#My new gender workbook book review professional#
Contributors are not, for the most part, professional critics (a vanishing breed) but what Ford Madox Ford called “artist-practitioners” - the moonlighting novelist or specialist. Since 1924, the Book Review has run bylines. On Laurence Sterne: “that ‘shorn lamb’ of his has been pulled hither and thither enough to be the toughest jerk mutton in the world.” An essay in the form of an imaginary conversation poked fun at novelists’ stock phrases.
It featured 10 reviews, all unsigned, along with lists of new books and literary happenings. The inaugural issue of the Book Review was published in 1896. Scott Momaday’s “House Made of Dawn,” which went on to win the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction: “American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule or teach English in top-ranking universities either. Fluorescent condescension and stereotype - on N. What did I find? Those misjudged masterpieces - on Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie”: “It is a book one can very well get along without reading.” The sensitive assessments - consistently by the critic and former editor of the Book Review, John Leonard, an early and forceful champion of writers like Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman and Grace Paley. So many masterpieces, so many duds - now enjoying quiet anonymity. The adjectives one only ever encounters in a review ( indelible, risible), the archaic descriptors ( sumptuous). All the fatuous books, the frequently brilliant, the disappointing, the essential. To wander through 125 years of book reviews is to endure assault by adjective. writers” were reviewed, how was their work positioned? What patterns can we trace, what consequences? And what do we do with this knowledge - how can it be made useful? When we come to know, what do we really see? ✧✧✧ But what about the reviews themselves: the language, the criteria? When “women, people of color, L.G.B.T.Q.
One survey, which looked at nearly 750 books assessed by The Times in 2011, across all genres, found that nearly 90 percent of the authors assessed were white. In recent years, The Times has faced scrutiny of the racial and gender imbalance in its reviews. Above all, the pleasant and dubious satisfactions of feeling superior to the past.Īnd yet. Fluorescent condescension and stereotype. A few preternaturally sensitive assessments. What could those reviews contain? Some misjudgments, to be sure - masterpieces misunderstood in their time. But what revelatory news could I possibly bring? The word “archive” derives from the ancient Greek arkheion, sometimes translated as “house of the ruler.” Who wanders there with any illusions? writers” and changing mores in criticism. My brief, you could say, was to review the Book Review, to consider the coverage of “women, people of color, L.G.B.T.Q. Not a surprising moment, then, to be asked to explore the archives of The New York Times Book Review on the occasion of its 125th anniversary, a moment for celebration but also for some more challenging introspection, a moment to examine the publication’s legacy in full. The morality of the novel, and of its creator, are litigated with hot urgency, as if Nabokov, dead some 40 years, lingers in the dock somewhere. Nous connûmes Nabokov himself this past year brought forth a swarm of studies and, in March, an anthology dedicated to “Lolita” alone. There have been fresh considerations of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, David Foster Wallace and others, as their private papers and private lives have come to light. It has felt like the mood of the moment, with the reappraisal of monuments, real and metaphorical, in our midst - writers included. “ Nous connûmes,” he purrs, borrowing “a Flaubertian intonation” - we came to know - and enumerates each guesthouse and motel, each unsmiling landlady. He slips into French to marvel at all they have seen. He has dragged his 12-year-old quarry on a road trip across the country, a perversion of a honeymoon. Halfway through “Lolita,” Humbert Humbert - relaxed, triumphant and a mere pinch of pages away from his downfall - stops to extol the wonders of America.
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