Writing About Reading

Fri, Sep 08

When we talk about the things we read, just like when we talk about the things we watch or listen to, it's as easy to slide off into empty vacuities -- "It was good" or "I didn't like it" -- as it is to descend into a rabbit hole of trivia and personal opinion. Meanwhile, "Literary Criticism" as it is often taught today usually means little more than seeing how badly you can mangle a literary work with someone else's false teeth, attacking a book or poem with one or another "theory" until everyone agrees that the "text" has been suitably "interpreted." Talking about literature seems to involve an intimidating mass of jargon, from adynaton and metalepsis to interpellation and catechresis, and then there's the simple difficulty of saying something clear and worthwhile about anything complicated.

So how do we write about reading? And why? And why does it have to be so hard?

The short answer is that it doesn't, though good criticism does demand work: 

• First of all, good criticism demands close attention to language. You have to read closely, think about the choices the author has made, ask questions, and notice when things seem especially striking or puzzling.
• Second, you have to think about what you're reading in context. That context may be historical, cultural, literary, or biographical, but at root what it means is reading a book in relation to other books, both ones that came before and more contemporary works. 
• Third, you need something to say. In some ways, this is the hardest part: it's not easy to come up with original insights into literature. For our purposes, you don't need to worry about being original, but you do need to have a viewpoint and a "take" on the novel that goes deeper than mere opinion. A reading should tell us something about what is worthwhile, interesting, or notable about a work, and how we can understand it at a deeper level.
• This brings us to the fourth thing you need for good criticism, which is evidence: you need to discuss the work itself and bring in examples, as well as other works, comparisons, other intepretations, etc. 

Today we'll look at four different interpretations of Jeff VanderMeer's work -- one academic article, one profile, one long-form book review,  and one literary essay -- both to think more deeply about Annihilation, and to see examples of the kinds of ways we might think about and write about books.