To Alice, w/o Malice, on Wood

[Mark Kohut]

Fascinating CofL49 facts..Did not know of his change of mind.

One of my working beliefs is that even the best critics in history
have often missed the most original,deepest of their time. Almost an
occupational hazard.
Almost like why great baseball pitchers cannot hit, analogously speaking.

There is Johnson on Sterne---'nothing odd will last'---Johnson getting
Shakespeare's best wrong (often)....Saintsbury missing the real
geniuses of his time....

Flaubert roundly dissed by the best....and so forth...

Mark


On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 8:25 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
>      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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