Showing Your Work
Postscript No. 11 | Josie Barboriak on the critic and her publics
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Josie Barboriak and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Josie’s essay “Good Reading, Good Thinking, Good Writing.”
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Below we discuss The Magic Mountain, crushing on Markiplier, having CIA in the family, Mating, and the irony and attractiveness of critics.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
JOSIE …I have a bone to pick with how everything I’ve read by Merve Emre is described as ironic. Like, it’s all irony. It’s irony all the way down.
TESSA Can you say something about that? Because you do have that line in your piece, where you talk about how Emre says Rothfeld doesn’t understand Rooney’s irony.
JOSIE Yeah, with irony, it really puts a wall between the person who got the irony and the person who didn’t. It also ignores the fact that I think most people who read Sally Rooney did not really take it ironically. We’re like, Wow, this is a romance novel. I see myself in this character. And obviously anything that’s successfully ironic can also be taken straight, but it’s a hard tactic to use. And I’m sure I’ll end up talking about this later, but I’ve definitely been thinking about this in conjunction with my reading of Nietzsche. I’ve been pondering to what extent I should have actually written this piece using Merve Emre as some kind of occasion to talk about criticism, and how maybe this is a truth that I should have kept within the University of Chicago and the people who were in attendance at these particular events.
RUFUS Why do you say that?
JOSIE Because I think Emre’s an academic who speaks publicly, and it’s very hard to move through all of these different publics. Her podcast, which I haven’t really listened to, is called “The Critic and Her Publics.” There are so many publics, so many groups of people in which you may or may not be understood. When you’re trying to build up or understand critical authority, there are two kinds of risks all of the time, and I don’t know which is worse.
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