poetry and fiction we still continue to read. For myself, I generally prefer to concentrate on what serious writing can do for us in the here and now, which requires keeping up a little bit on the new books and writers who can help us achieve this goal.

Comments

[Robert Nagle]

http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/?p=83398314

Good mention of Steve Stern btw. Reading your blog is getting expensive for me!

[Jonathan]

I've never heard of him either. I'm go to go out and look for his books today. And who is this "Harold Bloom" character anyway? Should I have heard of him? [just joking: we've all heard of Bloom, what does that say?] In my defense I should say I'm not an English professor, though I know many who have read less contemporary lit than I.

Are there novelists who haven't heard of Robert Creeley, or who have only a vague idea of who he is? I've heard stories to that effect. Although I read poetry voraciously, I am still coming across new names every day of poets I've never heard of. Outside of one's "field" the usual strategy is to follow only the most famous writers.

[Kirby Gann]

I totally agree -- I was an English major in college, and distinctly remember the revelation that came with discovering literary works had been published since John Updike's "A&P" story.... In our studies it seemed like Literature stopped sometime in the early sixties, and everything after was dross. It was a seller of used books that turned me on contemporary writing after I graduated; used booksellers are a great resource.

Though that article was my introduction to Steve Stern, too.

[Mr. Waggish]

I have my problems with Bloom but I have to give him credit for being far better read than the vast majority of acclaimed humanities professors. Ignoring the content of "The Western Canon" and just looking at the lists in the back reveal all sorts of obscure books, even things like Disch's "On Wings of Song" and others (I don't have the book on-hand).

Morris Dickstein in his heyday was also well-attuned to contemporary lit.

[Jimmy Beck]

As usual, it's hard to disagree, Dan. I would only add blogger and comp lit prof Jenny Davidson to the list of English profs who do read their contemporaries and clearly get it.

[David Milofsky]

Dan,

I think you're painting with a pretty broad brush here, though perhaps as an English professor myself, I'm biased. Most of my friends are writers and I doubt many of them have heard of Steve Stern, much less read his books. Though I edited literary magazines for most of the last fifteen years, I'm constantly amazed (and humbled) by the sheer number of first-class writers with whom I'm unfamiliar. But keeping up for its own sake strikes me as being mostly a waste of time, an attempt to be au courant. Most of what I read for fun was written more than one hundred years ago but not because as a professor I'm obliged to read it. And by the same token, many of my scholarly colleagues seem more up to date on the current scene than I am.

[birnbaum]

This new found attention for Steve Stern is amusingly predictable and as a number of people have pointed out above , this happens all the time and will no doubt continue.

I discovered Stern serendipitously—waiting for an appointment I opened a book package and actually started to read this book by someone unknown to me and I was extraordinarily pleased by what I read. Need I point out what a good thing this is?

I suppose on any given day I could be moved to rail against the infernal injustice and unfairness of the Universe or feel blessed and be bouyed by the prospect that there was more to come...but that's about me or the caprice of subjectivity, isn't it?

[robin d. gill]

I agree when you write that "critics and scholars interested in understanding the literary impulse, the nature of literature and the possibilities of literary form, ought to be attending to contemporary writers;" but let me ask: How do you expect them to find these contemporary writers?

What you will find is what the major publishers publish or what is trendy for one reason or another. Taking one of my recent bks for example, the only reviews outside of haiku-related magazines (because my bk has the most haiku translated on any single subject, that is to be expected)in its first year out = i repeat YEAR = after publication was in an interspecies magazine edited by someone whose bk i helped get into japanese years before and one guy down-under (Danny Yee could teach the reviewers up-over something about openness). Recently, 18 months after publication, i finally got a review in a magazine on literary translation, but my book is for a general audience and the word has still not reached the mass media . . .

Sure you have blogs, like this (and all i just found via lbc.typepad in an article my mom clipped for me), but i wonder how many of the books that will still be read in 50 or 100 years you manage to find. Are you really doing that much better than the mass media? (at least you have a place for comments like this, but how many comments are read and by how many people?)

To my mind, there is only one way that the nyt or nyr or any other major review will begin to pick up the major bks and that is to have e-mail and read that e-mail = the good bks are not being reviewed for the same reason the information pointing toward 9/11 did not find its way to the authorities.

"Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!"

[Dan Green]

I expect scholars and critics to find contemporary writers by doing what scholars and critics are supposed to do: Pay attention, if necessary use those library/research skills scholars are supposed to have and keep track of book reviews, literary magazines, and websites. I don't want to seem immodest, but I'm trained as a scholar of contemporary literature and I learned how to seek out relevant writers and books by identifying the appropriate publications and monitoring them. I still do this. It's possible to do it. One thing they should definitely do is ignore the "major publishers" and the "mass media." This should seem like common sense to serious scholars and critics.

[robin d. gill]

I am delighted to read someone is paying attention, but wonder if it is enough.

I worked for 20 years as an acquisitions editor and thought i was pretty good at finding things, too, but, now that i am on the other side, wonder if i could have found myself. Great books by author-publishers may not show up in the book reviews you track for most reviews rule-out self-published books regardless of their merits, and the literary magazines . . . Let me put it this way, unless you read Modern Haiku or Metamorphoses or the online Simply Haiku or LYNX, you would miss my books, entirely.

As an author who never has enough time to write, much less do pr, I believe there is no substitute for intelligent screening by mass media. If one has a good book, it should be enough to send out, say 5 pr copies, to get the word out. Today, people who should not have to do so are wasting their time touring the nation doing "readings" rather than staying home writing
The duty of reviews and critics is to squash bad books and propogate good ones to save everyone time and improve literature. I say they are failing in that duty.

"Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!"

ps 1 I wish blogs could do what mass media does, but my experience with haiku-related bbs's (mostly in japanese) is that the word does not get far. One would hope that news could be passed around to all who would want to know, but it generally stops at a dozen or so bbs's..
ps 2 Tired of waiting for news of my books to perculate down, i have just bought a headset and will hit the air.