Dostoevsky, Dan Green, Post-Modern Critics and Decline
I’ve read Dan Green’s blog with interest for several years now; I value it because I disagree with much of what he says. Some months ago I suggested to Dan, in a Comment, that evaluating and ranking the relative merits of literary works comprised an important part of the critical function, and that, so long as an evaluative criteria is agreed upon, interesting debate usually ensues. Dan did not agree. He prefers to adopt varying criteria, depending upon the work being analyzed, and sees little benefit in creating canons or hierarchies of quality.
Ironic then that, in a decidedly provocative post, he would judge Dostoevsky a ‘terrible’ tedious writer who stoops to ‘cheap tricks’, and subsequent to this evaluation, receive some very interesting counter arguments.
Dan seems to me to epitomize the post modern lit critic: one who believes that taste is beyond dispute, who avoids assigning relative merit, contents himself criticizing ‘realism,’ poses unanswerable questions about the nature of reality, reads not for enjoyment but in search of innovative new fictional structure and form, and subscribes to the notions that truth is contextual and that no boundaries exist between ‘high’ and popular culture.
James Wood and those of us who admire established canonical works are pilloried as reactionary, or worse, toadies of the establishment. Constant calls are made for the new and experimental with no specification as to what this might look like (except that it not resemble ‘realism’) because of course one cannot know the unknown, predict the future. When asked to define the admirable, they, the post moderns, say only that different criteria must be used for different works.
Despite the fact that much of interest could be learned from considered debate between these two factions, encounters, while at times producing insight, usually decline into invective, on the Internet at least.
October 20th, 2008 at 7:41 AM
Some not entirely random thoughts, but not particularly orderly either:
1. The disavowal of evaluation is not a new feature of academic criticism, nor particularly
post-modern. It was there in the "Polemical Introduction" to Northrup Frye’s Anatomy and, I suspect, long before that. The desire to keep evaluation around is just as old.
2. I have trouble imagining, in a concrete way, what it would mean if a significant proportion of
academic critics (10%, 20%, 50% ?) were to take up evaluation as a significant part of their publishing schedule. Setting aside the problem of getting tenure credit, what kind of articles and books would be written? Are we going to separate the canonical texts into high, middle, and low tiers? Or just high and low? What about a 10-point system?
Are we going to see Hamlet pitted against Titus Andronicus and against Amleth? Are we going to compare the works of Charles Dickens against those of his compatriots who failed to make the canon? (And are you the non-academic reader going to read to forgotten novels so as to verify that the new evaluators have gotten it right?) Are we going to see 100 evaluations of Paradise Lost each year? To what end? What about 1000 articles (and 10 books) sticking thumbs in the dyke that keeps pop culture from flooding the fertile plains of high culture?
Who’s going to read all this ranking and evaluating and debating? Wouldn’t you rather read
primary texts?
3. What are the criteria for evaluation? You’ve indicated various lists on your blog. Why not gather them together and propose a list yourself and the set out explicitly to use those criteria. My impression is that these various criteria are rather vague and won’t bear the intellectual weight you want to place on them. The only way to find out is to put them to the practical test. You’re not going to get anywhere by revving your engine in the hopes that someone else will show up with just the criteria you need.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:13 PM
Thanks for your comment Bill. I’m currently working on a piece that will I hope make a reasonable argument in favour of evaluative criticism, other than that which states that canons tend to save the ‘common reader’ time and effort…
In the meantime, I did give some thought to criteria here: http://nigelbeale.com/?p=1068
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:30 AM
Nigel, I’ve made a brief post over at The Valve in which I list your Booker criteria: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/nigel_beales_evaluation_criteria/
November 17th, 2008 at 8:13 AM
After a storm comes a calm