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The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America
The End of Intelligent Literary Politics in Richard The End of Intelligent Literary Politics in Sheed and FIRST First Edition Thus, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by Sheed and Ward, 1974. Octavo. Paperback. Book is very good with light shelf wear and a small scuff to the top page ends. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 312312 Literature We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!
- GenresNonfiction
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
76 people want to read
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June 16, 2015
Richard Kostelanetz’s monumental evisceration of the American book world circa 1974—the self-appointed backslapping elites, the perpetual disdain for the unconventional, the laziness in book reviewing and fear of losing one’s status when criticising the wrong thing—remains, as a final sadness, itself a rare out of print tome. Kostelanetz has written perhaps the most fearless exploration of literary politics in print, taking on and naming the titans at the top of the heap, dissecting the power structures that emerged in the 1950s and 60s, and the emergence of the plutocratic hierarchies that continue to dominate publishing. Outing the various cliques as mobs, and using apt and amusing mafia parallels, Kostelanetz is unrelenting in his meticulousness, and counteracts the status quo with a passionate defence of the avant-garde, using the second half of the book to bring light to the various emerging authors of experimental poetry, fiction, and mixed media works around the time. At times a touch long-winded and overfed with quotes, this nevertheless is an essential read for those requiring a hard slap as to the inherent evil of the corporate book world and why indie is the only way forward.
June 20, 2017
The End of Intelligent Criticism
This book is alternately/alternatively hilarious and tedious.
As Richard Cory Kostelanetz himself (elsewhere he describes himself as a rugged Jew, whatever that is - maybe the initial "d" is missing?) says of a Jewish writer's work*:
"Rarely before in reputedly serious critical discussion have 'literary' evaluations been so facilely derived."
Ostensibly a polemic against some undefined and amorphous "literary establishment", this sociological analysis of literary political methodology better describes (to the extent of skewering) various successive attempts to attack literary Modernism and replace it with a mainly American male Post-Modern canon (which are still evident in the online reviews and vanity-publications of maximalist novelists and "critics", not to mention the cabal of encyclopaedic novel salesmen and big fat book spruikers which is inordinately active on GR, if you call their tweets, posts, blurbs and press releases literary activity).
Gestures of Social Solidarity
Again, Kostelanetz quotes Q. D. Leavis in another context:
"These are not judgments of literary criticism, but gestures of social solidarity."
On the other hand, Kostelanetz recognises that "the living writers most worth admiring and emulating have either remained aloof from minority movements or have straddled them..."
To this end, he says that young readers "are likely to initiate the evaluative reinterpretations of writing in recent decades, not only separating what is genuinely good and important from what was just vociferously championed in its time, but also to resurrect important authors who were unaffiliated and thus neglected."
Among his choices for revived novelists would be:
"Vance Bourjaily, James B. Hall, Kenneth Patchen, William Gaddis, William Demby, Paule Marshall, J. F. Powers, John Howard Griffin, Alan Harrington, Wright Morris, Alfred Grossman, and Mark Harris - all of whom [were at the time] well over forty."
"Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels"
Below is a summary of Kostelanetz' analysis of the methodology. You might recognise it in the ideologically-based hagiography of John Barth (the Exhausted), William Gaddis (the Unrecognised), William H. Gass (the Bloated), Gilbert Sorrentino (the Great Eviscerator), Alexander Theroux (the Wordy), Joseph McElroy (the Runt of the Litter), Steven Moore (the Boss), Tom LeClair (the Excessist) and William T. Vollmann (the Saviour) in some hallowed sections of GR. Kostelanetz quotes Robert Alter on an earlier phase of this movement as "falling into a declining phase of unwitting self-parody." To which Kostelanetz relevantly adds a "sense of swelling flaccidity."
Ironically, in 1965 (eight years before the publication of this book), Kostelanetz would break ranks with this heft-mob, when he wrote:
"Of course, not all attempts for true originality are even faintly successful. William Gaddis' 'The Recognitions' (1956), which many fervently admire, strikes me as incoherent for any two of its 956 pages...."
Kostelanetz also highlights William H. Gass as a recipient of the benefits of what he describes as "marital collusion".
The typically cryptic reference is explained on page 145 by the example of positive reviews of Gass in "The New Republic", which was edited by Richard Gilman (who also wrote the reviews), the husband of Lynn Nesbit (Gass' literary agent).
