Has academia ruined literary criticism? Is this the end of literary studies? Has contemporary culture reduced authors to mere influencers building their brand? Or is the discussion of literature nothing but a flimsy pretext used by university professors seeking to promote their political beliefs? Do young people even read books anymore?
Debates about the value and function of literary criticism today are, it seems to me, both constant and evergreen—always seeming new, urgent, specific to some particular contemporary crisis, but also far more continuous and universal than you’d think. I do not say this because I will offer a history of these debates—there are plenty of those too—but rather because I am strenuously attempting to discuss three recent books on the art of literary study without situating them in the context of present conversations. A perverse act, perhaps, but surely books serve at least in part to preserve ideas for future consideration, beyond the buzz of today’s chatter? Rather than demanding we submit to their terms of debate, the steady thrum of so many arguments today can in fact free us to frame the conversation in whatever terms we choose—to choose which interlocutors we engage with.
What is more, the pleasure of reading these three books—Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, Michel Chaouli’s Something Speaks to Me and Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment—alongside each other is that although they are so wildly different that they hardly seem to be participating in the same debate at all, they also speak to each other in a surprising harmony that attests to the multifaceted nature of criticism, resisting the typical binaries and all-or-nothing terms in which it is often framed. Though reviewers have appreciated the contrasts between Kramnick and Chaouli’s books, adding Oyler’s—so vigorously examined in other, less academic venues—unexpectedly sharpens them. It is a twist of the kaleidoscope that rearranges the points of focus and scrambles the categories, letting us see something different about the nature and appeal of criticism that we might miss when reading each book on its own.
All three texts are about literary criticism today, but they each approach it from very different angles. Kramnick focuses on literary criticism as a practical skill; Chaouli probes the relationship between critic and text; and Oyler considers what criticism is for. If we insist on considering the three as competing, Oyler’s book might have an unfair advantage: as a collection of essays about contemporary culture, it can range more widely, and crack more jokes along the way. The other two are more earnest (not necessarily to their detriment) and are written primarily for academics rather than the general public. This may be why No Judgment most directly confronts questions of elitism and high versus low culture: to speak as an academic is to have already taken a side in those arguments, rendering one’s opinion on such matters, to put it bluntly, of lesser interest. Still, academic though they may be, Chaouli’s and Kramnick’s books clearly evince a certain loosening of form, a desire to claim—and do—criticism in a way that is just as artistic as it is intellectual. Or rather, to dismantle that apparent opposition. To read them is to be reminded that the difference between academic and public writing is not analogous to the alleged divide between academic and creative work—there are, after all, many creative and beautifully written academic monographs. Despite what you may expect, then, the most meaningful way in which Oyler’s book is not academic is through its breadth of focus, demonstrating a freedom to opine on any passing topic that many academics crave.
I should begin by telling you, at least briefly, what each book says. Something Speaks to Me is in some sense easy to summarize, in that Chaouli distills his characterization of the process of literary criticism into three steps: 1. Something speaks to me. 2. I must tell you about it. 3. But I don’t know how. The three sections of the book correspond to these three moments, also glossed as “intimacy,” “urgency” and “opacity.” But rather than an argument, each section is a kind of meditation, a sequence of linked thoughts or fragments orbiting a series of central questions:
1. What happens when a text “grabs” me? Why does it happen with some texts and not others? What conditions must be met for it to happen? Does this attraction, or bond, contain some kind of recognition, or knowledge?
2. Why do I feel compelled to share it? Can it be shared? What does this sharing accomplish? What is the content, really, of what I am sharing?
3. Why is it so difficult? What makes the text opaque? What kind of making is the work of criticism?
The drift of this last section, the most meandering one of the book, is counterintuitive: one might expect it to be devoted to a consideration of how critics write, or other questions of method. But surprisingly, Chaouli has relatively little to say about this, instead keeping his gaze trained on more metaphysical questions about identity and relationality. The inevitable open-endedness of such inquiries is perhaps why this section makes for a frustrating conclusion, spiraling the book ever further into the unknowable precisely when we might long for a more grounded inquiry into what actually makes writing criticism so difficult and the practical features of critical prose. This is where Jonathan Kramnick parachutes in, devoting an entire book to the topic.
