First and foremost, I must mock my fellow Discordite, Sire, for using the word "yap" in the introduction this piece, It's like hearing my dad say "bussin'." I secondly would like to say that Janakiraman's dubbing of us as the Emperor's New Critics was something I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to not post in our masthead.
I enjoyed Janakiraman's piece, it did give me pause to think about my own article and consider some of my positions more closely, and I especially appreciated that he understood that the piece was more about the culture surrounding Vuong than the work itself, something I think a lot of my detractors missed, but is somewhat my own fault I think for being unclear in my purpose and rather meandering throughout.
I thought Crewe's exhaustive piece sort of made saying much more about the work itself redundant. I disagree with Janakiraman's assessment of Crewe's piece, specifically that "the relentlessness dulls the point," because I think the relentlessness itself works to underscore Crewe's point that the onslaught of Vuong's prose is itself relentless and that he isn't just cherry-picking, though I don't disagree that work like Crewe's is effectively "verdict-oriented." But is it such a bad thing to be a polemicist? Sometimes a "review" can be—and I believe many of the best are—a call to arms, that drives toward a verdict to rally for an aesthetic or political cause that the reaction to the work inspires. I think that in Crewe's piece such a target is the momentum of a writer who has come to define an era, someone Crewe feels it is necessary to take down a peg in order to prevent the forces of literary production turning it into a trend.
Janakiraman's response to my point about Vuong as representational of Vietnamese-Americans as a whole is apt. It was certainly overstated on my part, and probably one of my weakest arguments in the piece. Janakiraman takes issue with my treating Vuong as more product than agent, but that I do more-or-less defend, as I think that cultural production under capitalism reduces agents to products (my piece on Taylor Swift talks about this in a more direct sense). I have friends who have received publishing deals with big publishers and have seen the process directly—the media training, the constant scrutiny, the lack of control over how your book is marketed, what milieu of writers you're thrown in with, what buzzwords are attached to your product, and so on. Janakiraman claims that I ultimately treat the work as incidental. Perhaps this is true, and it's certainly very much worth considering. For my part, I don't think the content of a book is necessarily irrelevant, but I DO think that often it is those very material conditions of cultural production that are the part that is obscured or treated as incidental under the shadow of the work. Ironically, given the phrase "Emperor's New Critics," such a position that it is the work itself which must take precedence is very reminiscent of the New Critic movement of the early 20th century.
And agreed on the Crewe piece; were he not so exhaustive with his examples, even more people would claim he was unfairly selecting a few choice blunders to pillory the book. By calling them out with such volume, it gets across that these are not exceptions to the norm.
I really enjoyed this piece AND Eris' piece, I appreciate seeing an actual dialogue about criticism and writing - it's a nice break from the shouting-into-the-void style discourse that has infected everything.
This was a great read. I went to a talk by Viet Thanh Nguyen last year and he touched on issues of marginalized writers being expected to positively / accurately represent their communities, creating some sort of monolithic view that isn’t placed on white writers. He was mostly referring to the development of unlikeable non-white characters being treated as an “issue” when it should be met with the same representative neutrality, but I think it rings somewhat true for the political “vibe” of a work being criticized as uncharacteristic of a demographic. A little too much of an “a-ha” moment that feels empty. We don’t place the same expectation on white writers. Just a reality we contend with in regards to book marketing / racialized writers being expected to be a voice. Some of what Eris wrote made sense here, but the criticism felt like it was pointing in the wrong direction (at Vuong directly).
It’s great to see writers engaging with their own criticism! Thank you for publishing and it’s cool to see Eris reflecting on the work in the comments.
Yeah, I mean to be clear Eris has his justifications for the approach he took, which he may choose to share here, but as I believe he even mentions in his original piece (and/or his notes about it, can't recall) it was very much something he dashed off as a response to these other notable pieces while procrastinating on a law exam. It's funny that it ended up becoming such a broadly cited piece, but it is probably because he is accurately diagnosing a certain widespread exhaustion with art that is marketed for its supposedly morally nutritive properties. I thought bringing some of the broader convo it has fed back here was useful, and Eris was a good enough sport to go along with it. (He cannot be said to duck criticism, which is something I respect about him.)
It was certainly one of my more low-effort pieces as a result, it's rather embarrassing to see it gain so much exposure as a result, I would have done more to polish it had I seen that coming.
Procrastination work is often extra feisty, with all that self-loathing being sublimated. Your piece still appeals more to me than the useful take on it. As a Canadian I generally take American-centred literary push campaigns with salt, and don’t buy in unless they last a few years. They make for excellent spectator sport, though, which sounds crass but literary Englishspeakers everywhere have an eye on these spectacles whether they want to or not!