For example, Gilman opined of "Omensetter's Luck" that it was "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." This outrageously inflated blurb is still rolled out on Gass' wiki entry and the publicity for "Middle C". Nice one, hubby!
THE 12 STEPS PROGRAM FOR PROMOTION OF YOUR LITERARY MOVEMENT
1. A Proliferation of Constellations
"[This] country has witnessed the rise of not one cultural establishment but a proliferation of them, one hardly in touch with most of the others, each with its own set of chiefs, assistant chiefs, molls, henchmen and lackeys."
2. A Literary Lobby
"Usually formed by writers about thirty years of age, a literary lobby is united not only by personal friendship and fairly similar artistic attitudes but also, and most important, by a sense of collective fortune. Therefore, the professional help that individuals render each other is based upon a sense of mutually entwined professional investment."
3. Common Social Origins
"What defines each modern American literary constellation are the common social origins of its members, be that inclusive factor geographic, academic, racial, ethnic, or sexual. What usually reveals the existence of such a tribe [or small clique or mob] is an articulate claim for the specialness of this common sociological factor coupled with a noticeable penchant for touting each other's works, whether published or not, and appearing by name in each other's 'criticism', if not their poetry, fiction - and eventually - their memoirs as well...These establishments are not 'conspiracies' but chains of interpersonal relationship based upon common sentiment and mutual interest whose links can be mobilised at times to function in rather aggressive, if not apparently conspiratorial, ways."
4. The Layers of the Onion
"In their internal structure, these literary establishments resemble an onion with a centre consisting of major theorists and organisers, surrounded by successive layers of imaginative writers, critics, editors, and publicists with various degrees of allegiance to the core."
5. The Deception of the Mainstream
"Just as all groups of any pretension compete with one another in the larger free market of publishers, professional prizes, and common readers, so each also claims to represent the 'mainstream' of American literary culture or its most viable current trend. This deception is best achieved by trying, whenever possible, to represent all American literature with just their parochial part."
6. Professional Success
"Every group sets as its prime literary-political goal the professional success of its members. As the primary means to this end is the promotion of characteristic enthusiasms and fraternal reputations, the first sign of possible prosperity is an increasing non-coterie taste for these writers and their enthusiasms."
7. When All the Students Are Professors
"In the evolution of an establishment, collective success begins when the group's stars earn recognition outside their immediate sphere (where acclaim had previously been guaranteed), when its pet 'ideology' gains increasing acceptance, when its academic colleagues are chosen as professors in the major universities, when editorial associates become moguls in New York publishing and reviewing media, and so forth."
8. The Infiltration of the Hierarchies
"A literary clique must try to infiltrate these media of publishing and reviewing - if not with core operators, then at least with sympathisers on the perimeter of the onion, or by recruiting the loyalty of people already within these hierarchies."
9. The Modus Operandi
"[It has] a core of writers and ideologists; a set of social ideals formulated in an early collective manifesto...; characteristic styles of both literary criticism and historical erudition; common themes and interests; a hierarchy of reputations, both critical and creative; a network of magazines sympathetic to one another, with overlapping lists of editors, contributing editors, contributors, reviewers - magazines in which the star critics were frequently quoted, both in the essays and in the ads, and their contributions featured over those by a supporting cast; its efforts to make writers of similar backgrounds into masters and prophets of the age; its reinterpretation of the intellectual and literary traditions to emphasise (and often resurrect) appropriate predecessors for themselves; decided penchants for mentioning each other in the same breath with the greatest figures of Western literature and for measuring both earlier and contemporary writers against [their own] ideology or literary values derived from that ideology; a self-generated myth of its own achievement as comparable to...'the outburst of poetic genius at the end of the sixteenth century when commercial England had already begun to crush feudal England'...; and finally entrenched connections in New York reviewing media and publishing which culminated respectively in both featured notices and textbooks propagating its ideology and reputations among the literate young."
10. The Anthologisation of the Canon
"Once the core canons of current writing had been established, they could be popularised, not only in 'critical essays', but in anthologies that often featured previously established eminences."
11. The Storming of the Citadel
"[The literary clique] capitalised upon the absence of a single permanent establishment to invade the scene from a minority position."
12. The Dominance of the Collective
"Not individual but collective dominance is perhaps the surest measure of literary-political success."
Extracts from a Review of this Book by Sara Blackburn Entitled "The Politics of Tedium"
Here are some comments made in a formal review of this book:
"...he goes on at such length and with such ardor about them that he protests too much. It's boring."
