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October 20, 2003
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Lucid is as lucid does
From a review of Alfred Kazin's oeuvre, written by a literary critic who laments his profession's failure to understand its proper social and aesthetic role:
German literary critic Walter Benjamin observed: "When we read a book, the book is reading us." Far too often, however, the teaching of literature is a guessing game in which students attempt to figure out the professor's take on a book, then feed it back to her in ungainly prose. Professorial opinion of books is, quite often, shaped by the critical community, so when students read a book, their job is to determine how those books are to be read as defined by literary critics filtered through their profs. It is kind of like attempting to enjoy a banquet someone else has eaten. No surprise, then, that most students abandon reading literary criticism as soon as they leave school. Lots of them abandon reading literature, too, and critics and professors may have a hand in that.Literary criticism has become increasingly more arcane, obtuse and unreadable. I pity the English grad students who have had to read the stuff over the past couple of decades, a time when it was a mark of pride among critics to be opaque, when scholars whose meaning was too readily apprehended were thought to be intellectual bantam weights.
[...]
Kazin and his generation of critics knew they were less important than the writers they wrote about, knew their task was to probe those writers and their texts for the richness (or the foolishness) being offered, the insights about the culture and our varied lives in it. Too many literary critics since Kazin think that they are more important than the writers and the primary texts from which they work. I even heard one of them say in an address before a conference that deconstructionists don't really need the primary texts anymore.
Perhaps the republication of so much of Kazin's work will help nudge the critical community away from such nonsense and toward a view of their function as more window than door.
Perhaps. But if the recent publication of Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena is any indication, it's not bloody likely. Edited by Cornell English professor Jonathan Culler and Cornell Ph.D. candidate Kevin Lamb, the collection sets out to defend the academic humanities against the accusation that it is rotten with rotten writing. The basic premise: that it's not bad writing we are reading when we encounter the convoluted and unintelligible prose of a Judith Butler, a Homi Bhabha, or scores of less decorated, less known theoreticians, but difficult writing. The insinuation: clarity is for the simpleminded, convolution is a value unto itself, and the reader who fails to understand this is no reader at all. There's an excellent review of the book in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education.
Thanks to About Last Night for the Kazin link.
