Professional Criticism

My latest peer-reviewed article, “John Bunyan in Abolitionist Periodicals,” can now be found online. It is published in American Literature, widely considered to be one of the finest in my scholarly field. I spent about two years researching, revising, and writing the article, and I benefited from the encouragement and help of many people, without whom I surely could not have written the article. I’m very grateful for this help.

But the whole process has felt strangely empty and anticlimactic. It feels rather like I have spent two years and hundreds of hours carefully designing and hand-building a horse-drawn carriage. Emerging from my garage, begrimed with sawdust and blinking in the sunlight, I look down the road to see someone cruising around in a self-driving Tesla. I have, with a great deal of work, produced an anachronism, a relic of a bygone era. For the specialist (mostly older, upper-middle-class folks), there is some interest, and if one of them happens to see my carriage, they might comment on the nicely-turned wheels. But, by and large, the carriage will sit in my garage, an unnoticed curiosity, until as the years pass the wood begins to sag and the paint begins to peel and the limited use it had, long ago, quietly vanishes.

All of this is to say that I am glad to have written this article as an exercise, as a way to try to become more knowledgable and discerning and thoughtful, and as a way to align my life with the idea that thinking hard and slow is valuable in and of itself. I would like to think that, in some small and perhaps infinitesimal way, I have improved as a writer and thinker because of the work I have put into this article. But very few people will ever read it and that even fewer—probably none—will get any use out of it. To write something like this is—scholarship as self-fashioning—is to put some serious time and energy into quite a selfish endeavor: I did it because I wanted to, and because I thought it would enrich me, and because I thought it might be a good career move, not because I imagined some reader on the other end being actually edified by any of the words on the page.

Is writing ever anything other than selfish? Does the reader ever get more from reading a text than the author got from writing it? If not, perhaps the correct economic model for writing is that authors pay readers instead of the other way around. (I’d be willing to bet that someone could make real money off of a website like that.)

But it also seems to me that writing shouldn’t be so onanistic: that the most ideal model of writing is something like gift-giving. I’ve been reading some how-to-write books and have noticed that they tend to be obsessed with the prospect of keeping a reader engaged. The job of the writer, sentence by sentence, is to be so interesting that the reader is compelled to finish the piece of writing.

“Interesting” is by no means a flawless standard for writing. We know now that the most interesting thing in the world, to most people, is outrage, and that cultivating our writing to maximize outrage results in problems, not just for writing, but for our culture and society more broadly. And there’s also something desperate about this: constantly trying to impress or wow the reader, like an insecure guy on a first date.  Every sentence an advertisement for the next sentence. And there’s something infantilizing about it—assuming that your reader needs to be catered to, that they have no energy or interest of their own to bring to the process of reading.

But at least this model offers something to someone, and I think that’s at the heart of the anticlimax attendant on my first “big” publication: for all of the effort I put into this article, for the job that it one day might have earned me, it’s not even particularly interesting—it seems to me now useless in a way that isn’t even fun.

I wonder if this is a common feeling among those who publish peer-reviewed work. In an academic marketplace in which we are expected to constantly market ourselves (and in which the humanities are constantly under attack because they are not considered “useful”), there are very few who would admit that they do not believe in their own work. (The one exception I can find was extremely bracing.) Expressing this feeling is no good for one’s career. It’s no good for the discipline, it’s no good for the journals that have agreed to publish one’s work, and it’s no good for all the other people who poured time and resources into the production of one’s work. And so we do not express it. But it’s also true, or at least it feels true to me: absent a sense of accomplishment or a sort of self-development—in other words, absent a set of motives that are essentially selfish—what does my elaborate work of antiquarianism accomplish?