"The fact that he makes much of their Jewishness is a little creepy..."
"Writers support and disseminate one another, as do people with similar ideologies; they always have. Who else will do it?"
"Kostelanetz' refusal to get down to this simple nitty-gritty makes his book a nah-nah of name-calling and sour grapes for me, when I had hoped it would be the devastating analysis of business pretending to be art that it should have been..."
"I had hoped that this book would talk about the origins of the power it deplores, and the vacuum that's there for it to fill. Instead, it comes awfully close to demanding access to the corrupt citadel itself. The writers whose fortunes it promotes deserve a less distracted champion."
* Anti-Semitism
As Sara Blackburn suggests, Kostelanetz' book is creepily rife with anti-Jewish comments and asides.
In an attempt to anticipate and disarm this criticism, he makes the following disingenuous comment:
"Whereas classic anti-Semitism generalises about 'Jews' as a total group, or deals in imaginary Jews who are portrayed as hidden gremlins screwing up the works, these chapters [of my book] talk about real individual Jews - or, to be more precise real writers who wanted to be publicly known as Jewish."
The "Demolition" of Irving Howe
Kostelanetz seemed to have been determined to publicly demolish the reputation of the relatively benign Jewish Democratic Socialist, Irving Howe.
Howe gets 32 entries in the index to the book, most of them abusive and puerile. However, Kostelanetz was still having a crack at him in 1992, 19 years after the publication of this book, when he published the revealingly titled “Irving Howe: Epitome of a Fake”.
In that work, Kostelanetz makes a cryptic reference to Howe's "less principled dismissals of younger writers (again mostly Jewish) in the sixties and seventies".
So what exactly happened to cause this antagonism?
Kostelanetz owns up on page 136 of this book:
"Most of the time, the [Jewish literary] mob refuses to acknowledge my existence; even as late as 1969, Irving Howe, replying to a letter-to-the-editor in which my name was mentioned, closed haughtily with, 'But, who is Richard Kostelanetz?'"
Well might we ask!
It's not clear, but it seems that the letter concerned an essay in the Autumn, 1965 issue of "The Hudson Review" which contained an early version of the first two chapters of this book under the title "Militant Minorities".
I infer that this was merely a case of an impudent young upstartNew Left anarchist gadfly trying to score points off a distinguished and respected member of the Old Left. He seems to have regarded himself as an up and coming Leslie Fiedler (a supportive critic who is mentioned favourably throughout the book, despite being a frequent contributor to "Partisan Review"), only he discovered that he belonged "outside the onion."
Kostelanetz doesn't acknowledge that he had his day in the sun at "Partisan Review" (which wasn't edited by Irving Howe), before being unceremoniously walked off the stage (or was it the beach?).
It's perhaps ironic that one of the editors at the time was Richard Poirier, who would one day direct Steven Moore's PhD dissertation on William Gaddis.
SOUNDTRACK:
April 7, 2017
This book is alternately/alternatively hilarious and tedious.
As Richard Cory Kostelanetz himself (elsewhere he describes himself as a rugged Jew, whatever that is - maybe the initial "d" is missing?) says of a Jewish writer's work*:
"Rarely before in reputedly serious critical discussion have 'literary' evaluations been so facilely derived."
Ostensibly a polemic against some undefined and amorphous "literary establishment", this sociological analysis of literary political methodology better describes (to the extent of skewering) various successive attempts to attack literary Modernism and replace it with a mainly American male Post-Modern canon (which are still evident in the online reviews and vanity-publications of maximalist novelists and "critics", not to mention the cabal of encyclopaedic novel salesmen and big fat book spruikers which is inordinately active on GR, if you call their tweets, posts, blurbs and press releases literary activity).
Gestures of Social Solidarity
Again, Kostelanetz quotes Q. D. Leavis in another context:
"These are not judgments of literary criticism, but gestures of social solidarity."
On the other hand, Kostelanetz recognises that "the living writers most worth admiring and emulating have either remained aloof from minority movements or have straddled them..."
To this end, he says that young readers "are likely to initiate the evaluative reinterpretations of writing in recent decades, not only separating what is genuinely good and important from what was just vociferously championed in its time, but also to resurrect important authors who were unaffiliated and thus neglected."
Among his choices for revived novelists would be:
"Vance Bourjaily, James B. Hall, Kenneth Patchen, William Gaddis, William Demby, Paule Marshall, J. F. Powers, John Howard Griffin, Alan Harrington, Wright Morris, Alfred Grossman, and Mark Harris - all of whom [were at the time] well over forty."
"Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels"
Below is a summary of Kostelanetz' analysis of the methodology. You might recognise it in the ideologically-based hagiography of John Barth (the Exhausted), William Gaddis (the Unrecognised), William H. Gass (the Bloated), Gilbert Sorrentino (the Great Eviscerator), Alexander Theroux (the Wordy), Joseph McElroy (the Runt of the Litter), Steven Moore (the Boss), Tom LeClair (the Excessist) and William T. Vollmann (the Saviour) in some hallowed sections of GR. Kostelanetz quotes Robert Alter on an earlier phase of this movement as "falling into a declining phase of unwitting self-parody." To which Kostelanetz relevantly adds a "sense of swelling flaccidity."
Ironically, in 1965 (eight years before the publication of this book), Kostelanetz would break ranks with this heft-mob, when he wrote:
"Of course, not all attempts for true originality are even faintly successful. William Gaddis' 'The Recognitions' (1956), which many fervently admire, strikes me as incoherent for any two of its 956 pages...."
Kostelanetz also highlights William H. Gass as a recipient of the benefits of what he describes as "marital collusion".
The typically cryptic reference is explained on page 145 by the example of positive reviews of Gass in "The New Republic", which was edited by Richard Gilman (who also wrote the reviews), the husband of Lynn Nesbit (Gass' literary agent).
For example, Gilman opined of "Omensetter's Luck" that it was "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." This outrageously inflated blurb is still rolled out on Gass' wiki entry and the publicity for "Middle C". Nice one, hubby!
THE 12 STEPS PROGRAM FOR PROMOTION OF YOUR LITERARY MOVEMENT
1. A Proliferation of Constellations
"[This] country has witnessed the rise of not one cultural establishment but a proliferation of them, one hardly in touch with most of the others, each with its own set of chiefs, assistant chiefs, molls, henchmen and lackeys."
2. A Literary Lobby
"Usually formed by writers about thirty years of age, a literary lobby is united not only by personal friendship and fairly similar artistic attitudes but also, and most important, by a sense of collective fortune. Therefore, the professional help that individuals render each other is based upon a sense of mutually entwined professional investment."
3. Common Social Origins
"What defines each modern American literary constellation are the common social origins of its members, be that inclusive factor geographic, academic, racial, ethnic, or sexual. What usually reveals the existence of such a tribe [or small clique or mob] is an articulate claim for the specialness of this common sociological factor coupled with a noticeable penchant for touting each other's works, whether published or not, and appearing by name in each other's 'criticism', if not their poetry, fiction - and eventually - their memoirs as well...These establishments are not 'conspiracies' but chains of interpersonal relationship based upon common sentiment and mutual interest whose links can be mobilised at times to function in rather aggressive, if not apparently conspiratorial, ways."
4. The Layers of the Onion
"In their internal structure, these literary establishments resemble an onion with a centre consisting of major theorists and organisers, surrounded by successive layers of imaginative writers, critics, editors, and publicists with various degrees of allegiance to the core."
5. The Deception of the Mainstream
"Just as all groups of any pretension compete with one another in the larger free market of publishers, professional prizes, and common readers, so each also claims to represent the 'mainstream' of American literary culture or its most viable current trend. This deception is best achieved by trying, whenever possible, to represent all American literature with just their parochial part."
6. Professional Success
"Every group sets as its prime literary-political goal the professional success of its members. As the primary means to this end is the promotion of characteristic enthusiasms and fraternal reputations, the first sign of possible prosperity is an increasing non-coterie taste for these writers and their enthusiasms."
7. When All the Students Are Professors
"In the evolution of an establishment, collective success begins when the group's stars earn recognition outside their immediate sphere (where acclaim had previously been guaranteed), when its pet 'ideology' gains increasing acceptance, when its academic colleagues are chosen as professors in the major universities, when editorial associates become moguls in New York publishing and reviewing media, and so forth."
8. The Infiltration of the Hierarchies
"A literary clique must try to infiltrate these media of publishing and reviewing - if not with core operators, then at least with sympathisers on the perimeter of the onion, or by recruiting the loyalty of people already within these hierarchies."
