Hierarchies of Literary Culture

In "Book Blogs as Tastemakers," an article by Beth Driscoll published in the Australian academic journal Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, the author discusses two "networks" of literary blogs, Romance fiction blogs and what she calls "highbrow literary blogs," to determine their influence "as shared expressions of readers’aesthetic conduct." One of the three highbrow blogs Driscoll examines is The Reading Experience.

In her Abstract, Driscoll maintains that "Analysis of book blogs shows that while new media does enable mass participation of readers in book culture, this participation can be stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by a hierarchy in which bloggers accumulate a specific kind of ‘readerly capital’ evident in their influence on other readers." The Reading Experience, according to this analysis, invites readers to participate in "highbrow" book culture and itself occupies the place in the literary hierarchy where highbrow tastes (difficult books, often by obscure authors) are expressed and reinforced. (The other two blogs occupying this place that Driscoll considers are Steve Mitchelmore's This Space and Veronica Scott Esposito's Conversational Reading.) "Highbrow literary blogs complicate the distinction between amateur and professional literary criticism," Driscoll writes, "by offering long-form, highly intellectualised writing about literature."

Although Driscoll really doesn't make many value judgments about this "highly intellectualised writing," she does at one point conclude that it "complicates a straightforward view of the internet as democratising, and suggests that the hierarchies of literary culture persist and are, in some form, reproduced online." As she more or less admits, however, the room at the putative top of this particular hierarchy is exceedingly small. Driscoll identifies Esposito, Mitchelmore, and me as "influencers" in this sphere, but while I cannot speak for the other two, in my case I have to say that my "influence" on most days is, from my own perspective, all but impossible to detect.

Driscoll quotes a comment made by a reader of an interview I gave a couple of years ago (upon the publication of Beyond the Blurb):

I admit, I am intimidated by The Reading Experience. I have clicked over there, and quickly clicked away, because I don’t see any footholds… all seems to be authors and books I’ve never heard of.

I myself admit that this comment dismays me. Although it has certainly been one of my goals to bring attention to "authors and books [you've] never heard of"--because the author or book in question has been unjustly neglected in a literary marketplace that prioritizes the already done and the already known--I am certainly disappointed to hear that some readers have found no "footholds" in my approach. If to find a foothold means to come upon the usual books discussed on the popular sites and in mainstream book reviews, then generally speaking new readers of this blog have no doubt often lost their footing. But if I have been unable to make my commentary on unfamiliar--indeed, perhaps "difficult"--works or on more "technical" issues of literary criticism accessible to general readers, I have not succeeded in one of my aims in starting the blog. I indeed hoped to "complicate the distinction between amateur and professional literary criticism"--more precisely the distinction between general-interest and academic criticism--but I also wanted to make such a hybrid practice intelligible to all good-faith readers, certainly not intimidating.

Driscoll maintains that, in This Space and The Reading Experience at least (Conversational Reading, she says, has a different tone, the writing "clearer, more straightforwardly structured" and thus leaning "more towards the mode of the middlebrow), the writing steadfastly "refuses to be accessible." Again speaking just for myself, this is not my intention at all. Since I believe an important function of criticism is accuracy of description, I would be subverting my own purposes if I deliberately used obfuscating language or fixated on arcane issues. In order to give an accurate description of a literary work--more specifically, of my attentive experience of the work--it is, however, sometimes necessary to focus on some qualities of a literary work in a way that goes beyond the customary sorts of judgments and generalizations that often pass for literary criticism, to use locutions that are more precise if not regularly employed in more casual discussions of books. Perhaps what Steve Mitchelmore and I have in common is that we both believe a literary work requires the reader's commitment to the work's own autonomous reality, making the critic (as first of all a reader) a kind of witness to the imaginatively authentic qualities of this invoked reality, to adequately describe which calls for some acuity of thinking and exactitude of language.

I have to agree with Driscoll that of the three of us she includes in her analysis, it is Steve Mitchelmore who has most steadfastly maintained "the autonomy of blogging as an intellectual practice." Although he began at one point to stretch out beyond his blog to other outlets (including TLS) for his critical writing, for a number of years now he has mainly confined himself to This Space, the freedom of which he values over the greater exposure he might get from also writing for other publications. There is surely something admirable in Mitchelmore's dedication to the writing over the wider recognition his forays into print publication might have brought. I myself decided to seek out opportunities as a book reviewer beyond The Reading Experience, not in search of external validation or prestige but to possibly reach a wider audience of readers. (The most prestigious publications have yet to come calling.) I have tried to maintain this blog along the way, but I admit it has too often been neglected in favor of these other writing projects. On balance, I've probably indeed reached more readers than if I'd attended to the blog alone more diligently--although I intend to continue writing on the blog, even if it is a different kind of writing (not as loose and informal) than would have been found here in the early days of litblogging, and at a time when most of the prominent blogs of that time have ceased to exist or have remained dormant for many years now.

If I am an "influencer" in online criticism, as Driscoll has it, it certainly isn't reflected in my blog stats, and most of the reviews and essays I have written elsewhere receive a few generous retweets but generally disappear from view rather quickly. (I have, however, reworked some of these into the ebook volumes I have put together.) I don't begrudge this situation, because ultimately I agree with what I take to be Mitchelmore's position, which is that the satisfaction of writing is in the writing itself and its service to literature, not in ancillary recognition. I am grateful for whatever readers I have--and most of them are themselves very intelligent people who simply have an interest in literature, not in "high culture" as a "commodity"--but I view this blog and my other writing not as an exception to the "democratising" of online literary culture but its very embodiment: a failed academic started a blog and succeeded enough that a successful academic thinks he could be a "tastemaker."

Addendum--Driscoll mentions a couple of times in the article that I have a Patreon account that helps to "crowdfund" my writing activities. Although I did briefly have a Patreon account a while back, the crowd funding me was in fact barely a cluster, and that account is now inactive. Except for the small amounts of money I have made as a reviewer and freelance critic, I sustain The Reading Experience on fortitude alone.

Comments

[Rohan Maitzen]

That article's characterization of your blog seems very odd to me. I think you have absolutely realized your goal of a "hybrid" critical form that is serious but also accessible, and certainly intelligible!

[Daniel Green]

Thanks, Rohan. I should have mentioned you in this response as someone who also tried to create a popular-academic hybrid--and who also certainly succeeded!