As her response unfolds, you realise she is championing not the positive review, but the negative review. She writes:
Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them. Learning the shortcomings of today’s neuronovel, we catch sight of the psychological novel of the future: a novel expressive of the problems we have now, including the encroachment of cognitive science into the concept of the self. When this novel appears, it will be because some people wrote neuronovels and books like “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and others identified the ways in which these works captivated us but failed to describe human existence.
Such an interpretation can be applied not just to literary criticism, but to any form of criticism where the aim is to help an author revise and improve their writing. Unfortunately, the truly negative book-review is rarely seen in the scholarly journals: in the last couple of years I've seen one particularly dreadful book-length survey of central Eurasian history receive some unfeasibly (and unwarranted) polite reviews.
3 comments:
Stephen Dale is perhaps one of the few academics who still gets into tussles in book reviews.
Babur once wrote something about his uncle that academics should remember. He wrote that Sulṭān-Maḥmūd Mīrzā "had poetical ability and made a divan, but his poetry was weak and flat. He composed too much; he probably should have composed less” (Bābur-nāmah, tr. Thackston, Modern Library edition, p. 31). Annette Beveridge's translation is perhaps more brutal, but equally apt: "He had a taste for poetry and put a dīwān together but his verse is flat and insipid,--not to compose is better than to compose verse such as his" (AB trans, vol. I p. 46).
I remember Robert McChesney's thoughtful and insightful review of Professor Dale's book on Babur prompted a fairly sharp rebuttal (published) from Herr Doctor Dale (although McChesney reserved his feircest criticism for the publishers', Brill).
Do see his tussle with one Ali Anooshahr, it is both brutal and not undue.
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