Good Reading, Good Thinking, Good Writing

“To criticize properly is to show the process of judgment...to struggle with what we like.”

Untitled, Sarah Getraer

Josie Barboriak is a 21-year-old writer from Durham, North Carolina studying at the University of Chicago. She will begin training at Johns Hopkins University to become a sociologist in the fall.

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I recently found myself in a spirited public disagreement with a famous literary critic. Onstage at the front of the theater, two critics sat, armchairs angled toward each other and the audience. The philosopher and public figure Agnes Callard was joined by literary critic Merve Emre (who writes for The New Yorker and is a professor of creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University) for a University of Chicago “Night Owls” event. Emre stared me down, her legs crossed in furry, tall boots, and I tried not to shake in mine.

In the exchange between the philosopher who writes on literature and the professor of literary criticism trained in theory, both of whom frequently address the public, the difference that stands out most is stylistic. I say stylistic to refer to the ways it is possible to carry oneself and speak, in addition to what is visible from a photograph. After all, both thinkers clearly put energy into aesthetic presentation. Prior to the well-attended event, I had learned from a Business Insider profile that, between undergrad at Harvard and graduate school at Yale, Emre had worked at Bain as a consultant. It shows in her air of unflinching confidence, how she stares straight into your eyes and speaks clearly. Her features are sharp and birdlike, and her outfits for the UChicago event series consisted of jeans and slinky sweaters, low-profile items paired with the aforementioned fur-covered boots. Approximately a third of the reactions to her campus visit I heard, mostly from women, were some awed variation of, “Well, she’s so pretty.” It was like the statement had to be disclosed before further speech, as though some conflict of interest preceded evaluation.

Callard, on the other hand, looks into the distance while she talks and approaches the audience as if on a journey to her point. She wears a blue dress with an eccentric print that she says came from an old book jacket, pink tights, and metallic pink loafers I’ve seen her wear often. Pieces of her salt-and-pepper hair often escape her messy bun to frame her face, which typically wears circular glasses and an inquisitive expression. When speaking, her tone sort of flits around; she seems to be focused more on the unseen object of discussion, the novel or the philosopher at hand, than on the specific person to whom she is talking. Callard has drawn ire for her attempts to live out her practice of philosophy, which often seems unconventional; to give you an idea, she once spoke at a Valentine’s Day event proposing that achieving freedom of speech within a romantic relationship would require dating a person radically different from oneself — perhaps even a Nazi. Her intellectual hero, about whom she has written extensively, is Socrates.

My question posed to the two was some form, less eloquently phrased, of the following: Is criticism just discourse of one judgment opposed to another, or does it build to something? Is there any sort of epistemic ground by which we can judge one attempt to communicate a judgment to be better, or more important, than another? What is criticism, if not a systematic attempt to understand why a certain type of aesthetic object resonates with a certain group of people at a specific time?

In response to my question from the audience, Emre challenged the idea that criticism could create a knowledge claim. In return, I cited, as an example of a good and important work, one of my favorite works of criticism, Becca Rothfeld on Sally Rooney’s “Normal Novels” and the fantasy of achieving universally recognized excellence without interrogating one’s egalitarian ideals. Emre responded by saying Rothfeld was wrong about Rooney because Rothfeld had missed Rooney’s irony, and I could see that Emre and I were not going to agree about what made one work of criticism more important than another.

I said something resembling, “So is criticism really just that one person makes one argument, and then another person disagrees, and none of it goes anywhere?” then Emre said something like, “Why is that a problem if it is?” and I made some vague, hopeful verbal gesture at something more, and somewhere along the line, Callard came in and asked if the most important question to ask about literature wasn’t indeed about the ways in which novels teach us how to live, which she said is an undeniably moral question, and then they kept talking, but I had urgent reading to attend to before the end of the night and ducked out.

“That Merve back and forth was crazy…I would’ve been shaking,” my friend texted me a few minutes after eleven. Sitting in the library, I recused myself from my Nietzsche and, after clarifying over text that I had been shaking, began the long process of attempting to figure out just what it was I had been trying to say.

