To Alice, w/o Malice, on Wood

[matthew cissell]

     First, I think of Wood as a champion of books; I'm not out to slander
or diminsh him or his work, nor do I pretend to defend TP. My interest in
Wood is limited to how his comments play a part in the critical discourse
around the works of TP.

   He is certainly a fine writer, but a "damn fine critic" may need some
downward adjustment given his error regarding Mr. Casey's cramped fingers,
especially if Wood pretends familiarty with Joyce's work. Wood's reputation
and career rest no more on his criticism of TP than it does on any of his
other judgements (for example, he is not 'famous' for his work on Sebald).
His trajectory through the social field is the history of his various
position-takings, and it is worth study.

  Did you know that in 1994 JW made his own list of great books in english?
(H Bloom's Western Canon had hust come out.) The CoL49 was on the list and
yet just 3 years later in his review of M&D (reprinted in Broken Estate) he
would treat CoL49 less than kindly. How do you explain the change? What
happened in those 3 years?

  (A brief aside on your comment about "young academics addicted to"
jargon. Well, I won't take umbrage since I don't think I qualify but I will
say that your words do little to illuminate and much to offend. Where did
young academics get their communicative practices from? From whence all
this intellectual gobbledygook? We might find something more substantial in
Gerald Graff (on how academe has failed university students) or John
Guillory (his work on the formation of a "canon of theory") to understand
where when and why students started to mimic and monkey the opaque rhetoric
of their professors and other scholars. And you might want to know that
some of us admire the sober and coherent discourse of such diverse thinkers
as John Searle, Roger Chartier, or M.H Abrams, to name a few. )

   When Ursula Le Guin made her speech at the Nat'l Book award this last
year she made a distinction between "production of a market commodity and
the practise of an art" and thus aluded to the problematic nature of a book
as a commodity and part of the financial economy and the book as a cultural
product involved in the greater general ecconomy of practices. James Wood
is a champion of that artistic practise and as such a friend of
bibliophiles, no matter what the difference of tastes may be, and for that
he should be appreciated. However, when the Critic de jour consistently
blasts a writer so widely praised by many (writers and critics alike), it
does not suffice to say "he doesn't get it". Greater study is required.

ciao
otis
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