Questions ..

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Michel:
>Criticism is a dialogue.  A review is a monologue.

>From an overlapping angle: A review is intended for those who have not read
a book, to assist them in deciding whether to do so.

A-and Monte:
>>Criticism is intended for those who have read it, to engage them in 
>>dialogue
about what they found there.

>>Often enough, of course, reviews take the place of criticism for readers 
>>who
seek not further enagagement but ready-made opinions of what they have read
(or even of what they haven't).

Yes, these would certainly seem to be the archetypes of reviews and 
criticism, but the lines between the two are often quite fluid indeed. I've 
often - far, far too often - read monological rants disguising themselves as 
'criticism'; rants where the author of the article is more interested in 
positioning him- or herself vis-a-vis certain predominant theories than in 
actually trying to understand what the damn object of analysis is in fact 
trying to say. Such poor excuses for criticism are in my opinion at least as 
undiscriminating as the hastily typed review. In an ideal world, criticism 
*is* a dialogue, but in reality criticism is all too often a series of 
alternating monologues, where the authors aren't interested in what their 
colleagues or their common topic have to say.

I will certainly also agree that reviews are mostly monologues/ready-made 
opinions, but we shouldn't forget those brilliant reviews which *are* in 
fact foundations for the criticism to follow. We haven't really seen any of 
those reviews with AtD. Reviewers simply weren't given enough time with the 
book, so the fault is as much Penguin Press' as the reviewers, IMO. There 
have been some good, long reviews of the novel, notably by John Leonard and 
Liesl Schillinger, but those reviews were mostly good because they were not 
stupid, if that makes any sense: they got the gist of what the novel was 
actually about and discussed a few imporatnt topics, but despite being 
clever and well-written, I don't expect them to be foundations for future 
criticism of AtD: The reviewers simply didn't have enough time to sit down 
and map out a larger picture of AtD's position in Pynchon's oeuvre, or its 
position in modern American literature.
Those kinds of reviews do exist, though, and we don't have to look far to 
find them: Richard Poirier's review of GR in Saturday Review of the Arts, 
published merely five days after GR, is an excellent example of a review 
which set the tone for much of the early criticism of the novel. It is 
really an astounding review, but as Gerald Howard wrote in his essay in Book 
Forum, Poirier also had plenty of time to prepare it. Another brilliant 
review is Louis Menand's review of M&D, which also seems to have influenced 
much subesequent criticism. Both reviews demonstrate the once in a while 
reviews really can be precursors for the later criticism - such reviews are 
much too rare, though, and in the case of AtD so far unmaterialized.

_________________________________________________________________
Vælg selv hvordan du vil kommunikere - skrift, tale, video eller billeder 
med MSN Messenger:  http://messenger.msn.dk/  - her kan du det hele