On the first floor of the library, I was joined by another friend — one who stands out to me for his halting, deliberate way of speaking while thinking (a habit which I exhibit occasionally myself but grows ever more pronounced when this friend and I get to talking in a situation in which what is being expressed feels difficult to capture but vital to do well, such that one must choose every word carefully, or backtrack and edit). His manner of speech reminded me of writing: one can write carelessly and with abandon and then revise, or one can write meticulously and slowly, with a weight to each word. Both encompass the assemblage of words akin to good thought, but to speak so eloquently off-the-cuff in response to newly asked questions seems, to me, suspect.

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The Night Owls event had been preceded by a lunch in which Emre spoke to a small group of undergraduates of the literature-philosophy-magazine-writing sort in which she walked us through her career path from editing to writing criticism to writing about books for The New Yorker. Most surprising was Emre’s dismissal of “close-reading” as a standard of criticism: according to Emre, the long-lauded Humanities 10 course at Harvard, which served as her reference point, produced “readers,” not “writers,” and she left Harvard thinking that teaching people how to read texts well was an entirely different skill than teaching them how to write about them.

At the end of the lunch, I approached Emre one-on-one and said that different people might understand close-reading differently. After all, we were sitting in the room that typically hosts gatherings for the Fundamentals major, Chicago’s undergraduate course of study based around the close-reading of texts; many of those lunching with Emre had spent generative time agonizing over what it means to read different types of texts well and attempting to achieve it ourselves in our own writing. Her response was that what I was describing was similar to what she had encountered at Harvard in the 2000s, and what she was advocating for was something different. This felt too swift of a shutdown; it rubbed me the wrong way. Leaving the building, a few of us discussed, with some incredulity, Emre’s approach to reading and to addressing the students in the room as something between interlocutors and members of her audience. The friend who had sent me the Business Insider article, whose interpersonal style tends toward the brash, put forth the possibility that Emre didn’t really know what she was talking about.

To understand Emre’s work is to take for granted from the very beginning that she does know what she is talking about. She writes, in her reviews, of readers being “in on jokes” or failing to be, and she is fascinated by problems of categorization and typification of people in real life and of characters in novels. I suspect Emre enjoys thinking of literary type as a thing to be played with, which perhaps carries with it a tendency toward solid lines and sleight-of-hand.

At the lunch, Emre had referred to herself offhand as a sort of “literary sociologist.” As a person conducting research within the discipline of sociology, someone who feels a deep discomfort with the project of putting other thinking minds into categorical boxes, I felt myself bristle at the term. If one’s work is primarily literary, they operate in the domain of aesthetic value, which must necessarily be freed from responsibility to some external world; if one’s work is purely sociological, it is constantly implicated in its own responsibilities to the world it tries to understand. The struggle to apprehend the empirical reality of the social world outside of oneself, paired in slick conjunction with the artist’s eloquence, seemed to me to represent a curious kind of authority over knowledge, and it was an authority Emre took up swiftly.

In writing, that authority is constituted mostly within Emre’s verbose style, which is made up of long lists, oddly placed words that register as possible callbacks to works of theory, or emphatic phrases which seem to be trying to mean something. The effect is a kind of dazzling-by-confusion which tends toward agreement. Okay, sure, you think. I guess. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about. A few days after the exchange, I sat down to read what Emre herself had written about Rooney’s irony and found myself doubting my own powers of comprehension. Though her language looked beautiful, some of her paragraphs took me multiple reads to understand; they made sweeping statements whose justifications were difficult to track. Am I having a stroke? I thought. Even in writing, I found it difficult to understand what was actually meant.

