People who cite Derrida often don’t know the work of James Wood and those who love Wood can’t stand Derrida. Why the divide?
The Berlin Wall crumbled more than a decade ago. Meanwhile the barrier separating those who write in the press about literary matters from those who work in the academy continues to inch up brick by brick. We honestly don’t know who lives and works on the other side of the partition and we have little interest. How many fans of Arcade, for example, have read a book this year by any of the leading literary critics in the popular press?
On the whole journalists and academics live on separate planets. They may hear of each other but they write for distinct audiences, begin from different working assumptions, and, above all, use divergent languages and methods to evaluate literary works. There is suspicion or contempt of each other but mostly the relationship is of mutual neglect.
Both sides lose out from this isolation. Journalist critics miss the intellectual fervor in academia, the conflicts, the research, the historical investigations, and the complex attention paid to production, dissemination, and consumption of literature. This is why their work often appears to academics as superficial, hasty and simplistic, not always nuanced to the intricacies of literary study.
Conversely, we academics might learn from the flexibility of journalists as they cross genres. Trained in the weighty dissertation style, it is hard for professors to shift up and down. Above all, we are not attuned to language and style of those who make their living by writing literary criticism.
In a resent post, Lee Konstantinou expressed surprise at the bad writing that comes from the computers of literary critics. In a profession sensitive to style and form, this bad writing is disturbing.
It is true. We don’t learn how to be interesting stylists. No one teaches us in all the years of undergraduate and graduate schooling how to write a gripping first sentence. The very idea of engaging with form rather than just with content embarrasses us. Do we find attention to ornamentation meretricious? Writing for the sake of writing decadent? Although we work with metaphor, we don’t know what to do with one other than throwing it in our Cuisinart.
Sadly, we prefer our colorless cell of functional writing, distrusting the sirens of the aesthetic, plugging up our ears to their song. (See my previous post.)
We have much to learn from our colleagues in the press whose advance depends on a catchy introductory paragraph. But we don’t listen because they are so far away. This situation, of course, is the product not of bad personal decisions but of a decades-long process in functional differentiation and professional compartmentalization. Boundaries have been erected between disciplines and knowledge continues to be portioned into autonomous zones.
This broad professional specialization, if inevitable, does not mean that there is no de-differentiation, as sociologists refer to it, a counter-reaction to differentiation. As individuals we can fight against these processes and build channels of communication across disciplinary divides. If we really believe in interdisciplinarity -- if we think that the English and History departments should talk to one another -- we should be willing to promote exchange with writers outside of the academy.
Let me turn to a few examples: the literary world in Greece has been much more integrated. The very distinctions between journalistic and professional criticism has only recently been made. The right to write seriously about literature was not appropriated by a trained elite. Doctors, lawyers, business people or any other person could write about poetry in an authoritative manner. As a result, writers have a larger audience than the limited one we are accustomed to. Critics have to think how to present their work to those outside their field.
There is similar interaction between academia and popular writing in places such as Turkey and Puerto Rico, to name just two examples. Others can point to similar cases from around the globe.
We obviously can’t go back to the world of New York intellectuals, to the literary milieu of Edith Wharton, or the salons of Weimar. We have to deal with the disciplinary separation we have been given. But it does not mean that we can’t cross boundaries ourselves and see how writers in the popular press craft their sentences, frame their arguments, and address their audiences.
Writing on literature should not be like living on a lonely planet.
"We have to deal with the disciplinary separation we have been given."
Why? It's not as if the current division of labor (or audiences, or approaches) that you describe is based on some kind of fundamental principle that has endured over time. Rather, as a number of histories of literary studies as a profession (or an academic practice) have shown, the current state of affairs is the anomalous one even within our own context.
I think it's a false dichotomy to suggest that the alternatives are rigor or belle lettristic elegance and journalistic hooks. There's more to Wood's oeuvre, for instance, than your oppositions suggest, and there are academics who write for broader audiences (Frank Kermode comes to mind). There are also, of course, well written and badly written examples on both 'sides,' as well as more or less thoughtful and rigorous analyses; I have some idea about this because in fact I do read books and reviews by non-academic critics (I've posted about quite a few of them at my own blog).
I agree that both kinds of critics would benefit from richer cross-fertilization between their efforts. But (understandably) most academics are unlikely to take the professional risk of working outside their peer-reviewed silos if there's no recognition from their institutions that there is value in doing so.
I think there is much to say, as I noted in responses to various of Lee's posts, regarding getting across the great divide of academic and popular forms of criticism. And I absolutely love the claim that writing on literature should not be like living on a lonely planet: it does feel like it so much sometimes! And as someone who reads and teaches both Derrida and Wood, I am increasingly interested in the ways in which we express ourselves could take different and more flexible forms, tapping into different literacies. But I'll ask a question again that I think lies beneath the debate over audience, style, and indeed theory: are there not institutional realities potentially underneath all the so-called "bad writing" we do in the academy, and how many tenure committees would accept the review--even the substantial review--or thoughtful essay or conversation-inspiring blog as a reason to promote? Moreover, how many of us take the time to explain what it is we understand the discipline of literature to do procedurally and rhetorically with our students, which is one of the main ways I have found to claim one of our most obvious audiences--our students? Roland recently brought up similar issues about audience, and in similarly compelling ways as you do here, Gregory. And yet I find myself trying to orient myself: I actually like the way many academics write, just as I like the way many popular critics write. Am I really so unusual? Are there not many academics who share a sense, at least, that Sontag and Adorno are equally worth reading, that Arendt challenges us in ways that Didion does not (and vice versa)?
This continues to be a really fascinating and important thread -- thanks Gregory, and also Rohan and Joel, for moving the conversation even further forward.
I agree with Joel and Rohan that it's hard to imagine a workable hiring / promotion system based on non-scholarly work. So probably we'll remain (for the time being at least) in a system which permits more popular work alongside or subsequent to more scholarly work. What we could collectively do is to encourage such popular work. I notice that Russell Berman and Saikat Majumdar are setting up a workshop at Stanford on "The Literary Public Intellectual"; this strikes me as a really positive development.
I confess that I too have a soft spot for Adorno, and at least when it comes to Minima Moralia, my fondness is in part a matter of style.
Still, for me the models are things like Kundera's trilogy of writings on the novel, or Nehamas's Nietzsche, or Leo Bersani's lovely book on Proust, or Oliver Sacks's essays... I do think there's a middle ground between simplistic and abstruse. And I do think we should all be striving for it in our own work, as well explaining to our students (I agree, Joel!) why it is that we think it such a good idea.
With all due respect and a salute to Gregory, there is an elephant in the room, and it's not an academic or a literary critic. It's hinted at in the first response here, which refers to blogging. The role of the professional critic is ever diminishing now that everyone and his/her brother can post an opinion online (witness yours truly). Online opinions are not necessarily well written (nor are they even necessarily read by more than one person), but they do seem to result, directly or not, in diminished audiences for critics of all stripes.