Free radicals

George Cotkin in The Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote what amounts to an excellent counter to Sven Birkerts' essay on the worrisome differences in book reviewing vs. blogging (thanks to Flyover for digging it out). Whenever critics hold up the holy days of Clement Greenberg or Edmund Wilson as an ideal from which today's squabbling multitudes of mere reviewers have fallen -- as Mr. Birkerts did -- I begin to balk. In hindsight, for all their supposed influence, they actually held sway over what was actually a very small, New York-based intellectual world -- and not today's much more widespread, multivalent culture. When have any other critics held such influence in recent history? And why would we want such solitary authority again?

As for our supposed decline into nastiness, the vast ocean of reviewing out there is actually quite tepid; the snarkiness is relatively rare, small-Manhattan-pond stuff compared to the bland enthusiasm that prevails elsewhere (see "Hosannah in the lowest: an essay on book reviewing"). Mr. Cotkin, however, takes the opposite approach. Mean-spirited squabbling we've always had with us:

"But before we simply dismiss this bloodletting as part and parcel of an emerging Jerry Springer show of criticism, it might be useful to recall the petty squabbles that drew the circle around the Partisan Review crowd, such as the thunderstorm of controversy that Norman Podhoretz's Making It and Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself evoked years ago. Both works were condemned for announcing that the intellectual world was not immune from careerism, from the desire for success.

There are excesses aplenty today. Do we really need to know about the New Yorker critic David Denby's fling with pornography, as he notes in his confession, American Sucker? Does Nation critic Katha Pollitt need to confess about "Googling" her ex-lover, following his every move? In criticism, no less than in life, sometimes less is more.

Cultural criticism has certainly changed over the years. The old days of the critic who wielded unchallenged authority have happily passed. Ours is a more pluralistic age, one not beholden to a narrow literary culture. Today cultural criticism is alive and well, populated at the top by giants such as Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Richard Rodriguez, Morris Dickstein, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Frederic Jameson: all critics with differing perspectives and concerns. And cultural criticism, more than ever, is percolating up from below. Blogs and Amazon reviews are opening up the cultural space of criticism, offering new possibilities. The literature professor Michael Bérubé offers valuable cultural and political analysis on his blog to about 40,000 visitors a month. Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and music critic for Commentary, has a blog, "About Last Night," in which he daily elucidates the thinking process and concerns of the engaged critic of culture."

OK. No problem with all that, although book/daddy has some serious reservations about all those "possibilities" opened up by Amazon's "reviews." More importantly, Mr. Birkerts' main point -- that the different media of literary criticism (online v. print) change the nature of the criticism's effects -- still stands, I maintain.