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If a literary critic dies....
Does anyone notice?

For most of the 240-odd years since Hugh Blair, English professors have been suckers, and for the same reason Blair made such a glorious one: No one knows what an English professor does. In waking up each day only to rejustify their entire existence—to jealous colleagues, to class-shopping undergraduates, to the administrative purse strings—professors of literature invoke the literary past in whatever way will most advance their own institutional self-interest.

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Edited by author 11-16-2005 09:49 AM
I disagree, frayed. Pure science can be every bit as artful as literature or fine art (Einstien was certainly a scientific artist). Note that I'm not elevating Darwinism to an art form, but arguing that the line connecting pure science to art is clear and real to my mind.

Evolution is not survival of the strongest, but survival of the fittest. As in biology, the literature that survives will likely be that which is best suited to the particular environments of schools, stores, book clubs, politicians, movie-makers, websites and blogs along the way. Of course, sheer volume of books in print (whether "strong" or not) would seem to make survival more likely.

(For more on Literature, Politics, the Media, and the Law, please visit: www.gravierhouse.com.)

Edited by author 11-15-2005 11:50 AM
To import a theory or fact from a biological science - yes, dears, science - and apply it to literary phenomena is, to import a philosophical concept, fallacious reasoning.
Writers needn't twist their knickers in knots over this one.

Time has no meaure for quality. There's no evidence that it cares at all whether the current crop of humans has written a limerick or a shopping list. To write things like 'strongest shall survive' is foolish.

Are we so certain that the 'strongest' have survived thus far?

How do we weigh the evidence?

It's an appealing idea that an evolutionary eye can sort the wheat from the chaff in literature, that the best of literature is elemental. I did agree, though, as I read the NYT piece, that as a school of criticism it's weaker than most, less egalitarian than feminism or deconstruction, for example, both of which can happily dismantle any text. Literary Darwinism sorts but then is left helpless to assess those that don't fit the evolutionary mould.

Enjoyed the essays anyway.

Literary Darwinism

The strongest will survive. The weakest will fall into the grant trap. Those in between will be bred out of existence and forgotten.


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Me too. Does there seem to be a run on critical books on the state of criticism - relative to demand anyway - these days?

On the bumper of my car: I brake for Andre Alexis

Oooo! Me want. (From Black Ink)


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The death of criticism?

Every day there's a new death of somethingorother article. Why can't we all just get along?

...many newspaper and magazine critics pine for a golden age when giants walked the Earth: When the imposing Clement Greenberg was shaping modernism in painting, the biting H.L. Mencken was exhuming the reputation of Theodore Dreiser, and the impious Leslie Fiedler found unsettling Freudian meanings in the novels of Mark Twain.

The nonprofit arts, with their limited marketing budgets, have typically depended more on criticism than the promotion-driven world of entertainment, which is sometimes called "critic-proof." But as late as the 1970s, the feisty Pauline Kael was spurring American outlaw filmmakers toward their most daring work.

But it's less common, critics say, for one of their kind to make a reputation, draw an audience's attention to an overlooked work or uncover dark cultural truths.


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Wondering if you've got what it takes to be a writer?
Why not send it to Fiction Bitch and find out you don't. Remember, on the Internet everyone can see you die.

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Now where did I put my teeth?
Robert McCrum says there's too much innovation in literature these days and we need to return to the classics. Yes, it's a scary world out there, full of wolves and Nazis and books that make my head hurt.


During recent years, we've seen novels in verse; novels composed without the vowel 'a'; novels narrated from the point of view of pets; novels of gothic slaughter; novels of colossal lust; novels heaving with obscenity. And, painful though it is to admit this, a lot of these books have been astonishingly bad, not to say frightful.


I say we don't have enough novels of gothic slaughter, colossal lust or heaving with obscenity. I'm waiting for the one that combines all three.

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