Blogging, women, and a swipe at ’90s gender psychology

As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?

Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to keep:

Personality bloggers write about themselves and their experiences and their lives, and topic bloggers write about other stuff—which, a lot of the time, tend to be written by men, but that’s partly because it’s easier for them to slightly isolate them[selves]—putting my pod psychologist hat on—it’s easier for them to [get] distance from the topic. (19:55 to 12:10.)

With all respect to the Tech Weekly team, this sounds like ’90s-style Men are from Blogger, Women are from Livejournal nonsense. Provided that this gendered difference in blogging styles actually exists—and all we have are anecdotes—isn’t the likelier explanation for this divide wrapped up in issues of economics and gender performance?

Putting on my blog psychologist hat, I suspect that I blog about literary critical issues because my understanding of maleness is, to some extent, defined by romantic stories of public academic discourse between men going back to Plato. As a consequence, it seems unlikely that a hiring or tenure committee will penalize me for my blogging, though, even if they do, as a white man with an advanced degree I am likely to be able to find another high-paying job.

I’d like to be able to argue that the great French diarists and lettristes of the 17th and 18th centuries, like the Marquise de Sévigné, model how we understand women’s public writing; however, since I know zilch about how Sévigné shaped modern discourse I’ll stick to the safe claim: the tradition of public debate among Euro-American women is, compared to Plato, fairly recent. Add to this consideration the statistic that the great majority of bloggers who have been Dooced in the last 10 years have been women and it begins to seem clear that the social and financial pressures pushing women away from topic-blogging are more concrete and relevant than any wispy, unsourced psychological argument.

Canons and Kureishi

A Grinnellian friend who blogs at Less Than a Shoestring pointed me to Ryan Williams’s response to the Guardian’s synopsis of Hanif Kureishi’s critique of creative writing courses at the Hay festival.

(I’ve not heard audio from Kureishi’s talk, so though I hesitate to read Charlotte Higgins’s description as wholly representative of what Kureishi said it’s all I’ve got.)

Kureishi’s argument, in all its shocking novelty, is that universities teach creative writing less as a professional skill than as a therapeutic technique: “The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers – and no one will disabuse them of that.”

Consequence: writing programs end up looking rather like “mental hospitals.” You fill in the rest.

I’ve never been in a CW course, so the thrust of Kureishi’s argument sounds as appropriate to me as to anyone else who’s seen Wonder Boys and kind of assumes Michael Chabon knows what he’s talking about.

More interesting than Kureishi’s remarks are Williams’s arguments why creative writing courses inspire this sort of attack:

1. Literary writing is on the decline, becoming, like contemporary jazz, accessible to few. Williams argues that, gallingly, “Phenomena like MFA programs and creative writing courses just serve as reminders of how difficult it is for a literary writer to make a living without institutional support.”
2. Creative writing students are aesthetically at odds with literary scholars. Williams: “if you hold the [...] idea that the only kind of writing of value is literary writing, then you’re very likely to see much of your students’ work as worthless.” (This conflict isn’t only aesthetic: creative writing and literary studies programs can compete for the same funds.)
3. CW programs flood the market with literary content; according to statistical rules, some of this content must be jaw-droppingly good. Cultural elites, like OPEC warily eying the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, see this as a threat to their dominance: “The presence of so much talent and good work threatens ideas about canonicity, or about the central importance of a handful of successful contemporary literary stars.”

Arguments 1 and 2 exceed my purview. I dislike contemporary jazz as much as the next idiot (sorry, Gary Giddins) and I’ve read almost no student creative writing (sorry, Brendan).

Argument 3, however, I can write about, especially as it pertains to Hanif Kureishi.

Kureishi appears alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo as a vaguely foreign-seeming writer in a country obsessive about national pedigree, but it takes only a few proper nouns from his British Council bio to see how firmly he’s ensconced in the literary mainstream: King’s College, Whitbread, National Theatre, and on.

To argue that Kureishi is, in Williams’s formulation, one of those “contemporary literary stars” fighting the new astronomy that would expand the literary universe, we would look for marks of approval from the canon-makers. Yet Clark Blaise’s 1990 Times review of The Buddha of Suburbia (byline: Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa) isn’t too hot on Kureishi:

It is difficult to turn from screenwriting [...] to the conventional Bildungsroman, in which nothing exists without a textured, modulated, layered consciousness. In ”The Buddha of Suburbia,” Karim’s emerging consciousness is not spacious enough to contain the worlds of Haroon and Eva, his mother and her new boyfriend, Jamila and Changez, or his own growing understanding of acting and theater. The book reads like three novellas flattened into one long narrative.