First and foremost, I must mock my fellow Discordite, Sire, for using the word "yap" in the introduction this piece, It's like hearing my dad say "bussin'." I secondly would like to say that Janakiraman's dubbing of us as the Emperor's New Critics was something I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to not post in our masthead.
I enjoyed Janakiraman's piece, it did give me pause to think about my own article and consider some of my positions more closely, and I especially appreciated that he understood that the piece was more about the culture surrounding Vuong than the work itself, something I think a lot of my detractors missed, but is somewhat my own fault I think for being unclear in my purpose and rather meandering throughout.
I thought Crewe's exhaustive piece sort of made saying much more about the work itself redundant. I disagree with Janakiraman's assessment of Crewe's piece, specifically that "the relentlessness dulls the point," because I think the relentlessness itself works to underscore Crewe's point that the onslaught of Vuong's prose is itself relentless and that he isn't just cherry-picking, though I don't disagree that work like Crewe's is effectively "verdict-oriented." But is it such a bad thing to be a polemicist? Sometimes a "review" can be—and I believe many of the best are—a call to arms, that drives toward a verdict to rally for an aesthetic or political cause that the reaction to the work inspires. I think that in Crewe's piece such a target is the momentum of a writer who has come to define an era, someone Crewe feels it is necessary to take down a peg in order to prevent the forces of literary production turning it into a trend.
Janakiraman's response to my point about Vuong as representational of Vietnamese-Americans as a whole is apt. It was certainly overstated on my part, and probably one of my weakest arguments in the piece. Janakiraman takes issue with my treating Vuong as more product than agent, but that I do more-or-less defend, as I think that cultural production under capitalism reduces agents to products (my piece on Taylor Swift talks about this in a more direct sense). I have friends who have received publishing deals with big publishers and have seen the process directly—the media training, the constant scrutiny, the lack of control over how your book is marketed, what milieu of writers you're thrown in with, what buzzwords are attached to your product, and so on. Janakiraman claims that I ultimately treat the work as incidental. Perhaps this is true, and it's certainly very much worth considering. For my part, I don't think the content of a book is necessarily irrelevant, but I DO think that often it is those very material conditions of cultural production that are the part that is obscured or treated as incidental under the shadow of the work. Ironically, given the phrase "Emperor's New Critics," such a position that it is the work itself which must take precedence is very reminiscent of the New Critic movement of the early 20th century.
Since I'm contractually obligated to be a good sport as you have been, alright fine, got my ass.
And agreed on the Crewe piece; were he not so exhaustive with his examples, even more people would claim he was unfairly selecting a few choice blunders to pillory the book. By calling them out with such volume, it gets across that these are not exceptions to the norm.
I really enjoyed this piece AND Eris' piece, I appreciate seeing an actual dialogue about criticism and writing - it's a nice break from the shouting-into-the-void style discourse that has infected everything.
This was a great read. I went to a talk by Viet Thanh Nguyen last year and he touched on issues of marginalized writers being expected to positively / accurately represent their communities, creating some sort of monolithic view that isn’t placed on white writers. He was mostly referring to the development of unlikeable non-white characters being treated as an “issue” when it should be met with the same representative neutrality, but I think it rings somewhat true for the political “vibe” of a work being criticized as uncharacteristic of a demographic. A little too much of an “a-ha” moment that feels empty. We don’t place the same expectation on white writers. Just a reality we contend with in regards to book marketing / racialized writers being expected to be a voice. Some of what Eris wrote made sense here, but the criticism felt like it was pointing in the wrong direction (at Vuong directly).
It’s great to see writers engaging with their own criticism! Thank you for publishing and it’s cool to see Eris reflecting on the work in the comments.
Thanks for this repub and for welcoming criticism of your own criticism.
Yeah, I mean to be clear Eris has his justifications for the approach he took, which he may choose to share here, but as I believe he even mentions in his original piece (and/or his notes about it, can't recall) it was very much something he dashed off as a response to these other notable pieces while procrastinating on a law exam. It's funny that it ended up becoming such a broadly cited piece, but it is probably because he is accurately diagnosing a certain widespread exhaustion with art that is marketed for its supposedly morally nutritive properties. I thought bringing some of the broader convo it has fed back here was useful, and Eris was a good enough sport to go along with it. (He cannot be said to duck criticism, which is something I respect about him.)
It was certainly one of my more low-effort pieces as a result, it's rather embarrassing to see it gain so much exposure as a result, I would have done more to polish it had I seen that coming.
Procrastination work is often extra feisty, with all that self-loathing being sublimated. Your piece still appeals more to me than the useful take on it. As a Canadian I generally take American-centred literary push campaigns with salt, and don’t buy in unless they last a few years. They make for excellent spectator sport, though, which sounds crass but literary Englishspeakers everywhere have an eye on these spectacles whether they want to or not!