As a reader-turned-writer, to admit confusion could seem to compromise the prospect of one’s own authority or leave one vulnerable to being blamed for misunderstanding. Looking for a sanity check, and appealing to a higher authority of my own, I talked through my attempted close-read of Emre’s piece in office hours with a professor. As we tried to make sense of the argument together, the professor concurred that her style was more confusing than it had to be. I wondered if the ambiguity in who was to blame for my confusion was part of the tactic itself; rather than the disclosure of some incommunicable truth being the point of the style, Emre was certain all the way through, and woe was the reader who found themselves on the other side of a brick wall, “not getting it.” The substance of her style seemed to lie in these moments of obfuscation itself. Instead of trying to deconstruct the wall, or attempting to scale it, the most natural response for the reader seemed to leap over it unthinkingly — to create the appearance of “getting it” by any means necessary.

Part of the problem of style for the critic is the difference that appears between the acts of thinking and of writing. Nietzsche put it well: “Most thinkers write badly because they communicate to us not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of their thoughts.” The thought is the argument which appears to the person reading or hearing it as formed and artful. Expressing a thought which one has previously prepared, one can, perhaps, make eye contact with one’s interlocutor and smoothly form the shapes of the words, delivering the idea through to its conclusion.

Thinking, on the other hand, appears in the stilted manner of some of the most enriching exchanges between friends or seminar contributions. The phrases come out in fragments which predate sense. A thought half-prepared will stall out before it edits and backtracks, returning to an earlier point in the sentence or newly recasting an earlier aside as the actual center of what one is trying to say. If a great written argument or piece emerges from such an exercise, it will be later, in writing, when the paragraphs settle and click into their positions on the page. As Nietzsche points out, if we were to try to transcribe thinking in the form of thought-as-appears-out-loud, it would be probably quite bad as a piece of writing.

Rather than the fluid style of a direct argument, readers need, particularly in times in which the gulf between the idealistic space of the academic and the “public” space of art-as-entertainment seems to be growing, the type of criticism which takes the form of an impasse, something that tries to hold, within it, thinking. Such a critic must combine the practice of the thinker with the banked knowledge of the scholar and the stylistic flourish of the artist. In addressing a public, her most important role is to demonstrate, and thus call the public into, the process of making a judgment. The critical posture taken up in a more Socratic style, which calls the audience to question, is one uniquely suited to address people in this way.

When I talk about criticism, I am referring to written work which makes a judgment about art (primarily literature). This judgment is oriented toward some public — not only professional readers and viewers of art but those who interact with it in their leisure time. We look, in our free time, for what we do not have in our working lives — perhaps intrigue, or mystery, or friendship. Thus, as critics, we must begin by knowing we are writing to the vast majority of people for whom literature functions as an escape.

One may bristle at the term “escape.” It could, perhaps, denote an unserious reader, or a reader whose engagement with literature cannot be but affective, shallow, or masturbatory. I say “escape” not in a pejorative sense but in a practical sense: reading allows people to keep alive parts of themselves which, for whatever reason, they do not get to exercise in their daily lives. As an alternative to the arbitrary frustrations of living or working in situations in which one feels stifled, literature’s ethical importance lies in providing a chance to exercise one’s imagination.

Like thinking, an aesthetic experience is passive; the person having an aesthetic experience removes themselves from the physical world to trouble or delight the mind in another one. Images fly through our heads as we sit enthralled in the world before us, the thinking world which offers an alternative to that of our immediate surroundings. Where the activity of thinking necessitates an inward turn, a judgment is an outward expression of an evaluation. Judging comes from imagining an art object from multiple standpoints — as others in a shared world might experience it — to determine the object’s meaning in a particular moment. The experience of an art object and the meaning we draw from that experience thus have a peculiar relationship: art can inspire some external creation of meaning — the judgment as public action — or preclude it by taking its place.

As it is located squarely within the experience of the individual, the aesthetic experience itself is morally and politically neutral. Consumption of looksmaxxing TikToks or romantasy novels certainly involves a great deal of feeling, but it’s hard to argue that any of what is being consumed is technically an impressive art object whose craft we ought respect, or that it is opening new and promising venues of human experience that speak to the present moment in a life-giving manner. Those who cry out, in reference to the state of popular publishing, “At least they’re reading!” miss this point. Art is and ought to be about more than having been conditioned to consider the sort of market democracy which draws together what David Foster Wallace once referred to as “The Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained.” Just because certain genres are popular or sell widely does not mean they are good. Just because a novel makes you feel good does not mean that it is.