My translation: reading Buddha as though it were a rewrite of The Sorrows of Young Werther shows us that Kureishi is insufficiently obedient to the Anglo-Germanic canon.

Look, I haven’t read Buddha and I’ve heard at best middling things about it, but faulting a novel for its fidelity to a 215-year-old literary genre is a sign of a canonical laziness. Would Blaise argue that Pip’s expanding consciousness in Great Expectations is not spacious enough to contain the worlds of Estella and Magwitch? It’s certainly not, but the book’s a doozy nonetheless.

Propelled by market forces, creative writing programs historically taught the rules of the canon. They have given us – as Williams writes – the sort of young, white, Ivy League graduates who populate the Times Best Books list every year, but they have also indoctrinated writers from outside this socio-ethnic elite into the rules of the canon.

This week’s fiction double-issue of the New Yorker opens with a story by Nabokov. (First sentence: “On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe.” You fill in the rest.) The pseudo-diverse group of writers who follow were trained, with one or two exceptions, at American universities: Uwem Akpan (MFA, U. Michigan), Tobias Wolff (MA, Stanford), Edwidge Danticat (MFA, Brown), Mohammed Naseehu Ali (BA, Bennington), Allegra Goodman (Ph.D., Stanford), Mary Gaitskill (BA, U. Michigan), and George Saunders (MA, Syracuse). Provided we count Annie Proulx’s degree (MA, Sir George Williams U.) as functionally American, the one exception is Haruki Murakami (BA, Waseda U.), although his New Yorker piece is the only one that isn’t fiction.

Clearly these creative writing programs are working in the sense that they teach a certain small percentage of their students how to write for the mainstream of the American literary audience, but in the process of doing so they are also teaching their students how to write in accord with the canon.

When Kureishi argues that creative writing programs fail to create strong writers, it’s not because those new writers threaten his canon but because they are too enmeshed in it.

Journal Club #3: Hülya Adak, Jale Parla, and Nergis Ertürk on Turkish and world literature

Katy, Dana, and Ryan’s thought-provoking responses to last Friday’s post (Finding the Countercanon, below) sent me back to the cluster of essays on Turkey and world literature at the beginning of January’s issue of PMLA (123.1). These articles are, frustratingly, behind a paywall, but the titles below link to abstracts.

When we look to English-language readings of Turkish literature we see at play the problem of contexualized scholarship that sinks my idea of a countercanon. How few professors of English literature, writing about or teaching literature on a global scale, are sufficiently competent in cultural histories to acknowledge both the contexts and the methods of language use in more than a few closely-related cultures? What, ultimately, is the standard of expertise in the teaching of a literature at a cultural remove from your own?

A war of words at the bottom of the alphabet

In the last few years, the Virginia Quarterly Review has become the poster child for a successful reimagining of literary periodicals. Ted Genoways, VQR’s brilliant young editor, applied the aesthetic flexibility of zines (comics, sarcasm) to a venerable lit periodical, and began funding serious international reporting and photojournalism in a way you rarely see outside the major papers and Atlantic-league magazines.

For this reason, the current row between VQR and ZYZZVA casts interesting light on two answers to the question of what literary periodicals should do in the age of blogs. Here are the relevant links:

• April 29: On VQR’s blog, Waldo Jaquith posts a (now censored) list of amusingly nasty things VQR reviewers wrote about submissions
• May 5: Ted Genoways apologizes
• May 20: Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZVA, takes issue with Genoways’s apology
• May 20: Genoways replies with an attack on ZYZZVA’s submission-review practice
• May 21: Genoways returns to ZYZZVA to make his case for the role of the contemporary literary periodical

I’m pretty sure that this means I will now have to take advantage of ZYZZVA’s almost-free-issue offer (vs. $14 for an issue of VQR) to discover what “literature pickled in formaldehyde” smells like.

Finding the countercanon

Sometime this summer I’ll pose for an Author Shot to replace that trippy anonicon, but for now I have to ask you to take my word for it that I’m a white man. With a beard, if that matters.

Perhaps because of my privileged upbringing (private school) and context (exurban midwest), or perhaps because of a discomfort with confronting difference, the English literature I have come to know is white and male. Looking back on my literary career, I am beginning to worry that I have for too long bought into the separate-but-equal mentality of the canon.