9. The Modus Operandi
"[It has] a core of writers and ideologists; a set of social ideals formulated in an early collective manifesto...; characteristic styles of both literary criticism and historical erudition; common themes and interests; a hierarchy of reputations, both critical and creative; a network of magazines sympathetic to one another, with overlapping lists of editors, contributing editors, contributors, reviewers - magazines in which the star critics were frequently quoted, both in the essays and in the ads, and their contributions featured over those by a supporting cast; its efforts to make writers of similar backgrounds into masters and prophets of the age; its reinterpretation of the intellectual and literary traditions to emphasise (and often resurrect) appropriate predecessors for themselves; decided penchants for mentioning each other in the same breath with the greatest figures of Western literature and for measuring both earlier and contemporary writers against [their own] ideology or literary values derived from that ideology; a self-generated myth of its own achievement as comparable to...'the outburst of poetic genius at the end of the sixteenth century when commercial England had already begun to crush feudal England'...; and finally entrenched connections in New York reviewing media and publishing which culminated respectively in both featured notices and textbooks propagating its ideology and reputations among the literate young."
10. The Anthologisation of the Canon
"Once the core canons of current writing had been established, they could be popularised, not only in 'critical essays', but in anthologies that often featured previously established eminences."
11. The Storming of the Citadel
"[The literary clique] capitalised upon the absence of a single permanent establishment to invade the scene from a minority position."
12. The Dominance of the Collective
"Not individual but collective dominance is perhaps the surest measure of literary-political success."
Extracts from a Review of this Book by Sara Blackburn Entitled "The Politics of Tedium"
Here are some comments made in a formal review of this book:
"...he goes on at such length and with such ardor about them that he protests too much. It's boring."
"The fact that he makes much of their Jewishness is a little creepy..."
"Writers support and disseminate one another, as do people with similar ideologies; they always have. Who else will do it?"
"Kostelanetz' refusal to get down to this simple nitty-gritty makes his book a nah-nah of name-calling and sour grapes for me, when I had hoped it would be the devastating analysis of business pretending to be art that it should have been..."
"I had hoped that this book would talk about the origins of the power it deplores, and the vacuum that's there for it to fill. Instead, it comes awfully close to demanding access to the corrupt citadel itself. The writers whose fortunes it promotes deserve a less distracted champion."
* Anti-Semitism
As Sara Blackburn suggests, Kostelanetz' book is creepily rife with anti-Jewish comments and asides.
In an attempt to anticipate and disarm this criticism, he makes the following disingenuous comment:
"Whereas classic anti-Semitism generalises about 'Jews' as a total group, or deals in imaginary Jews who are portrayed as hidden gremlins screwing up the works, these chapters [of my book] talk about real individual Jews - or, to be more precise real writers who wanted to be publicly known as Jewish."
The "Demolition" of Irving Howe
Kostelanetz seemed to have been determined to publicly demolish the reputation of the relatively benign Jewish Democratic Socialist, Irving Howe.
Howe gets 32 entries in the index to the book, most of them abusive and puerile. However, Kostelanetz was still having a crack at him in 1992, 19 years after the publication of this book, when he published the revealingly titled “Irving Howe: Epitome of a Fake”.
In that work, Kostelanetz makes a cryptic reference to Howe's "less principled dismissals of younger writers (again mostly Jewish) in the sixties and seventies".
So what exactly happened to cause this antagonism?
Kostelanetz owns up on page 136 of this book:
"Most of the time, the [Jewish literary] mob refuses to acknowledge my existence; even as late as 1969, Irving Howe, replying to a letter-to-the-editor in which my name was mentioned, closed haughtily with, 'But, who is Richard Kostelanetz?'"
Well might we ask!
It's not clear, but it seems that the letter concerned an essay in the Autumn, 1965 issue of "The Hudson Review" which contained an early version of the first two chapters of this book under the title "Militant Minorities".
I infer that this was merely a case of an impudent young upstart
Kostelanetz doesn't acknowledge that he had his day in the sun at "Partisan Review" (which wasn't edited by Irving Howe), before being unceremoniously walked off the stage (or was it the beach?).
It's perhaps ironic that one of the editors at the time was Richard Poirier, who would one day direct Steven Moore's PhD dissertation on William Gaddis.
SOUNDTRACK:
April 7, 2017
July 17, 2007
Nearly suppressed, this 1974 book by avant-garde writer and chronicler Richard Kostelanetz showed how American arts and letters was under increasing pressure to conform to a new standard from corporations buying up old and respected publishing houses, and from literary cliques. Most of what he outlines and portends has come true some thirty years later. You can only get this book from used bookstores and sites like [http://www.abebooks.com].
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