Rather than attempting to communicate a purely subjective feeling, as an art object does, or advance a scholarly argument grounded in the history of literary movements, a work of criticism must find a way to enclose within it a process of judgment itself, and the critic must find a style which can perform this kind of invocation. One essay that exemplifies the thinker’s struggle to understand an aesthetic experience is not about any traditional form of art but about the sport of tennis. In Wallace’s essay “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” he describes the “kinetic beauty” of the top athlete as one which constitutes “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” beauty which is near-impossible to evoke or explain with only specific observation:

“The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws…He seems both more and less substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.”

You can feel Wallace struggling writing this paragraph; you can see his explanatory style in every sentence. He gestures at the metaphysical, hedges, asserts it again. Throughout the essay, he seems to be closest to what he’s trying to communicate when his words might seem the most outlandish; elsewhere, he falls back on the abstraction of the word “truth,” a great and lofty word beyond immediate presence, desperately trying to give the reader what he so clearly feels: that Federer’s greatness as an athlete has a sort of objective metaphysical component to it that commands attention — that his greatness is a sort of argument for a metaphysical ground to goodness.

Wallace’s task is impossible because the moral world does not allow such a simplification, such a perfect argument for equating strength, beauty, truth, and goodness. The essay is about Federer, but there is another presence in the text without whom it would be sorely lacking — that of honorary coin-tosser William Caines, a 7-year-old boy with cancer, who Wallace sees, and records, then seems unable to contend with, as a writer, in the piece he wants to write. It means that, while Wallace is compelled by the metaphysical force of the aesthetic, he cannot go without acknowledging the most difficult sort of truth, that “whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux that produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.”

Wallace’s narration looks at Caines by means of looking away from him. His decision to orient the logic of the essay around Caines is a deliberate one. In reading this essay for a college course on aesthetic encounters, a friend of mine said she found Wallace’s treatment of Caines as a character “totally disgusting” for trying to fit him into some grand story of metaphysics — using Caines, perhaps, as grist for Federer’s mill. Maybe what Wallace is doing here is repulsive. But at the same time, Wallace’s write-up can’t exist without the kid with cancer; it would be just as dishonest to omit him from the story as it would be to assert that all weakness is weak because it is bad. He’s a kid, you know. He didn’t deserve to have cancer. One knows this cognitively. Unfortunately, many children have cancer, and I don’t know most of their names. I only know William Caines’s name because he was in proximity to the great tennis player Roger Federer when the great writer David Foster Wallace was covering his game.

The task of criticism, then, can be seen as that of the negotiation between two domains: that of the beautiful — that which is aesthetically powerful and compelling and gives us an impression — and that of those who are not powerful — those who have not been allowed to exercise the highest potentialities of human freedom, who are waiting in the wings of history just on the edge of sight. Wallace cannot avoid being implicated within the piece, in praising his choice of subject in Federer and thus having to contend with all that does not fit justly into this praise. What is honest and compelling in Wallace’s writing is its appreciation of the stakes of being affected by art and its recognition of the clear impossibility of holding both of these truths in hand. He has managed to be both a thinker and a stylist.

As Theodor Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, “Abstract temporal sequence plays in reality the part one would like to ascribe to the hierarchy of feelings…The irreversibility of time constitutes an objective moral criterion.” There is an accidental element in why we come to know and love one work of art and not another, and this accidental element is directly contrary to freedom. In art, as in love, we are compelled without knowing why. To realize this is completely crushing. The element of the arbitrary is a more interesting way to think about all injustice which is carried, imperfectly, into the present. It is clear, for example, that despite the dominance of meritocratic ideology, the wealthiest denizens of private enterprise do not constitute their own sort of golden-souled person, that the injustice of hereditary wealth or status does not map plainly to any objective standard of goodness, either. In exploring these dimensions, art can draw attention to the mechanisms of injustice or show the world as it could be otherwise.