Where other literatures have come into my education they feel decontextualized, tokenized, colonized: the sheer talent of a Toni Morrison, for example, would invalidate the canon’s premise were she not acknowledged, so there she is, with Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston. But I don’t understand Morrison, Ellison, or Kingston in anything of the depth with which I understand Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, or even Zadie Smith.

Smith, because she writes something like World Literature, seems to escape some of the literary ghettoization of the American canon. Still, World Lit can’t always escape the gravitational pull of academics’ ghettoizing impulse: over and over again Kazuo Ishiguro explains to white interviewers that he doesn’t model his fiction on Yukio Mishima and Junichirō Tanizaki (Chekhov is his greatest influence, followed by James). Interviewers and reviewers, even (especially?) from academic publications, tuck Ishiguro into an ill-defined Japanese Lit.

There are dangers in assuming all authors are like Ishiguro, of course: I’m not sure Philip Roth could give a disquisition on the range of styles deployed by Tanizaki and then come back to explain the stylistic influence of a certain Polish translator of Chekhov. Still, it seems not unreasonable to imagine that authors of the twentieth-century novel, in all languages, are employees of one of the more culturally heterogeneous firms around.

Back to my problem: as a product of my time and place I know the canon as it is espoused by my university, and I know the canon as it is espoused by my authors. (Woolf and Rushdie are graciously forthright about the books they think people should be reading.) But I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know, the canons that boom outside the walls of my little University, the list of 100 Essential Books They Won’t Teach You In College.

What is expertise?

I’ve been appreciating the riffs on David Remnick’s 100 Essential Jazz Albums at Why not blog? and Yellow Dog—though my public library probably isn’t so happy about the influx of transfers—but these lists have thrown me into something of a crisis about expertise.

Donna and J. Rice—to say nothing of David Remnick—gain authority for their claims based on assumptions about how they experience jazz: when they listen to an album, the casual reader assumes, they do so informed of its context and its rules. We assume they have listened to that album multiple times, over a range of contexts and occasions—when their father would put on his favorite records in his study; when hanging out with friends in their dorm room; when they are putting together dinner on a Thursday night and need to feel a deeper connection with the world than rolling out pizzas for the grill might otherwise invite them to be.

We would expect a literary analyst to come at a text, even the first time s/he reads it, with a greater understanding of the text’s moves than would a more casual reader. But do these the assumptions about contextual range that take hold when we look at a list of essential jazz albums apply when we gauge literary expertise?

This is the essential hazard facing young academics: there are few texts I could write about with the authority Remnick has whenever he writes a word about jazz. I have a chapter on In Search of Lost Time that I am pleased with, but I can’t pretend to have read that text as frequently or for as wide a period of my life as Remnick can say he has listened to Art Blakey’s Moanin’.

In praise of bad reading

A parenthetical debate about close reading appeared on a couple high-profile blogs this weekend. First, Sisyphus:

(I have banned the phrase “close reading” from my vocabulary, as none of us are really matching patterns to find the keystone of irony or whatever was in the New Critical method. It’s become a pet peeve of mine that lit scholars use “close reading” and “reading a text closely” interchangeably. I digress.)

Then Dr. Crazy:

(and here I’d quibble with Sisyphus’s rejection of the term - I’d say that while “close reading” has evolved from what the new critics did that it’s still the foundation for much if not all literary critical methodology)

This institutional history of New Criticism sounds about right—Even Newer Critics seem to have imported the NCs’ means without bothering to import their ends, thereby prising the tool from its original purpose.

That original purpose, to Wimsatt and his ilk, was to use close reading as a sort of literary nutcracker, shelling texts from the twin fallacies of intention and affection to expose the tasty kernel within.

It interests me that we Even Newer Critics (Post-New Critics?) have returned to the issue of intention but, with the exception of that reader-response business in the ’70s, haven’t really troubled with affection.

I date the beginning of my literary career to my reading, on my own time, of Emma. This would have been 8th or 9th grade—I was an ill-read youth, years behind my colleagues. I crowed about my affection for the exquisite, flawless Emma for at least a week before one of my better-read peers politely took issue with my characterization of her.

My misreading of Emma echoed Emma’s misreading of her world: the foundational act of my literary career was an affective fallacy, an imposition of my skewed perspective onto the text.