Kramnick’s central claim in Criticism and Truth is that close reading, the signature method of literary criticism, is not a form of reading but a form of writing. Unlike other contributions to state-of-the-field debates, he focuses not on methods of reading or classroom practice, but on the method of academic scholarship. It is the published research, he says, that is the true lifeblood of the discipline. We examine literary texts and how they work in order to understand something about the world, but our understanding is reflected in the creative act of what we produce: academic writing. This is not a science, and the results are not judged by a standard of replicability, but rather of what Kramnick calls “aptness,” a combination of persuasiveness and elegance. Much of the book’s argument, after an initial discussion of various techniques of criticism—such as in-line quotation and the representation of other people’s ideas via paraphrase or ventriloquy—is devoted to the validity of this standard, and to explaining how verification works.
Lauren Oyler’s book is also interested in the problem of verification. Although only one essay in the collection, about the book-reviewing social platform Goodreads, speaks to the work of criticism directly, many of the others consider how knowledge circulates, and what makes it reliable or authoritative (or stale). No Judgment attests to the relevance of criticism implicitly, through its indirect portrayal of the experiences of a person who uses the tools of literary analysis to understand life in a media-saturated contemporary culture. The essay on life in Berlin, for instance, is about the problem of how to write about—actually, how to experience—life in Berlin in relation to the many cliches about it. An essay on vulnerability probes how the term is understood and debated in popular culture—from a massively popular TED Talk to Tár and its reception—and how those meanings function to obscure the workings of power. An essay on autofiction plays out the various debates about fiction and truth, what we want from novels, and who has the “right” to tell certain stories. It is all the more compelling because Oyler has occupied all three of the positions in those debates (novelist, critic and reader) and recognizes her competing interests in each role.
But in the essay about Goodreads, Oyler speaks more directly to the question of what criticism is for. The section begins, rather disarmingly, with bewilderment: “I don’t really know why I write criticism. It’s difficult and time-consuming to write a book review—much more difficult and time-consuming, per word, than any other kind of writing I do.” Oyler rehearses the various justifications she could offer—if the point were money or fame, criticism would be an idiotic choice, but other, more persuasive motivations, such as the desire to correct other people’s flawed judgments, or to draw more attention to a book, or perhaps to acquire the status of highbrow authority, are also of limited efficacy. Ultimately, she seems to settle on a more straightforward motivation (“There are few things more fulfilling than encountering a difficult text, film, or work of art and then spending some time thinking about it, discussing it, and uncovering the meaning in it”), and despite her unwillingness to make a “valiant” claim for the importance of art, the real argument is that good art is often difficult to understand, and the role of critics is to wrestle with those difficulties and guide others through them. We might say that she arrives at a collective version of Chaouli’s sense of a calling that emerges from a text’s opacity: understanding art is no longer a solitary pursuit, but a social activity.
Thus, while the three books seem to make very different arguments, even opposing ones, they also align and overlap in unexpected ways. They speak to different facets of the larger endeavor: Kramnick writes about craft, Oyler about social function and Chaouli about individual drive. Each is a partial view, but each emphasizes an essential aspect of the endeavor of criticism.
Just as striking, when reading the three together, is the style of each book, and especially the many ways, both direct and informal, that they speak to their readers—even the two academic texts. Though all come across as personal, and personable, each of them finds their own way to negotiate the balance between earnest vulnerability and cool detachment. Oyler’s characteristic form of unstable irony and wry humor—a mode in which I am instinctively comfortable, probably because I’m also a well-educated millennial who dabbles in social media—is punctuated with moments of thoughtful openness and striking honesty. It registers very differently from the more sensationalist versions of disclosure typical of contemporary essayism.
Chaouli is perhaps more conventionally sincere, almost sentimental. He wears his love of literature on his sleeve, unabashedly describing how much writing means to him. “Acting poetically is contagious,” he writes, “and what communicates itself from utterance to utterance is neither a message nor an idea but a way of relating to the world and to myself, and it is this that provides the sharpest thrill.” The time is long past when such writing seemed risky in academic prose: we have mostly embraced the (occasional) incursion of the first-person feeling into analytical works. The vulnerability—and risk—in this book comes, rather, from the moments where his intellectual authority is shaken; when he doesn’t know what to say, or how to say it. These are the passages where one feels a real sense of intimacy with the author, beyond the friendly relations we are accustomed to having with books that address us directly. They are also where the book’s idealistic, almost mystical view of criticism most vividly shines forth.
Jonathan Kramnick’s book clearly shares some of that idealism, but his emphasis is far more pragmatic. The tone is that of a mediator, the adult in the room calmly arbitrating a quarrel. That this metaphor casts the other characters in the drama of literary criticism’s future as children is not wholly inappropriate—one senses a certain exasperation with many of them (for example, when discussing the case some scholars in the digital humanities make for their methods: “It surely can’t be the case that only a tiny, well-funded part of the discipline traffics in truth while the rest is mired in error”). But there is also an appealingly plaintive quality to the directness of his claims.
