QUILLBLOG

Is criticism dead?

Salon’s two chief literary critics, Laura Miller and Louis Bayard, have posted a lengthy discussion about the state of literary criticism in North America, which begins with the following question: in the age of blogging, has the role of the professional critic become obsolete?

Before either of them even get to the discussion of blogging, however, they get waylaid talking about the destructive influence on criticism of “cultural studies” courses.

Miller: In cultural studies, whether or not a work by a member of a previously silenced group is “good” or not is the wrong question: “Good” is understood to be a suspect term based on the self-interested values of those in power.

So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like [James] Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today.

Then they finally get to blogging:

Bayard: Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? [...] The problem with arguing for [professional] cultural gatekeepers is that, if you’re a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving — “Hey, that’s my job!” — and yes, elitist — “Don’t try this at home, guys.” I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Miller: I don’t think there’s a real causal connection between the blogosphere and the withering away of newspaper criticism, actually. It has more to do with the economics of newspaper publishing and management and editors feeling that criticism is disposable because it’s not reporting, which they see as a newspaper’s core product.

I think of blogs not as alternatives to reviews or essays, but as a forum for short items, news and remarks, as well as links and responses to longer pieces posted on the sites that commission them. I could be wrong, though, as I’m not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The Atlantic, Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like The Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I’m excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I’m all for cultural gatekeepers because there’s way more out there than I have time to read and it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

As for qualifications, what qualifies Doris Lessing to be a celebrated novelist? Only the novels she’s written. If you and I agree that it’s good writing that makes a good critic, rather than simply the delivery of information and an opinion, then really good critics are as common as really good novelists — that is, not very. Talent is neither equitably nor widely distributed.