Guest Post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today

This piece appeared as the President's Column in the summer issue of the Newsletter of the ALSC (Association of Literary Scholars and Critics). For information about membership, about the ALSC journal Literary Imagination, or about the upcoming conference in Chicago, Oct. 12-14, you can go to http://www.bu.edu/literary/."

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, the erosion of space for book reviews directed at general readers has reached critical proportions. The tipping point was the departure of Teresa Weaver as book review editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, not to be replaced. This propelled the National Book Critics Circle into a campaign to save book reviewing. Its petition protesting Weaver’s dismissal attracted over 5,700 signatures. Also this spring the Associated Press closed its book review desk, the Raleigh News-Observer eliminated the post of full-time book review editor, and there were cutbacks at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and, most dramatic of all, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, one of the best book review sections in the country, which ceased being a stand-alone Sunday section and was folded into the Ideas section. To make up for some loss of print space, the editor, David L. Ulin, shifted some features to online only, as he explained in a telling interview posted by the president of the NBCC, John Freeman.

All this suggests that the publication of book reviews for a general audience is in dire straits, largely because newspapers and magazines themselves are under terrific pressure - from the Internet, where much of the advertising has migrated; from corporate owners, whose shareholders expect a better return on investment; and from editors who feel that books have become a specialized taste and book reviews are a marginal form of journalism, little more than free publicity for publishers. They have no such compunction about reviewing movies, since this pays the bills. Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation, writes to me that “we live in an age where people who used to pay attention to book reviews pay more attention to movie reviews. Books are still read and enjoyed, but the pleasure is had at the expense of analysis and criticism, as if the latter somehow robbed us of the fun instead of adding to it. And doubtless there are commercial considerations as well, with Hollywood buying more ad space.” It’s no surprise that money talks, but could it also be that the action has simply moved on?

Literary journalism has always been the bastard child of serious criticism and ‘real’ journalism, the hard stuff, you know, about serial killers and five-alarm fires along with local politicians and U. S. Senators. Book review editors often have difficulty convincing their bosses that the news about books is in the books themselves, not in mega-buck contracts, bestseller chitchat, and profiles of famous authors. Truly conscientious reviewers are not exactly a beloved breed: authors sensitive to criticism detest them, publishers would love to coopt them, and academics rarely respect those who write for a wider public, not for other scholars. Yet book reviewing is where talented young critics often get their start. It encourages them to be generalists, keeping in touch with contemporary writing. It forces them to write quickly and clearly and to put flesh on their arguments, eschewing the abstract jargon of many professionals. And it contributes to a cultural conversation otherwise dominated by hot TV shows, blockbuster movies, and media-manufactured celebrities.

In the case of nonfiction books about urgent issues such as war, foreign policy, human rights, and civil liberties, far more people will absorb the arguments through reviews than from the volumes themselves. When they display independent critical judgment based on real knowledge, such reviews serve as valuable complements to editorial pages and op-ed columns. They build up a viable public culture. Sharply argued reviews, along with interviews and feature stories, can turn an important book into an Event, a moment of reckoning. Without such reviews, we’re left with high profile pseudo-events produced by expensive hype and shrewd marketing.

Reviews are even more vital to the assimilation of literary works, which can’t depend on topical interest to attract readers. A handful of literary titles do well because their authors are known quantities, as familiar to their admirers as famous actors. But intelligent reviews - and the word-of-mouth that followed - helped build their renown in the first place. With the decline of book reviewing, who will take the measure of the next generations? The term “standards” may seem old-fashioned in our anti-elitist culture. But critical standards are essential not to impose hierarchy but to celebrate genuine craft, imagination, and human interest, or to show where they fall short, even in the work of talented writers. Useful reviewing comes in many guises: rapturous accounts of thrilling new discoveries, interpretive discussions of complex literary careers, and killer reviews targeting inflated reputations. All can serve a worthwhile purpose.

We shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that most reviews do this well. Reviewing, like any form of writing, is a demanding craft. Too many reviews consist of banal plot summaries laced with unsupported judgments or opinions. Stung by uncomprehending reviews, Henry James described literary journalism in 1891 as “a periodicity of platitude and irrelevance,” adding that “it had nothing in common with the art of criticism.” Yet James himself had written a mountain of periodical reviews, and they form an amazing part of his legacy. Even obtuse reviews help build a conversation around the important new publications. Skeptical editors have a point - they do constitute free publicity - but for books that are more literary than commercial - for midlist fiction, for example, or for poetry - this is the only publicity they’re likely to get, since publishers will scarcely advertise them.

Luckily, at the higher end of the cultural spectrum, serious book reviewing is somehow holding its own. Though Partisan Review folded in 2003 (after 69 years) and Herb Leibowitz’s indispensable Parnassus: Poetry In Review, set to publish its last issue this fall (after 35 years), has received a two-year reprieve, thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Willard Spiegelman, many key publications and book review pages miraculously survive, including the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the TLS, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The American Scholar, The New Criterion, the reinvigorated Poetry, the Boston Review, the American Poetry Review, the Threepenny Review, and a surprising variety of old-style literary quarterlies like Salmagundi and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Some observers, I’m sure, would look to online blogs as a substitute for printed reviews. They might argue that the Internet, though it has undermined many publications, offers a more accessible venue to prospective writers and Web-surfing readers. As far as I can see, a strong case can be made only for online magazines like Slate and Salon or highly selective portals like Arts & Letters Daily, which most resemble the print journals and literary miscellanies on which they’re modeled. These are edited sites, much like print publications but quite unlike the river of complaint, prejudice, and enthusiasm that makes the Internet so egalitarian. Since everyone has political opinions, political blogs have thrived where literary blogs have faltered. The real site of literary comment on the Web is not the blogs - apart from our own blog, The Valve, and the personal blogs of prolific scholars like Michael Bérubé - but the intriguing customer reviews on Amazon, which differ little from the customer reviews of travel destinations, computer software, and home appliances. It’s nice that the Internet is a talk-back medium, with articles dragging long tails: a buzz of reader reactions, however fatuous. But book reviews, to be of any value, demand a trained sensibility and real critical expertise; they need to furnish more than rough-hewn consumer guidance and the colorful peeves of the man in the street.

Though it is built on reading and writing, the Internet is seen as the enemy of literature, digging the grave of the printed book. But just as the computer lent new fluency to the act of writing, the Internet has revolutionized literary research, allowing instant access to vast bodies of information that would have required arduous labor only yesterday. It has amplified the reach of print publications by becoming a prime carrier of the printed word, creating a simultaneous worldwide audience for publications great and small, local and national. But the economic crisis afflicting newspapers and magazines, which has battered literary journalism, shows how the Internet is eating away at it own foundations, the printed sources of so much of its real content. The blog will not make up the difference, at least in its unedited form as a spontaneous effusion, a personal diary in shorthand. As Adam Kirsch has written: “Bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve."

Morris Dickstein is president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He was a charter member of the National Book Critics Circle, recruited by Nona Balakian, and a member of the board from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of several books including "Double Agent: The Critic and Society," Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970" "A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World," and "Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties," a finalist for the 1977 NBCC prize for criticism.