None of the three books wants to focus centrally on a grand argument for the need for criticism, though all of them do make such arguments at some point, at least briefly (here’s Kramnick, for example: “The collapse of the discipline risks our knowing less about the world, about works of literature and the people who create and read them”). They speak only glancingly of the economic threats to the humanities and the institutions that foster and cultivate an appreciation for the arts (Oyler mentions the “slow eradication of outlets that actually publish professional criticism” and Kramnick observes that “no discipline is relevant if it ceases to exist”). And none of them really engages with the question of literary criticism’s political potential. Such an omission can of course itself be read as politically conservative, or deceptive (if you believe that the humanities are actually intended to indoctrinate others with “woke” ideals), or irresponsible, or evidence of false consciousness. But I find myself unable to muster the proper level of outrage.
I don’t think any one of these books on their own, or even all three of them together, can make the complete case for the importance for literary criticism that the responses to them frequently seem to expect (or demand). I acknowledge that—especially given today’s political and economic conditions—such a case does need to be made, at least occasionally. That is, I do not entirely agree with Namwali Serpell’s recent claim in the Yale Review that it is “not our job” to argue for our own relevance, though I think she is right that the problems we face originate in much larger forces that are vastly beyond our control, and that there is a whiff of desperation in our prodigious efforts to market our wares. Perhaps that is why I am not as bothered as the “discourse” tells me that I should be by the omission, in these books, of any significant engagement with the material realities that literary critics face. There are other (important!) books for that. These particular three, it seems to me, both individually, and even more so when taken together, function less to persuade the larger world of literary criticism’s value than to give those of us who practice it a way to think about why we do what we do, and what we love about it. Not that we will all share these feelings—and of course there is never just one reason. But the essayistic mode of these books signifies a kind of humility, or, as Chaouli puts it, tact: “I acknowledge that I am partial, that I speak not from a place of detached sovereignty, but from within a situation that exceeds me.” All of them assume a sympathetic audience, as they reasonably should. We’re reading the book, after all. This is probably what allows them to frame their points with an appealing modesty. The claims being made are held deeply and offered sincerely, but they are offered, not thrust. Even Oyler’s “I’m right” is prefaced by a “they’re not wrong.”
Maybe my appreciation for this restrained approach is nothing more than a sign of my own sense of resignation, in the face of a world that seems to sink further into chaos and atrocity every day: I like reading about what literary criticism is, but I don’t want to argue with people about why writing books is important. I just want to do it. Arguing about criticism is far less pleasurable than arguing about books. But pondering the nature of criticism—using the tools of criticism to understand the thing itself—that is quite pleasurable, actually.
Literary criticism is a strange sort of creature. The urge to create it is not quite the same as the inspiration to produce an epic poem—one does not ask the Muse to sing of meter and Marxist analysis. Whereas an artwork confronts its maker as an alien object, with an enduring whiff of the otherworldly or sacred, the work of criticism remains stubbornly mine. Perhaps the benefit of the derivative status that some critics get defensive about is its grounded, earthly being. My urge to produce it may be mysterious, just as many parts of myself are unknown to me, but the product nonetheless bears the stamp of my indignation. In this sense, it is an expressive art; yet unlike the more traditional arts—which can claim to answer to a higher calling than the needs or whims of the most immediate audience—criticism is also fundamentally communicative, conversational. It is an argument, and as such, it is bound up with power and status (however much the critic may wish to demur) as well as skill.
This is what reading these three books together allows me to see so clearly: the fascinating ways that criticism bridges the solitary and the social, expression and communication, art and craft. It emerges from an opaque sense of urgency, or duty to the text, but also from a desire to be correct, and to have the best opinion. It is necessarily secondary, dependent on the artworks themselves, and is ostensibly responsible to them, even if the critic may wish to talk about something else instead.
The reason that so many critics seem to have this wish, lately, can be debated: a symptom of the declining status of art, or the rising currency of first-person narration? (Are these two hypotheses in contradiction, or causally related?) It seems to betoken a move from criticism to a more diffuse essayism, a leap that Kramnick and Chaouli are seemingly poised to make, and that Oyler already has. Yet each returns, inevitably, to texts (or films, or other artworks) as the foundation from which they build. That’s really what we’re here to talk about. But what happens next in the conversation is up to us.