Indeed, by displaying a process of identification, the critic builds credibility. Here, she goes after the reader who is her own “kind of person,” considering her various chosen and unchosen affinities for and memberships in different social, political, or economic groups, for whom the work of art may have sparked a similar emotional response. When a critic who is attuned to the unseen logics and assumptions that govern the worlds that novelists create and the arguments that nonfiction writers build is also savvy about their own identity and placement within the world, they can meet the reader as a person who is deeply affected by art. It is only through demonstrating their process of observation and careful questioning of the text by the critic-as-reader that the critic-as-stylist builds authority and makes legitimate the call to a public to recognize the social fact of our own aesthetic engagement.

Adorno pulls out what Kant knew well about art, that we feel its beauty due to the sensation that every piece within it has a purpose which contributes to an ultimately harmonious whole. Characters serve their purposes as they are needed for the plot of a novel and are honored in being a part of its cohesion; real life does not work this way, despite how badly we might want it to be so. Simplifying and thematizing others, judging them before knowing, are also ways of making sense of the world; these acts do not necessarily make better people even as they draw groups and categories that are easier to understand. That gap between life and art is the reason why making sense of the world is not an inherently ethical project. In fact, the temptation to resolve can cut off one’s process of thinking about realities that really might be impossible to square — that both good and bad things happen to people who do not deserve them; that the world, unlike art, does not appear as a work of caring and deliberate design.

This complex and morally implicated relationship of the human to art within the world gives rise to the duty that critics have, to contend with the sweeping force of beautiful style. That means we must write about the works which captivate thinking people. When one particular work of art resonates with and affects many people in a particular historical moment, we can ask why it resonates and, with an eye toward history, what it means that it does. The critic’s task is to acknowledge, without looking down on the reader, what feels good about the art, and to still reach for something better — to defend better expressions of ideals from their semblances.

After all, people read criticism primarily in order to decide how to devote their limited time, to determine which art to experience, and with what sort of attitude. The purpose of a work of criticism is typically thought of as an exercise in judgment; a book review, for example, will contain within it an assessment of whether the critic believes the book is good or bad — for whatever reasons they may give — either worth reading or not. Over the course of the review, the critic may impart a positive or negative impression to the reader of a work of which they are not yet familiar, or they may change a reader’s mind about a work of art about which the reader has already formed an opinion.

It’s not hard to argue, though, that whatever judgment or “takeaway” emerges from a work of criticism is the least interesting thing about the piece. Readers come into criticism with an open mind, which could be changed by the critic strong-arming them into agreement or coaxing the reader’s mind into its own sort of questioning. While knowledge of a canon will serve a critic well, her judgments themselves are not the sort of knowledge production that produces a fact that stands against time. Neither is the critic a pure stylist. Eloquence is, as has been argued, an altogether different skill from writing well; if writers possess it, its presence is incidental. Beautiful style alone will bludgeon you to death with agreement. Its substance is the sheer force of like or dislike. Consider the story of Ion, Socrates’s interlocutor who, as a rhapsode, knows not where his art comes from. To put too much of an emphasis on the judgment of “good or bad art” itself, to speak of the ability to judge as divinely ordained, puts a wall between the reader and the critic who has been trained to speak and write beautifully and convincingly.

I am suspicious, then, of criticism that functions primarily as entertainment: real-time speech as overly neat or too-formed, written work that seems to bypass or evade struggle in coming to a judgment. No matter how extensively the written-out argument is edited, the authority comes from making the process of thinking clear and transparent rather than using style to gloss over these steps. Such work positions the critic as being possessed with a sort of gift, as speaking from a pulpit to tell the people what to like or dislike. When we intervene in a domain which is primarily that of enjoyment for the majority of people, we must counter the shallow sort of market force that tells people they must consume what is most popular and most readily pleasurable, or that a “reader” or an “intellectual” is an identity label to be touted and commodified. To practice criticism in the wrong way reinscribes the problems of the market with another sort of market: that which criticism sells by continuing to validate the reader’s own judgments or pleasurably overriding them. Either the reader continues to feel good about what they were already consuming, or, having been chided by the critic’s authority, they nod in the shameful delight of having been corrected.

