The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online

by Houman Barekat (Editor), Robert Barry (Editor), David Winters (Editor)

What do we think of when we think of literary critics? Enlightenment snobs in powdered wigs? Professional experts? Cloistered academics? Through the end of the 20th century, book review columns and literary magazines held onto an evolving but stable critical paradigm, premised on expertise, objectivity, and carefully measured response. And then the Internet happened.

From the editors of Review 31 and 3:AM Magazine, The Digital Critic brings together a diverse group of perspectives—early-adopters, Internet skeptics, bloggers, novelists, editors, and others—to address the future of literature and scholarship in a world of Facebook likes, Twitter wars, and Amazon book reviews. It takes stock of the so-called Literary Internet up to the present moment, and considers the future of criticism: its promise, its threats of decline, and its mutation, perhaps, into something else entirely.

With contributions from Robert Barry, Russell Bennetts, Michael Bhaskar, Louis Bury, Lauren Elkin, Scott Esposito, Marc Farrant, Orit Gat, Thea Hawlin, Ellen Jones, Anna Kiernan, Luke Neima, Will Self, Jonathon Sturgeon, Sara Veale, Laura Waddell, and Joanna Walsh.

Genres: Nonfiction, Criticism

204 pages, Paperback

Published November 16, 2017

About the author

Editor, Review 31. London-based writer: occasional contributor to the likes of Los Angeles Review of Books, Art & Music, 3:AM Magazine, Berlin Review of Books.

Reviews

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am meant to be reviewing this for Litro, so will be pretty brief about it here (although Litro nicely says I can reproduce whatever I write for them on my own site). The book is a collection of essays—more or less; some are adapted versions of talks given elsewhere, like a Will Self lecture delivered at Brunel University—on the topic of the subtitle: literary culture online. A wide selection of subthemes is represented, from literary translators' use of the Internet (in an essay that foregrounds the online journal Asymptote and discusses how its editorial team works to place translation further to the front of readers' brains), to working "for exposure" in the age of moribund print media, to a writer's need for isolation and how that works when social media demands constant accessibility. My favourite, from a standpoint of professional usefulness, is an essay on publishers and how they function as the very first "critics" of a text, in the sense that the choices they make about a book—editorial but also, very significantly, in terms of marketing and cover design—create a foundational interpretation of that book that every other reader and critic builds on. Of particular interest to bloggers are the several essays in the collection interested in the collapsing distinctions between "professional" or "elite" critics, and the criticism of the general public on forums like Goodreads, Amazon, and, of course, sites like this one. I would have appreciated an acknowledgement that the ability to participate in "professional" literary culture is in large part reliant on your ability to pay your rent whether there's money coming in regularly or not, and that, therefore, the rise of "amateur" online literary critics might be a) representative of the fact that this is an increasingly difficult proposition, and b) a potentially fertile source of brilliant criticism that comes from people who happen not to be able to afford to play the game. Still, this is a collection of essays that I would like every bookseller, book blogger, book reviewer, arts page editor, and minister for the arts to read: containing such varied points of view, with consistently solid writing and argumentation, it's illuminating at every turn.

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as research for my Third Year Dissertation on the impact of the Internet on literary culture and readership habits. A fascinating collection of essays broaching this knotty topic, exploring in-depth the repercussions of inhabiting the literary sphere in an increasingly digitised world. It invited me to consider the fetishisation of the material book, as well as the boundless opportunities supplied by nature of the fluxional, unfixed, ever-evolving online space. Inspired me to think more about literary ethics—namely the exploitation of upcoming writers who are prompted to provide their writing for free, in exchange for a currency founded on ‘exposure’. Their work is thus rendered as ‘content’, rather than serious pieces with any academic substance. I have been prompted to consider how writing, as well as authors publishers, and indeed readers, have responded to the superabundance of written content online, and what this all means for the book industry. A dense and insightful, academic yet accessible read, endlessly fascinating; this book asks readers to acknowledge their personal historical moment, and hypothesise where books are destined to take us in the future.