But I’m not sure, all these decades later, that my adolescent brain was entirely in the wrong: Austen taught us to see the world through the eyes of a flawed character, and for all her attention to Emma’s moral and social education she never teaches us how to see the world through Knightley’s eyes—she suggests only that when our Knightleys come along we had better recognize and obey their new and better interpretations. By listening to my Knightley when she corrected my fantasist ignorance I unwittingly followed Austen’s program and, I would argue, engaged more closely with the text than critics who came at it with thoughtful critiques of capitalism and caste structures.

I wonder, sometimes, if we literary dissertators are anything more than a thousand meddling Emmas, reading texts closely by dint of having blinders on.

(The footnote to any discussion of close reading must be this obligatory link to Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie’s Shakespeare Master Class sketch, from the 1982 Cambridge Footlights Revue.)

Announcing: Podcasts from my Writing Center!

It has been a few semesters in the making, but UW–Madison’s Writing Center has begun releasing podcasts! You can subscribe to our feed and everything.

I’m a total podcast junkie: between bus-riding and chore-doing I probably listen to an hour of podcasts a day. Obviously I’ve followed this project with great interest and was ecstatic to help put together the first one.

Write This Way to the J-School [mp3, natch] is a conversation about personal statements with the undergraduate adviser at the UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Robert Schwoch. Sure, a good bit of our conversation focuses on the mechanics and prompt of UW’s J-School, but for the most part Robert tackles issues that apply to any personal statement: who reads it and how they read it, what role it plays in a large application packet, how to distinguish yourself from the crowd, and all the rest.

If you have students working with personal statements, we’d love it if you’d point them our way!

Should critics be willing to offend?

I was astonished, reading Imaginary Homelands, at the tone of some of Rushdie’s book reviews:

• Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum): “Unfortunately, the journey to this truth is so turgid that it’s impossible to care about reaching the goal. This is Spielbergery without the action or bullwhips, and if, as Anthony Burgess threatens on the jacket, ‘this is the way the European novel is going,’ we should all catch a bus in the opposite direction…” (272).
• V. S. Naipaul (Among the Believers): “Terrible things are being done today in the name of Islam; but simplification of the issues, when it involves omitting everything that can’t easily be blistered by Naupaul’s famous Olympian disgust, is no help.” This “makes Among the Believers, for all its brilliance of observation and depiction, a rather superficial book” (375).

Note to self: don’t ask Rushdie to blurb my book.

Say what you like about Rushdie, his skin is about as thin as that of the USS Maine. He delivered a spellbinding lecture here in the winter of 2003-04; during the Q&A, some thoughtful Madisonian asked whether this whole fatwa thing didn’t just propel him to fame and wealth: wasn’t it rather a convenience to have had the radicalized element of the second-largest religion on earth told they would receive an eternity in paradise for murdering him, plus a few million dollars to tide them over until then?

Rushdie’s answer was less furious than it might have been.

Rushdie’s strength as a reviewer lies in that forthrightness: a guy who takes down Eco, Naipaul, Graham Greene (”a rather plain Panamanian plonk,” 215), Julian Barnes, and Stephen Hawking (”a particularly bad case of Premature Eurekitis,” 261) is that much more persuasive when selling his readers on an Indian cinéaste (Satyajit Ray) who doesn’t get much exposure hereabouts.

Reading his work makes me wonder whether my own critical writing is too tame: if my arguments don’t draw blood, are they as useful to the scholarly world as they could be?

Of course Rushdie’s authority matches his audacity, and he can offend without fear of repercussion; he doesn’t have to get tenure, or go to conferences with Naipaul, Greene, et al.

Zany story, killer reading

The New Yorker has an unusually smart fiction podcast: short story writers reading and chatting about stories written by earlier New Yorker short story writers—Louise Erdrich reads (UW–Madison’s own) Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford reads John Cheever (in his sexy, sexy voice), Paul Theroux reads Borges, and so on.

I’m not an aficionado of the form, but I delight in learning a little bit about how the Big Names of today (Jhumpa Lahiri, Nell Freudenberger) read the Big Names of yesteryear (respectively: William Trevor and Grace Paley).

Today I listened to Donald Antrim reading Donald Barthelme’s 1974 “I Bought a Little City” (iTunes link), and though I hadn’t heard of the former and had barely heard of the latter, found myself in a state of high delight. The story is marvelous and the reading is exquisite. If you have 18 minutes of chores to do tonight, listen to this while you do them.