# data[].attributes.body
A website for all things literature, including commentary/criticism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lit Hub is a central place for writers, publishers, books, bookstores, librarians, and readers to congregate and celebrate books and literary culture.

# data[].attributes.body
Links to several lit criticism essays.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Without a doubt, 2015 was a year of controversy in literature and publishing, from the shady publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman to Michel Houellebecq's controversial take on Islam and French politics in Submission. But it turned out that much of the best criticism of the year, while still concerned with literary controversy, was aimed at less anticipated targets. 2015 was a year when critics - and especially poets - took aim at structural racism and the tyrannical mediocrity of white male writers to great effect. Otherwise, as Ferrante recently implored us to do in the Financial Times, our best critics worked to "restore authentic centrality to the books themselves."

In March, the "uncreative poet" Kenneth Goldsmith appropriated the autopsy report of Michael Brown - the 18-year-old unarmed black resident of Ferguson, Missouri who was murdered by a white police officer - for a "poem" that he called "The Body of Michael Brown." Goldsmith read the work at Brown University.

Among the best responses to this farce - or, rather, a response that contains many responses - is CAConrad's piece "Kenneth Goldsmith Says He Is an Outlaw," published at Harriet. After taking Goldsmith to task for his self-perceived "outlaw" status, the poet publishes a run of solicited responses to Goldsmith's non-poem from a number of writers. One hopes the piece will be taught in schools in a course titled, "What Was Conceptualist Poetry?"

Few would deny that the lowest point achieved by literary discourse in 2015 came about in April and May, after a group of writers chose to protest a gala honoring the remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo with the 2015 PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. Both sides had their reasons, to be sure, and I've been clear about which side I take, but the ridiculous, self-serving language used by nearly everyone involved became almost too much to bear. Thankfully, Gary Indiana came along to put it a stopper in it. It's worth quoting at length:

I begin to imagine this PEN/Charlie Hebdo "controversy" was cooked up by PEN itself to stir some otherwise missing excitement about its activities. The content of the whole thing is zero; there is usually less fuss made about who gets the Nobel Prize. The real point of it begins to look like the endless repetition in print of the same four or five proper names, most of whom owe their entire careers to essentialist posturing and/or implacable, relentless networking.
Cathy Park Hong, The New Republic: "There's a New Movement in American Poetry and It's Not Kenneth Goldsmith"
Later in the year, in October, after Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker published a bizarre piece that tried (and failed) to subliminally undercut Goldsmith's detractors - note: Goldsmith regularly writes for the magazine - Cathy Park Hong righted the ship when she asserted that "the old guard of poetry" - represented by Goldsmith - had "collapsed." Citing a confluence of poetry, performance, and protest, Hong notes that the tide is turning in poetry away from the ambitions of the conceptualist art-poet and the white literary male:
Jenny Zhang, BuzzFeed: "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist"
Poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry's ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.

As it happened, proof of Hong's statement about the changing of the guard in poetry came the month before, when poet and writer Jenny Zhang published an essay about yet another racist - but, as Zhang makes clear, not atypical - moment in poetry. In her piece, Zhang responds to poet Michael Derrick Hudson's "decision" to use yellowface, to write under an assumed Chinese name, in order to get accepted to 2015's Best American Poetry anthology, edited by Sherman Alexie. There are too many great moments in Zhang's essay to cite here, but it's impossible to ignore the way she shifts from white mediocrity to the excellence of undersolicited writers of color. It's an excellence that Zhang demonstrates repeatedly in her own work:
John Keene, J's Theater: "On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics"
The long con of white mediocrity may never be exposed because there are too many people invested in making sure not a single instance of white excellence is overlooked but quickly drop the vigilance when it comes to the excellence of those of us who were never afforded such protection. But for those of us who didn't grow up entitled, those of us who grew up underestimated, underinvited, undersolicited, underacknowledged, underloved, I say let's expose each other's excellence.
Rebecca Solnit, Literary Hub: "80 BOOKS NO WOMAN SHOULD READ" and "Men Explain Lolita to Me" Dwight Garner, The New York Times: "Bill Clegg's 'Did You Ever Have a Family' Heaps One Tragedy Upon Another"
Of a piece with Hudson's yellowface and especially Kenneth Goldsmith's appropriation of Michael Brown's autopsy report is conceptualist poet Vanessa Place's ongoing redistribution of Gone With the Wind (this year she began tweeting the text). In response to Place's project, author John Keene - whose Counternarratives is the year's best collection of short fiction - takes contemporary conceptualist practice to task for instrumentalizing black life as a limit-point for its "practice":

A conceptual, which is to say formalist white-gaze gesture, involving the screenplay version (whose authors included the white screenwriters Sidney Howard, Oliver Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, and John Van Druten) of racist author Margaret Mitchell's rendering of purported black speech, is supposed to represent a "deconstructive move" that reveals subtexts in the text concerning power, gender, race, and authorship. As if those are not already legible in the very fact of who wrote the novel and the screenplay, and who directed the film, let alone the life experiences of any black American person living in the United States in the era in which the film was set, or was made!

No writer was funnier or more decisive when skewering her targets this year than Rebecca Solnit, whose two pieces for Literary Hub on the subject of stupid, didactic literary men will sadly be worth reading for years to come.
Claire Vaye Watkins, Tin House: "On Pandering"
It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of literary works cannot be decided by a no-competition clause appended to a spurious homo-social contract written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of "insane."

No thinking person would try to explain to these writers, who put together a kind of decalogue on the book that will probably go unrivaled for a decade. I learned more about reading this page-by-page guide than I did 1. reading it myself and 2. studying it in college.

I fear I am being very rough on Mr. Clegg's novel, rougher than I would like to be. But the pocket where I generally put the nice things I want to say about a book is, in this instance, pretty empty.

Ben Lerner, poet and novelist, hates poetry.

In this beautifully written letter to her publisher from 25 years ago, Ferrante explains why she'll remain anonymous:

To explain all the reasons for my decision, is, as you know, hard for me. I will only tell you that it's a small bet with myself, with my convictions. I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won't. There are plenty of examples. I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child.

Although it generated no shortage of debate, few could deny that Watkins' forceful essay on pandering to white men caused readers and writers alike to consider who their writing is meant to address.

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you'll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Without a doubt, 2015 was a year of controversy in literature and publishing, from the shady publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman to Michel Houellebecq's controversial take on Islam and French politics in Submission. But it turned out that much of the best criticism of the year, while still concerned with literary controversy, was aimed at less anticipated targets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Disclaimer: When theories are explained briefly, a necessary reduction in their complexity and richness occurs. The information below is meant merely as a guide or introduction to modern literary theories and trends. Please note: Site is in the process of being updated and expanded - January 2006.