How to Be an Intellectual by Williams Jeffrey

Author:Williams, Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Fordham University Press (Lightning Source)
Published: 2014-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Hutner himself has been rewriting the history of American fiction, notably in his book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (2009), which covers not only modernists like Faulkner but a great many other writers, like Joseph Hergesheimer and James Branch Cabell, who were considered among the best writers of the 1920s and 1930s but have since been forgotten, largely because they represent middle-class taste, Hutner surmised. “We were writing literary history from an extremely limited, partial shelf, based on very, very few books,” and the resulting “history that looks at five novels spread out over fifty years seems contrived.”

In some respects, Hutner’s approach aligns with a new critical movement to study the large mass of novels produced. Most notably, Franco Moretti, a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, has drawn on quantitative and other means to account for three centuries of novels published around the globe. For What America Read, Hutner adopted a hybrid method, surveying more than fifty books per decade but also giving short readings of some of them.

That approach is probably less controversial than difficult to emulate, since it takes a great deal of labor to filter an inventory of several hundred novels. Hutner reported that it took him more than a decade to research What America Read, his second book. He observed that that would not be possible for a junior professor doing a first book; first books are typically based on readings to demonstrate a basic interpretive skill considered fundamental to professional criticism. But real innovation often occurs with second books, when one is freed from such pressures and can make “a new step or explore a new direction,” Hutner reflected.

More recently, Hutner has extended his research to “twenty-first century fiction.” To do What America Read, he combed through magazines and newspapers for reviews; for his new project, he found there is a less coherent review culture, so instead he is looking at winners of the main literary prizes, like the Pulitzer or National Book Award. He has ascertained a list of 125 novels, such as Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), that seem to form the main body of works of the period thus far.

His approach again gives us a fuller sense of literary history than the one that we usually purvey in academe. “The novels about which contemporary scholars fall all over themselves didn’t win any major prizes,” Hutner quipped, and we too rarely talk about books such as Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist (1985), which won a National Book Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. In a recent exchange in ALH, he argued even more pointedly: “literary academe has failed miserably, almost completely, in the one extramural mission entrusted to it that it might have been able to sustain: the creation of a book-reading, book-buying public. Instead, academe disdained the assignment.” Still, Hutner finds hope in critics taking a renewed public role: “Scrutinizing the writing of

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