Dear Jack Slain, who fled Cravath, Swain and Moore in the late ’70s for the comforts of teaching corporate law at NYU, also taught accounting for lawyers. In that class he often cited a compelling example of looming obsolescense: the buggy whip manufacturer, circa 1915. Not a trade for the dawn of the Model T era, nor ever again to provide the least prospect for business success.
I have often reflected on buggy whips over the last quarter century as I watched successive loves undermined, left behind, and overtaken by technology or changing tastes: Amtrak; record players; post cards; letter-writing ; home-baking; card catalogues; newspapers; books.
So it is with dread, recognition, and grief that I read this requiem for literary criticism in The Nation. So I’ve chosen a “slowly dying” profession! Another venture in buggy-whip production. Literary criticism joins the museum rooms of my now-middle-aged life.
March 26, 2008 at 11:54 am
How depressing. I, for one, am now reading — for the first time — The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. I know it was controversial at the time, but the writing is so much better than most of the more contemporary fiction I’ve read lately (and some might consider Confessions contemporary) that I keep shaking my head as I read.
So, does this mean you’ve been accepted into the emminent, dying program?
March 26, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Your interest is obsolescent only in terms of contemporary taste, not in terms of the culture of the West. You are (temporarily, I believe) out of step with the zeitgeist, but eventually people will recognize that criticism is never obsolete. That is, the effort to analyze, understand, and judge the value of aesthetic endeavor to individual human beings and their culture is never passe. It may not be fashionable, but it is inherently useful. Do what you believe in. Do it as well as you can. Know why you do it, and know who has done it well, and –most important — know HOW you know they have done it well, and you will be engaged is significant worthwhile activity. As in “Broadly Speaking.”