The criticism of enthusiasm

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

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This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

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Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

Knowing stuff

Apropos of yesterday's post, here's Ezra Pound on the question of when you can make judgments (this will come as no surprise):

Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is 'true', it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity. He doesn't KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn't know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does. Thus a very young man can be quite 'right' without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn't know. (26)

Notice Pound's commitment to the value of education. Pound's model, which he explicitly believes to be scientific, contrasts with another scientific model, which prefers the perceptual capacities of the untrained worker because it is unbiased.

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Ezra Pound. A B C of Reading. 1934. New York: New Directions, 1960. Print.

When you care enough to give the very best poetry.

I ran into this book in the basement of Moe's this evening, while looking for something else:



It's the Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, edited by Donald Hall. (I was underwhelmed by the table of contents, honestly.)

This is the hilarious thing that caught my eye:



There's literally a gold star on it indicating that the book is poet-laureate-approved.

I guess it's like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, or the Oprah's Book Club seal, only less well known. This particular kind of call on expertise belongs to a consumer logic. Eight out of ten dentists recommend.

The volume is edited by a nationally famous poet, and just in case a nationally famous poet isn't famous enough, here are his credentials. You wouldn't want to get screwed on a bad volume of poetry. It would be like buying a bad toaster, the kind that always either under-toasts or burns the bread. You can't be expected to have researched poetry, just like you can't be expected to be an expert on toasters; that's why Consumer Reports, and gold poet laureate stickers, exist. To save you, the consumer, the labor of finding out more than you really need to know about poetry. I mean, who has time to compare all the stats, right? You just want a book that does the job.

To close, some wholly unrelated words of wisdom, courtesy of Google Ads: