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August 13, 2004

This review by James Wood in the London Review of Books is not new, but well worth reading:

“Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart . . .

This ought not to be possible. If all those clever writers studied other writers at university, they should, in addition to producing fiction and poetry, be writing capacious essays for the mythical common reader. We should be awash in V.S. Pritchetts and Edmund Wilsons. There are many reasons why this is not so. The audience for such essays is probably smaller than it was, and certainly less cohesive. The growth of the canon, and changing attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic.”

I’ve been dipping into Wood’s new collection, The Irresponsible Self, and enjoying every page. If you’re looking for a quietly brilliant alternative to the kind of analysis Woods finds specious, it’s in his book.

Link via Maud Newton.

Posted by Rachel at August 13, 2004 04:29 PM

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