In 1959 Elizabeth Hardwick complained that American book reviews were drowning in praise. Sixty-seven years later the complaint still stands, and a new Intellicurean essay asks a harder question: who is left to be wrong?
Why we’re pointing you there
Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing” is the most famous complaint about soft criticism, and Who Is Left to Be Wrong begins by taking her at her word, numbers and all. From there it moves through Rosalind Krauss’s six-word claim about video, a BuzzFeed pledge borrowed from Thumper, and Edmund Wilson’s six-month public quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. Then it opens the published guidelines of twelve leading review outlets to see what any of them actually says about judgment.
What we liked most is that the essay holds itself to its own standard. Its claim narrowed when the evidence came back against it, and it abandoned a count it couldn’t make honestly, saying so plainly at the end. Along the way it arrives at a sentence about favours that haven’t happened yet, and we haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
