Burn it!

William Deresiewicz takes on Lawrence Buell's "The Dream of the Great American Novel," a turgid new contribution to the school of subjecting literary classics to a political-correctness auto-da-fé.  The purpose of this approach is not to explore the intellectual or aesthetic achievements of a novel but to determine how closely it hews to this year's most exacting standards of virtue. "I feel as if we’re back in Salem," Deresiewicz laments. "Maybe he should have just thrown the book in the water to see if it would float."

As so often is the case, the most devastating criticism of Buell's book consists simply of quoting a passage:
Admittedly any such dyadic comparison risks oversimplifying the menu of eligible strategies, but the risk is lessened when one bears in mind that to envisage novels as potential GANs is necessarily to conceive them as belonging to more extensive domains of narrative practice that draw on repertoires of tropes and recipes for encapsulating nationness of the kinds sketched briefly in the Introduction—such that you can’t fully grasp what’s at stake in any one possible GAN without imagining the individual work in multiple conversations with many others, and not just U.S. literature either.
Calling the Great American Novel a "GAN" should be enough to tip us off.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Arrrrrrrggggghhhhh!!!! I thought I'd escaped that when I fled, er, finished grad school.

LittleRed1

james said...

I don't see on Wikipedia that he published any novels himself, great or otherwise. The world is probably richer for that. ?Ecocriticism??

raven said...

Do these people just use a random word generator or something?

Gringo said...

As so often is the case, the most devastating criticism of Buell's book consists simply of quoting a passage:

Hard to disagree with that conclusion.