A CURSE ON MEAN-SPIRITED INTELLECTUALS | More Intelligent Life
RECENT ARTICLES
LITERATURE
Book critics we like
Memoirs of a nobody
Thomas Bernhard
Herodotus and bad fate
Norman Rush's "Mortals"
Herodotus and retrospection
Grace Paley's "Fidelity"
Herodotus and women
Norman Mailer
Reading Herodotus
The indexing trade
The memoir boom
Barnes & Noble Media
Homer and the brain
Iraq war poetry
Philip Pullman
Sherman Alexie
Adam LeBor's Jaffa
Presidents in poetry
Hazards of biography
Bernard Malamud
"Schulz and Peanuts" (audio)
The Shakespeared brain
Cursing critical theory
J.M. Coetzee and James Wood
Good bits of bad poetry
At Shakespeare & Co
"The Uncommon Reader"
Villains of P.G. Wodehouse
Poetry in translation
MUSIC
Rock critics we like
Letting Bach breathe (audio)
Bryce Morrison on Hattogate
Music as installation art
The Joyce Hatto affair
The autumn IL playlist
FINE & PERFORMING ARTS
Natalia Goncharova
Tony Harrison's "Fram"
Design: Alexander von Vegesack
Circular tables at Christie's
Dani Karavan
Making a musical
Edward Weston's photographs
Richard Dadd at Bonhams
Hillary Carlip's "A la Cart"
Miniatures at Sotheby's
Arts critics we like
"The Homecoming"
China syndrome
Hankies at auction
Looking at "La Loge" (audio)
Francis Bacon: auction hype
Mannerism at the Morgan
Arts and crafts, rock-and-roll
Connect at the Met
Auction gloom
Sylvie Guillem
Revival of German Expressionism
Parmagianino's "Antea"
In praise of Irma Stern
Art Basel Miami
Museum Gunzenhauser
Maysoon Zayid, comedian
The Life of Rudolf Nureyev
Tom Stoppard in Moscow
Bob Dylan's paintings
"1001 Paintings"
The age of Rembrandt
Pricing modern art
FILM
Watching "Shine A Light"
Martin Sheen for president
Smoking on screen
Film critics we like
East Germany on screen
I love the Oscars
Scott Burns
British Council film festival
"The Man from Earth"
David Lynch
"Yiddish Theatre, a Love Story"
"La Chinoise"
"Helvetica"
FOOD & DRINK
Australia's wine country
Well-tempered chocolatiers
Sipping Cos D'Estournel
It's offal good
Tasting Graves wines
Chateau Les Crayeres
Where the cabbies eat
Reading about wine
Wine and me
Taillevent
La Mission Haut-Brion
Perfect cup of tea
Live food
Le Cinq at George V
Drinker's guide to eastern Europe
Absinthe
Celebrities and luxury
Ducasse at the Dorchester
Chateau Montrose
David Campbell
Le Tour d'Argent
Victorian beer
Le Café Anglais
American cooking
Chateau Lafleur
Kensington Place
Robert Parker
X-rated meat: scrapple
Enjoying offal
Brilliance of Burgundies
Pleasures of the izakaya
Edinburgh v Glasgow
Eating a guinea-pig
Dave Arnold
Homaro Cantu
Wylie Dufresne
GREEN
Global warming humour
Grizzly Bear Ranch
Enough, Greenpeace!
Clinton Global Initiative
"ZOOM" extract 3
"ZOOM" extract 2
"ZOOM" extract 1
Living without a fridge
Hydrogen-powered Hondas
ISSUES & IDEAS
Freedom from the Olympics
High-end prostitution
The Diana Inquest
Sarkozy visits England
TEOTWAWKI
Beggars can be orators
Aldermaston march
Friend of a farmer
Commander-in-chief
"The New Cold War"
Epicurus exonerated
Lazy language, lazy thought
Cuba and the TRNC
Britain's silly tax laws
Keeping Kenya Christian
Patriotism
Missed opportunities
Obesity epidemic?
Davos and China
Popularising science
Thought-crime
Monarchy
Child-minding dads
Hannukah
Three thoughts on dying
Liberty, law and order
Free speech in Oxford
1968
James Flynn, IQ maverick
Pompous professors
Religious prejudice
The Menezes fiasco
English nationalism
A tear for Yitzhak Rabin
Taxing foreigners
Reporting Iraq
Princess Di and the public
Otherness
Hedonism
PHILANTHROPY
Your money or your life?
Donating to Afghanistan
One cause, or many?
Embedded giving
Giving for scholarship
Helping a beggar
Children and wealth
New Philanthropy Capital
PLACES
A Mali holiday
Living in Babel
Down in the Delta
My house in Marrakech
What do people do in Antarctica?
Falling in love with DC
Eat in Peckham
Chicago sells well
Fun times in Maputo
Breaking into Burma
Dresden's rebirth
Birth bribes in Budapest
New York's cemeteries
Africans in Tel Aviv
Ben Saunders, explorer
An American in Kenya
Palestinian life
A walk around Nairobi
Towns of Crimea
Autumn in Paris
The Sinai desert
SPORT
Remembering Munich
Against the London Olympics
American exceptionalism
Rugby World Cup 2007 (ii)
Rugby World Cup 2007 (i)
TECHNOLOGY
Robots get cuddly
Redesigning the dinosaur
Interactive clothing
David Weinberger
Ned Kahn
Swarming robots
MISCELLANY
TV, theatre, pop culture critics
Are you being followed?
The spring issue is here
Sex diaries of Keynes
New York cabs
Benjamin Franklin
Hitler's digestion
Life as a handbag
Stroke me, I'm a primate
The death of alpha-blogging
Swearing and Steven Pinker
Castration and sex
A CURSE ON MEAN-SPIRITED INTELLECTUALS
AND LITERARY SCHOLARS ABOVE ALL
Philip Davis, the editor of The Reader, is fed up with seeing literature treated as fodder for convoluted academic analysis. He leaps to the defence of a like-minded critic attacked in the Times Literary Supplement ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
It is probably because when I was a young beginner, trying to write about literature, I did not feel encouraged or appreciated. Those were days of high theory in literary studies: it was naïve to be interested in realism, in emotion, in the human content of literature as I was. "Nobody came," says Thomas Hardy of the plight of his own young idealist, "because nobody does."
But I was very pleased when a friend recently sent me a book of literary criticism that he said I would like, and I did. This is rare: I am sick of university teachers treating literature as though it were a branch of something else—Social Studies, Gender Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Political Studies. The book was by Brigid Lowe and is called "Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy".
It is a brave book, with one big simple message: all too often literary scholars merely use books (they call them "texts") for the sake of their own agendas and careers. Here's the novel; here's the ideological agenda to which it is to be fitted; and here's the critical mallet to whack it into shape. For example, here is the opening of another recent book on Victorian Sympathy from Stanford University Press which goes something like this: "The Victorians were very interested in sympathy - which was all about consolidating the male sense of identity, and an early example of interpellation in action." So that's what it's all about.
Instead Ms Lowe offers a vision of sympathy—both within Victorian novels and in the reading of them—that is too generous and too complex for prescriptive and self-righteous narrow-mindedness. A character in Mrs Gaskell will have a prejudice, a theory, a plan or a principle—and then suddenly, when confronted by a particular person in a specific human situation and moved or pained, will give it all up. That's what the novel does, and it is what novel reading helps to foster.
I was really looking forward Dr Lowe's book making a stir. But in the Times Literary Supplement on Sunday, her book was loftily dismissed by a foremost American literary scholar. Ms Lowe is a member of the "younger generation" of literary scholars, the reviewer argues, but the book is rather "dated". Apparently, all of Ms Lowe's targets in the world of literary theory—Terry Eagleton, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Roland Barthes, Edward Said and J.Hillis Miller—are not a problem any more. We have "gone on" to new ideas.
Well, you could have fooled me. But then the reviewer does one of those sneaky scholarly things designed to make fools of people. Lowe quotes with interest an argument from "In A Different Voice", by Carol Gilligan: in tests to measure ethical development, where a moral person is (so narrowly) defined as one who can "effectively apply abstract principles of justice and fairness", women did far worse than men because they got too interested in the particular case. Good for them! But our reviewer notes that Lowe quotes from the 1998 reprint of this "landmark book", and, actually, "In A Different Voice" first appeared in 1982. Therefore Lowe too is "dated" (—and the Victorians, poor souls, presumably even more so).
I say to this distinguished reviewer as I said in my last posting: A Blog On You! Somebody had something important to say, but you did not want to hear her say it. You didn't really offer an argument. Instead you made something true, regardless, into someone "dated" instead, just by being clever. It wouldn't be morally good were you a scholar of Roman drainage systems (as I wish you were). But it is worse if you are a literary scholar, because literature should have made your intelligence more sympathetic. Let the curse stand on all such failures of university education: A Blog On All Your Houses.
(Philip Davis, author of "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life", is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of The Reader magazine. He will be speaking on Malamud at the 92nd Street Y in New York on October 31st.)
a.. Add new comment a.. Printer-friendly version
A distant epigone writes
Submitted by Robert Cottrell on November 14, 2007 - 19:40.
Roger Gathman has an interesting response to this piece, finding the line of argument disagreeable but well-motivated:
Actually, I don’t see how either Barthes or Said would be opposed, in principle, to Lowe’s thesis. However, I can easily see why they – and me, a distant epigone – would be repelled by Davis’ tone. Or at least fascinated by the psychodynamics of quotation and quarantine here – starting with the quotation and quarantining of the word ‘texts’, as if this word had come from Mars instead of being firmly part of interpretive history, going back through the Church Fathers to the scholiasts. Then there is the oddity of the accusation of self-interested motive in the reading – apparently, self interest stops when one finds an interpretive school one likes. Then, at that point, self-interest
...
read more »
|
|
IL%20Cover%20Spring2_60.jpg
15K
Download
|
|
|
Economist-business_group_logo_footer.gif
1K
Download
|
