The second issue of Dublin-based literary journal gorse will be published this month. It includes 285 pages of essays, fiction, and poetry by writers from around the world.
I’ve got an experimental review in the issue called “Kill Fee.” It sort of continues or echoes a narrative that began in a piece I wrote for 3:AM late last year.
What is a critic’s role? What motivations shape their decisions to write about the books they defend and those they dismiss? And what are the ethical or moral dimensions of those decisions? Beyond mere conflicts of interest, what lines do they draw for themselves in their work? What personal forces or experiences affect their preferences about what to read and review?
In this ongoing series of interviews with critics, one of the central questions will be, “What is a critic’s role?” It’s a broad question, open-ended, but one which can be used, if the critic chooses, to address the personal side to their lives as critics, and perhaps how they see their work affecting society and culture.
For the first post in this series, I’m very pleased to present an interview with Rohan Maitzen. Our conversation took place over email in recent months.
Maitzen was born in Berkeley, California, and raised in Vancouver, B.C. After doing her Ph.D. at Cornell she moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she has taught in the English Department at Dalhousie University since 1995. She specializes in Victorian literature; her academic publications include Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing and The Victorian Art of Fiction: 19th-Century Essays on the Novel. She is an editor and regular contributor at Open Letters Monthly and blogs at Novel Readings.
It seems there are as many answers to this question as there are types of critics who do the work of criticism.
In “A Critic’s Manifesto” Daniel Mendelsohn offered a formula for criticism: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. “The key word here is meaningful,” he wrote. “People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics.”
But there is of course more going on in life that affects the work of a critic than the pursuit of knowledge, taste, and good judgment. Critics advocate for their chosen literature and they are activists in many ways; this is nothing new. For the past few years, I have read and reviewed mostly books by women (around 95%), so it’s a topic that interests me quite a bit. My focus is in some ways a response to the charge regularly weighed against some critics and journals that they defend institutions that are elitist and predominantly focused on white, male writers.
So I’m curious about the motivations that shape other critics’ decisions to write about the books they defend and those they dismiss. What are the ethical or moral dimensions of those decisions? Beyond mere conflicts of interest, what lines do they draw for themselves in their work? What personal forces or experiences affect their preferences and, as in my case, lead to resolutions about what to read and review?
Very pleased to learn that novelist Mohsin Hamid chose my 3:AM Magazine piece, “Honest Work: an experimental review of an experimental translation,” for the Charm Quark award in the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize 2014. (“Magical and wise” – so kind!)
Congratulations to the other winners and all the other writers. Many thanks to everyone at 3QD, especially S. Abbas Raza. And special thanks to David C. Winters at 3:AM for publishing the piece and giving me carte blanche with the experiment. I wouldn’t have attempted it without such strong support.
It’s my hope that more people will read Yoko Tawada’s work and that of translator Chantal Wright. Support literature in translation and translation presses! (Like the University of Ottawa Press, among others!)
Very happy to say that my short story, “Sharpening the Sickle to Shame the Scythe,” appears in Issue #16 of Fiddleblack.
It’s about the way people cope with guilt during the grieving process. So it’s a bit different from the kind of short stories I’ve published thus far.
Many thanks to editor Jason Cook for publishing this piece. He wrote this introduction to the new issue, which features wonderful poems by Brian Kubarycz and Elias Marsten, and stories by Anna Boorstin, Maxwell Howard, and Caitlin Woolley.
Here’s an excerpt from my piece. Thanks for reading. And of course I’d welcome a chance to hear your comments about the story.
In the hours before Lauren Hunter-Aikens got the news she was stuck trying to revise a story she had written in her creative therapy group.
In the story, the narrator imagined that the news of her son’s death would come by phone. She would be at work drinking coffee, clicking with intense focus through documents on her computer screen. Her phone would buzz in her purse. Not wanting to disturb the office silence, she would answer right away and keep her voice low out of respect for her colleagues on the other sides of her cube.
The voice would ask if she were sitting down. She’d say yes, why? The person who’d called would say the preliminary things she had feared for so long. Then the voice would tell her that there had been an accident. Most often she imagined the voice telling her there had been a car crash, but also very frequently it was an accident at home, where a nanny watched the boy until she and her husband got back from work around five-thirty. The boy had died in a fall down the stairs or been poisoned with household chemicals. A few times she imagined the boy had choked on something she and her husband had neglected to clean up, such as a penny or a tire from a broken toy car. In any case, in that scenario an everyday object in their home had somehow killed the boy. In the story, the woman would wail when she got the news, slamming her phone against the desk, causing the people in the cubes next to hers to jump up and look over the wall, asking what’s wrong, what on earth has happened?
A little while back I contributed a prose-y poem to the wonderful art + text collaboration site called Visual Verse. They provide a piece of art and you write about it for an hour, between 50 – 500 words. It’s a wonderful way to take a break, just let yourself write and enjoy it, then send it in, where it’s beautifully archived and becomes part of a larger project where other people have done the same thing, taken the same chance.
Anyone can contribute. I highly recommend it. Below is the captivating image by Denise Nestor that I studied while writing my piece, called “Death is just a circus trick.”
I’m only reading books by women this year, and today I was wondering: How is this resolution affected by my other focus, reading translated novels?
Is it okay, that is, does it “count” as a book by a woman if the original author is a woman, but the translator is a man? And if I were to read a book translated by a woman, but the original author was a man, would that mean I’ve broken my resolution?
The answer to that for me is yes in both cases. Thus far, I’ve just been focused on the original author’s gender when choosing books by women to read. And I’m not really worried in any way, or looking for an “out” to try and read a book by a male author.
The question of this twist on my #readwomen2014 resolution is for me partly about the build-up to the reading experience. How a book is recommended: the channels it goes through to reach me, my interpretation of a book’s possibilities during the selection process, all the things I hear on Twitter, or from a publicist–these things all affect the experience before I begin to read.
Considering the translator’s gender could be another factor in the thinking that comes before we start reading a book. It’s also a way to read critically and look for bias. Though I’ve yet to concentrate on this while reading, wondering if the translator’s gender alone affects the overall quality of a translation. Though it must, in a way, when we really get down to matters of word choice and interpretations. Translators who work closely with the author can of course make sure they’re getting it as right as possible (as “right” as any translation can be), but author and translator can’t confer on every choice (or any choice, if the author is dead).
It’s interesting to consider what these things might mean to me as a reader. And there must be people out there who have fine-tuned their #readowomen2014 resolution to include, where translations are concerned, only books where both the author and the translator are women.
truce 