The Future of Criticism:
A Conference in Honor of Roger Shattuck
The 2010 Future of Criticism conference was a great success, thanks to our wonderful panelists and audience. We are grateful to William Carter for his beautiful film on Roger Shattuck (an online video of this film is available for viewing on Radio Proust courtesy of Larry Bensky). Bob Weil's thought-provoking remembrance of Shattuck’s life and work set the stage for a day of insightful discussion. Daniel Mendelsohn and Thomas Mallon engaged in a riveting conversation about the state of literary criticism today, and Christopher Ricks, Denis Donoghue, Liesl Schillinger and Morris Dickstein (pictured above) discussed the changing nature of criteria and approaches to criticism throughout the 20th century. Jed Perl, Maud Newton, Lorin Stein and Jane Ciabattari wrapped up the day with a look at criticism’s future in the age of the internet. We were pleased to give the first two annual Roger Shattuck Prizes in Criticism to Marcela Valdes and Adam Kirsch, two very deserving young critics, whose bios are below.
The Center for Fiction is extremely grateful to the Shattuck Family for supporting the conference and the awards. We are also grateful to our partners, the National Book Critics Circle and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, for helping us organize and promote the conference.
2010 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism Winners
The annual Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism is devoted to the support and encouragement of emerging critics. Each year, two deserving critics will receive this award. The 2010 winners are Marcela Valdes and Adam Kirsch.
Marcela Valdes writes for The Nation, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and Bookforum, among other publications. She is the books editor of The Washington Examiner and a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly. Valdes specializes in writing about Latin American arts and culture. She has worked as a book review editor for Publishers Weekly and as a columnist for The Washington Post Book World. She was a founder of Críticas, the English-language magazine devoted to Spanish-language books. She is currently the 2010 Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic. He is an editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet Magazine. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines. Kirsch is a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and a 1997 graduate of Harvard College. He is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Invasions. He is also the author of The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (2005) and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (2008).
The following is the acceptance speech of Marcela Valdes:
Thank you. It is a tremendous honor for me to receive this award from the Shattuck family and from Center for Fiction. It moves me to think that a organization devoted to fiction can value what I try to do.
I’d to begin by thanking a few people who helped to bring me here today. Heidi Julavits at The Believer took a chance on me in 2003, and let me write a 10,000 word essay on Yukio Mishima, at a time when the longest piece I’d ever written ran about 1,800 words. Ted Genoways and Kevin Morrissey at The Virginia Quarterly Review gave me an assignment to write about Roberto Bolaño and didn’t complain when I turned in a strange, two-headed beast of reporting and straight criticism that looked very little like the article I’d first proposed. John Palattella at The Nation shared my enthusiasm for two-headed beasts, and allowed me to try out more and more complex versions of them while also giving me the privilege of writing about Spanish-language books before they’d ever been translated into English. And, finally, my husband, John Beckman. A novelist and scholar in his own right, he has encouraged and supported me in those unhappy nights when my own confidence has failed, he has cooked me countless dinners when I’ve been on deadline, and he has given me that precious gift: a loving marriage.
I see a few familiar faces in this room, but most of you, I suspect, know very little about me. So I think it’s only polite to tell you a bit about the person who is receiving this award. My parents moved to this country from Chile in 1974 — not because of the military coup that took place in Chile the year before, but because of my father’s ambition. A practicing doctor in Chile, he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a fellowship to improve his surgical skills. I was born a few months after he arrived with my mother and older sister. And, thus, I became the only person in my family whose first words were spoken in English, an experience that has given me an instinctive understanding of the power of words.
Like many immigrant families, mine moved around a lot. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d lived in 6 different cities and gone to 7 different schools. Maybe this is why, ever since I learned to read, I’ve mostly had my head in a book. For many of my formative years, books served me as both magnifying glass and safety blanket. They were my most reliable friends. I could pack them in a box and take wherever we went next. I could bury my head in them every time I needed to sit down in a new school, in a new cafeteria sounded by faces that were curious, hostile, or just indifferent.
More importantly, books became my way of examining the world. And I wonder if this isn’t an experience that all of us in this room share. Novelists, critics, devoted readers – how many of us have first really learned about love, or war, or grief in the pages of a magnificent book? And how many of us, when confronted with some troubling puzzle – like the psychology of suicide bombers or the persistence of poverty amid wealth or the systematic killing of women in a town in northern Mexico – don’t turn first to the bookshelf for our answers? William Gass once wrote that the writer is a person who “choos[es] to relate to the world through words” – and this is as true of critics and editors as it is of novelists.