The contemporary critic’s aesthetic judgment, with all its moral and political implications, is situated in time; it is about not truth, and therefore contributes to no bank of knowledge. Instead, it is about meaning. Meaning is the last remaining truth-claim, the truth which remains after the abolition of all truth: that the human mind will always be looking for a direction. It is the task of the critic to direct it — and to direct it, perhaps, against the force of the arbitrary, both in its thinking position toward the work of art and in how it ultimately frames and illustrates its judgment.

What is most important to the practical meaning that readers make from works of art is that art teaches us how to live through imagination, beyond the arbitrary. Good criticism is attentive to these stakes outside of the internal experience of art. We know, looking inward from our daily lives, that literature provides the appearance of escape. But what is the reality of escape? I’d posit it begins with thinking as the center of the reader’s judgment, which requires the critic to earn authority, first and foremost, by showing her work.

To criticize properly is to show the process of judgment as available to another person, to cultivate a reflective and critical attitude — to struggle with what we like. This means we should ask more of our readers. A more Socratic model of the critic is one with faith that judgment can be taught. A good teacher can think with you, and a good critic invites you into the practice of judging with them. The critic with this attitude towards the reader understands the connections between teaching good reading, good thinking, and good writing. Close-reading, allowing oneself to be affected by a text, understanding why they are affected by it, and wrestling with the text’s ideas, leads (by mediation of this stilted form) to the good thinking which can become that writing which truly is good. In the completion of this process, the stylist and the thinker are reconciled.

Perhaps the beginning stages of thinking are those which are not typically understood as beautiful; perhaps we might resist the embarrassment of uttering them ourselves. But I am arrested by this awkward form of speech and charmed by its honest struggle to communicate the singularity of aesthetic experience into that which is interpretable. In speaking, our singular experience disappears; we become trapped, implicated in meaning. Yet such is the only possible path toward understanding, toward being seen by another person. There are some of us who are metaphysically possessed with artfulness or trained in the mobilization of texts, and those are the people who most often end up as professional critics. But thinking, as the substance of criticism and of democracy, is that which is most necessary to teach. It is for us all.

*What follows is an excerpt from a conversation between Josie Barboriak and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Josie’s essay.

In our conversation, coming Friday, we discuss The Magic Mountain, crushing on Markiplier, having CIA in the family, Mating, and the attractiveness of certain well-known critics.

Below is a taste.*

RUFUS Where are you from, Josie?

JOSIE I’m from Durham, North Carolina. That’s where I am right now.

RUFUS What’s in your childhood library?

JOSIE Okay, let me look at what’s actually from childhood. I really like these books called The Penderwicks, which is just like these siblings having a fun time.

TESSA Oh, stop everything. The Penderwicks are my favorite…I was obsessed.

JOSIE I’m looking at what else I had as a child, like the Wildwood books, those were great, and The Hate U Give, from being an ally.

ELAN Never read that one.

RUFUS I never read that one either.

TESSA You know, me neither. Everyone was telling me to read it, so I didn’t want to read it.

JOSIE I read it. I was assigned it, but I read it like a month earlier than it was assigned so I felt better than everyone else, in, like, ninth grade.

TESSA Can I ask what your favorite Penderwicks book was?

JOSIE Oh my gosh, it’s been a while. I really like the one where they’re at the ocean — the first one, the main one?

TESSA The one where they meet Jeffrey?

JOSIE Yes, of course.

TESSA Were you attracted to Jeffrey in that book?

JOSIE Was I what?

TESSA Were you attracted to Jeffrey in that book? Were you like, Yes, Skye Penderwick, you should have a crush on him?

JOSIE I think I was too young to have a sexual interest at the time. I never really got attracted to book characters.

RUFUS Really?

JOSIE I’m lucky that I don’t have that kind of affliction.

*Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.*

THE YOUNG AMERICANS