This Thing We Call Literature

Arthur Krystal

Laments the loss of the golden age of belle-lettrist scholarship with elegaical tributes to the likes of Erich Auerbach, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom
Bemoans the declining popularity of literary fiction at the expense of genre fiction and graphic novels
Casts a skeptical eye on the increaingly popular paradigm of cognitive literary studies

This Thing We Call Literature

Arthur Krystal

Description

In his fourth book of essays, acclaimed cultural critic Arthur Krystal surveys the world of letters in its academic, literary, and populist incarnations—just to make sure those divisions still apply. What he finds is that the ground has shifted. With Lionel Trilling at his back, Krystal casts a cold eye on contemporary culture and discerns a lack of discrimination between the truly great and the merely good, and the fairly good and just plain bad. Critical but not angst-ridden, he deplores tunnel vision on both sides of the culture wars. Presumptive cultural boundaries have no place here. Krystal admires Bob Dylan and Elmore Leonard without including them in a purely literary pantheon. He endorses the Great Books without necessarily voting the Republican ticket. In essays about the meaning of the novel, the role of music in poetry, genre fiction vs. literary fiction, the contributions of the superlative critic Erich Auerbach, and the strange alliance of neurology and aesthetics, as well as in lighter pieces about reviewing and list-making, Krystal brings his own brand of discriminating intelligence to a spectrum of received opinions whose flaws and cracks otherwise go unnoticed.

This Thing We Call Literature

Arthur Krystal

Author's Note
1. Prélude.
2. A Sad Road to Everything
3. Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures without the Guilt
4. It's Genre. Not That There's Anything Wrong with It
5. What is Literature?
6. Should Writers Reply to Reviewers?
7. LISTEN To The Sound It Makes
8. Listing Toward Oblivion
9. Erich Auerbach: The Critic in Exile
10. The Shrinking World of Ideas
Postscript

This Thing We Call Literature

Arthur Krystal

Author Information

Arthur Krystal, Cultural Critic

Arthur Krystal has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. He is the author of The Half-Life of an American Essayist, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, and Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic. He lives in New York City.

This Thing We Call Literature

Arthur Krystal

Reviews and Awards

"I picked this book for reasons that are fairly obvious, and it actually didn't come out this year. It came out in 2016, and it's a collection of essays called This Thing We Call Literature by Arthur Krystal. He's a book reviewer and literary critic, and I read something he wrote early on this year and was so blown away by it that I had to go buy the book. He's a really clear, simple, direct writer. In this time, in the Trump era, where there's a backlash against postmodernism and there are these culture wars and conflicts, especially concerning academia, Krystal's book is really a defense of the canon, or at least, a defense of the idea that we should be arguing for the value of a canon. He has such a measured, enjoyable tone."—Rider Strong via "Literary Disco's Best Books We Read [in 2018]" - Rider Strong via "Literary Disco's Best Books We Read [in 2018]", Literary Hub

"As Jeremiahs go, Arthur Krystal is an affable, erudite one, who dispenses his opinions with humour but also with steel [...] A typical Krystal essay or review balances insight, sense and humour [...] This Thing We Call Literature is 'essentially a lament and not a condemnation of the general literary culture' although there is condemnation of those who trumpet the new as the great, or elevate the second rate [H]is longest essay is a consideration of Erich Auerbach [...] a well-rounded portrait of a man who seemed to share Dante's sense of tragic destiny [...] a critic with occasional failings, but a master of the philological approach to literature. Krystal's interest in Auerbach suggests there is life in high culture yet." - Tony Roberts, PN Review

"Krystal's essay achieves criticisms most useful task: it sends a reader back to an author with renewed excitement." - Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books