Roger Shattuck himself was a man who was not interested just in French literature or Marcel Proust. In his essay, “How to Read a Book,” he describes three kinds of reading. “We read,” he wrote, “for basic comprehension of words and sentences. We read for literary response to the parts and the whole of a work. And we read for the relations of the work to other works and to life itself.” All three of these kinds of reading, I would venture, correspond to different functions of the critic, and Shattuck’s excellence lay in his ability to deftly exercise all three: to make the complicated intelligible, to heighten appreciation of aesthetic engineering, and to illuminate the thoughts about Art and the World that form the beating heart of every great work of fiction.
I worry sometimes that so much writing about books today seems to dispense entirely with these three functions. We live in the Age of Opinion, but not enough thought is given to the process by which opinions are formed. One could give a whole lecture on this topic, but it’s late in the day, so I will offer just this one thought:
I believe that all good criticism must begin with a serious attempt at understanding. A critic must endeavor to answer the question “What is this author trying to do?” before she moves to any form of judgment. Understanding will always be imperfect, of course; and it’s not the same as approval. We can all understand a book and loathe it. But without that first step, criticism slides into egoism – and that is the most vulgar corruption of our art.
In recent years, my own attempts at understanding have grown to encompass not just individual authors and particular books, but the post-dictatorship world of Latin America. I can’t help noticing that almost all the great writers, and almost all the great filmmakers, in Latin America today grew up under authoritarian regimes. They grew up, that is, amid deception and repression and torture, even if they themselves were spared the most direct experiences of these political vices. Many of their works grapple explicitly, if not always consistently, with this brutal legacy – it’s no coincidence, I think, that so many of them love detectives.
And why should the rest of the world care? I’d like to offer two reasons. First, because from these dirty wars have sprung another stretch of banquet years. Not since the 1970s have we seen such a profusion of exceptional works by Latin American novelists. Second, because repression and violence have not gone away; maybe they will never go away. And in these books lie clues about how people get through such dark eras to rebuild themselves and civil society again.
About
Held at The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street, New York, NY
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
The critic and scholar Roger Shattuck believed in writing for the reader, in order to enrich the experience of reading. This conference honored Shattuck's role as critic to the people while also exploring the directions that criticism may take in the next ten years. At the conference, the first two winners of the new Roger Shattuck Prize in Criticism were announced.
Schedule
1:00-1:10 Film on Roger Shattuck
1:10-1:40 Robert Weil remembers Roger Shattuck
1:45-2:45 Literary Criticism Today: A Conversation
Daniel Mendelsohn and Thomas MallonIntroduced by Noreen Tomassi
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00-4:15 Panel–Criteria & Approaches
Christopher Ricks, Denis Donoghue, Liesl SchillingerModerator: Morris Dickstein
4:15-4:30 Break
4:30-5:00 Presentation of Shattuck Awards
for Criticism
5:00-6:15 Panel–The Future of Criticism
Jed Perl, Maud Newton, Lorin SteinModerator: Jane Ciabattari
6:30 Wine and Cheese Reception
Held in the Roger Shattuck Archive
Biographies
Dr. Andre Aciman. Novelist, essayist and editor whose recent books include Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt and The Proust Project, currently a director and executive officer at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.
Dr. Emily Apter. Professor of French and Comparative Literature at NYU, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century French literature, her most recent book is The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature.
Harold Augenbraum. Author of six books on Latino literature and Professor of U.S. Latino literature at Amherst College; editor of the upcoming Collected Poems of Marcel Proust, currently the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation.
Larry Bensky. Award-winning political and literary journalist, writer and broadcaster, formerly an editor and writer for The Paris Review and New York Times Book Review, among other publications, currently the producer and host of “Radio Proust”.
Michel Braudeau. Novelist, former book critic at L’Express, editor at Le
Monde. Currently, Editor-in-Chief of La Nouvelle Revue française; author of Flight of the Monarch (and Other Reflections), a book of essays.
Dr. Mark Calkins. Professor of Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University, the head of the San Francisco chapter of the Proust Society of America and Editor and Webmaster of TempsPerdu.com
Dr. William C. Carter. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, specialist in Proust Studies and 19th-and 20th-century French literature, and author of the recent biography Marcel Proust: A Life.
