Prestige and Criticism

Everybody needs an audience

One of the unspoken themes running through my consideration of the state of criticism—prestige—became a term of importance a few years ago, partly due to James English’s 2008 study of literary prizes, The Economy of Prestige. Much like Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, released a year later, it reset not just the terms of debate, but the scale at which literary criticism took up its task.

Such sociologically-inflected criticism finds its champion for a younger generation in the work of Dan Sinykin, whose Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature was published recently to some acclaim, no doubt at least in part to its cover’s nod to the iconic Vintage Contemporaries graphic design of the 1980s. But Sinykin does seem to address something that readers are naturally curious about, namely the impact of conglomeration, a signal development of the US—and thereby global—economy, upon literature.

It seems to me that prestige can be figured a couple of different ways, depending on one’s audience. If you happen to find yourself thriving in an ecosystem where avant-garde literature of a certain provenance bestows prestige, then you might write about the poets published by a firm like New Directions. Conversely, if you want to reach a larger audience, you might rather choose to write about the types of novels published, after their hardback run, as mass-market paperbacks—not necessarily potboilers or beach reads, but novels like Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead or Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, two name just two notable recent works.

I don’t mean to ding Kingsolver or Smith, two writers I have enjoyed and hope to continue reading. Indeed, I picked them deliberately as worthy avatars of the kind of quality literary fiction that emerges from large conglomerated publishers, aka the “Big Five.” No, I am thinking about how the scale of book publishing influences criticism. An October review of Sinykin’s book in LARB by Hilary Plum states clearly what I am dancing around. Plum openly approaches her review as a writer and editor of small-press books, and her perspective provides some startling insights. By way of referencing the writing collective Fiction Collective Two (FC2), who published Plum’s first novel, she writes:

[Sinykin] doesn’t mention that FC2 continues to publish steadily as a writers’ collective. Perhaps this is because FC2’s current authors have little mainstream name recognition—perhaps because scholars and critics don’t write about them; perhaps because there is little cultural capital to be gained by doing so, because no one else does. To write about an obscure small-press experimental novel would mean writing about something that no one else has yet deemed significant or an object worthy of attention, which to me sounds exciting but is not how things work—scholars need to gain citations and responses, to join and lead the conversation, not to be celebrating a curio.

Plum’s is the rare critique that doesn’t merely fault the author for their error, but rather places their blind spots within an economy of prestige (to slightly revise the meaning of English’s phrase) so regimented that it could not result in something otherwise. In other words, Sinykin’s focus on conglomerated publishers results in part from his need to have a critical audience. He is not unique in this; everyone wants to be read. All the same, despite her admirable fairmindedness, Plum’s critique comes out a touch unsparing: “And so my critique of the limits of scholarship, as it is published today, to some degree parallels his own critique of fiction.” Although Plum in her review probably makes a bigger deal of being a minor figure on the literary scene than necessary, her frustration is nonetheless well-earned.

I have written previously of the straightjacketing effects of the necessity of institutional legitimacy on criticism. But here we have the other half of that coin: prestige. The question of audience has always bedeviled critics. By the same token, at a time of declining access to publishing platforms, even through the time-worn and still primary institutional conduit that remains—academia—I’m not entirely sure that the realities of audience and prestige have adequately registered for those critics still able to draw readers and attention to their work. Which is itself a question of prestige of a different but related sort.