Yesterday we mentioned Craig Morgan Teicher’s search (spurred by an asinine Huffington Post article) for “the Most Underrated Writers in America.” Craig named our own Stephen Elliott as underrated writer number one, and then encouraged readers to submit their own under-loved authors.
Today Craig has posted “The Top 15 Underrated Writers According to PWxyz [Publishers Weekly‘s blog],” along with an almost complete list of reader’s submissions. Did you submit someone? Did they make the cut? Take a look and find out.
6 responses
As a regular Rumpus reader, I wasn’t at all concerned by your initial link to to the HuffPo article. Instead, what DOES concern me is the immediate crackdown that followed, in which the original post was removed and the HP piece hastily (and without explanation) qualified as “total bullshit,” “asinine,” and now “ridiculous.” Stephen Elliot even went so far as to apologize for the Rumpus having linked to it (which, I’d like to point out, you’re still doing, just more snarkily).
I thought Jeremy Hatch’s original post was excellent. He linked to a literature-related article that’s been generating a lot of buzz, expressed his reservations about such “negative list-making,” and then asked readers for their opinion. This seems to me exactly what the Rumpus Blog is here to do. He did not endorse the piece, he merely pointed it out and rightfully so: I at least am grateful for having my attention drawn to something I might have otherwise missed, and which was certainly thought-provoking. (If nothing else, I admire Anis’ gusto).
Presumably, Stephen (and/or whoever’s been posting about this since) objected to the article for being a hasty, negative “smack-down.” I say “presumably” because the reasons for naming it “asinine” were never really expressed, which I find both concerning and ironic: if the HP piece were “mean-spirited” or “immature” (as some have said here), is it really any more mature or generous to smack-down the smackdown with a couple of epithets?
One of the points I agreed with was Anis’ assertion that we’ve lost the tradition of real criticism. Many of the great mid-century critics could be fiery and fuming, as lavish in censure as they were in praise. As the literary community has grown more tightly-knit and more insular (to both positive and negative effect), we seem to have lost that capacity, and replaced it with the childhood mantra of “If you can’t say something nice.” While on one level I understand that (and the delicacy of criticism has been discussed here on the Rumpus), I worry that, when all feedback must be positive, we risk replacing ‘art’ with ‘art-therapy.’ If I believe in great art, don’t I need to distinguish it from the less-than-great? And might that not, indeed, entail the occasional ‘smack-down,’ *especially* of someone we perceive as overrated?
Anis Shivani fired a cannonball at the “establishment.” Maybe, if we engage with and discuss his argument, it will emerge that he was shooting blanks. But to dismiss his arguments hastily and out-of-hand seems only to reproduce the worst aspects of his article while simultaneously illustrating his assertion that real criticism of (and within) the literary community is no longer possible.
Shivani’s assertion that we’ve lost the tradition of real criticism is nothing more than Golden-Age-nostalgia wankery. It’s the same kind of argument you hear when someone decry the lack of non-corporate hip-hop or say that Hollywood made better movies in the past. There’s plenty of fiery criticism out there if you just look for it, but it’s easier to make grand pronouncements and take lazy shots at established authors in an online forum that values only one thing: page views.
Sorry Bennett. The Huffpo piece might have been getting buzz, but it was poorly reasoned, vindictive, and seriously lacking any merit. Honestly, the article is just mean-spirited and isn’t even trying.
Brian,
As a grad student in a theory-intensive literature program, Shivani’s statements about the academy (no interest in contemporary literature and a supremacy complex vis their material) pretty much mesh with my experience. None of my professors and exactly one of my fellow-students had even *heard* of Bolaño. Substitute any other big name in the last few years and I think the results would be pretty similar. Meanwhile, in class discussion, a student flat-out said that artists are a group of “idiot-savants” who don’t understand what they’re doing, and that literary theorists are the ones doing the “real work”; I was the only person to (publicly) take issue with that statement.
As for Golden-Age wankery: nostalgia is an all-too-easy trap that we should be sure to fight against. But so is its opposite: the reflexive notion that any criticism of current trends is “mere” nostalgia implies either an outdated notion of progress (everything *must* be getting better) or some sort of cultural flat-line (things have always been the same, neither better or worse, human nature’s immutable, etc etc). In reality things can and do change, all the time, in every field, and we have a right to try and determine whether those changes are for the better or the worse. Otherwise, again, we eliminate the possibility of all (social, political, aesthetic) criticism.
Which isn’t to say that there can’t be good “fiery” criticism out there; maybe I’m just not reading the right things.
Not to flog a dead bla bla bla, but did you guys see this?
http://jezebel.com/5608263/literary-critic-hates-vaginas-ghetto-volume
“Idiot savants”: hilarious.
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