Jane Ciabattari. President of the National Book Critics Circle, a blogger on Critical Mass, a regular contributor to NPR.org, The Daily Beast and many other publications, and the author of the short-story collection Stealing The Fire.
Dr. Antoine Compagnon. Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor at the College de France in Paris, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and noted editor and writer.
Dr. Denis Donoghue. The Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York Univeristy, Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Nominating Committee, and a Fellow with the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Council of Learned Societies, his most recent books is On Eloquence.
Dr. Morris Dickstein. Literary and cultural critic and author, currently the Distinguished Professor of English and Theater at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.
John Freeman. Former president of the National Book Critics Circle and a prolific book reviewer, currently the American editor of Granta.
Dr. Hollie Harder. Associate Professor of French and Francophone studies and Director of the Language Program and Romance Studies at Brandeis University as well as the head of the Boston chapter of the Proust Society of America.
Jennifer Lyons. The head and manager of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency, LLC, agent for Roger Shattuck, currently representing two Pulitzer Prize winners, as well as a long list of distinguished authors.
Thomas Mallon’s seven novels include Henry and Clara, Bandbox and Fellow Travelers. He has written non-fiction books about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (the just-published Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. He received his Ph. D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and has taught at Vassar College, the George Washington University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, he has been literary editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D. C.
Daniel Mendelsohn. Award-winning author of six books, critic, and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review among others. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Review, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Maud Newton. Writer, critic and blogger, whose blog and work has been sited in The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, The New Yorker and Bookforum, among many others.
Cynthia Ozick. Award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, author of The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, Quarrel & Quandary, her latest book is Diction: A Quartet, a collection of four short stories.
Jed Perl. Writer and art critic for The New Republic and author of many books including Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I, and most recently Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century.
Dr. Christopher Ricks. William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, co-director of the Editorial Institute and a Professor of Poetry at Oxford; editor, critical writer and former president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
Joan Rosasco. Author of Voies de l’imagination proustienne and noted international fine art exhibition coordinator.
Liesl Schillinger. Literary critic and regular contributor for the New York Times Book Review.
Lorin Stein. Senior editor at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, whose authors
include Richard Price, Denis Johnson, recent translations of Roberto
Bolaño, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, among many other prominent writers; recently named editor of The Paris Review.
Rosanna Warren. Award-winning poet, editor and translator, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Letters, most recent books include Departure and Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, currently the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and a Professor of English and Roman Studies at Boston University.
Robert Weil. Vice-president and executive editor at W.W. Norton, editor and publisher of many award-winning authors.
Dr. Stanton Burnett. Author of prize-winning books on Italian politics, former director of USG information and cultural programs worldwide, currently Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Yale University.
Quick Links:
Roger Shattuck Biography
Roger Shattuck was a distinguished scholar, writer and literary critic, perhaps best known for his studies on French literature, culture and Proust. After serving time in the Army Air Force during WW II and later, finishing his bachelor's degree at Yale, Shattuck moved to Paris. It was in France that he developed his interest and love for French culture, and where he met his wife Nora White, a dancer for the Les Ballets Russes des Monte Carlo and Le Ballet de Paris. He published his first book, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to WW I in 1958, after moving back to New York. The book was overwhelmingly well-received, and he went on to publish several books of literary criticism as well as several definitive texts on Proust. His biography of Proust won the National Book Award in 1975. A series of books and articles analyzing Proust's novel became pivotal works for all serious readers of Proust. Despite his lack of a graduate degree, Shattuck taught at Harvard, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia and Boston University, from which he retired in 1997. He was a founding member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and continued to write reviews and publish well into his retirement. He passed away in December 2005. Thanks to the generosity of the Shattuck family The Center for Fiction is now home to much of Roger Shattuck's personal library and papers.
Roger Shattuck Bibliography
* The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1958)
* Proust's Binoculars (1963)
* Marcel Proust (1975) [won National Book Award Arts & Letters prize in 1975]
* Half Tame (1964)
* The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (1980)
* Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1994)
* Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts (1998)
* Proust's Way: A Field Guide to 'In Search of Lost Time (2000)
* The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (2003)
Advisory Board
Andre Aciman
Emily Apter
Harold Augenbraum
Larry Bensky
Mark Calkins
William C. Carter
Antoine Compagnon
Morris Dickstein
Denis Donoghue
John Freeman
Hollie Harder
Jennifer Lyons
Cynthia Ozick
Jed Perl
Christopher Ricks
Joan Rosasco
Liesl Schillinger
Rosanna Warren
Robert Weil