This Thing We Call Literature

In his fourth book of essays, acclaimed cultural critic Arthur Krystal surveys the world of letters in its academic, literary, and populist incarnations--just to make sure those divisions still apply. What he finds is that the ground has shifted. With Lionel Trilling at his back, Krystal casts a cold eye on contemporary culture and discerns a lack of discrimination between the truly great and the merely good, and the fairly good and just plain bad. Critical but not angst-ridden, he deplores tunnel vision on both sides of the culture wars. Presumptive cultural boundaries have no place here. Krystal admires Bob Dylan and Elmore Leonard without including them in a purely literary pantheon. He endorses the Great Books without necessarily voting the Republican ticket. In essays about the meaning of the novel, the role of music in poetry, genre fiction vs. literary fiction, the contributions of the superlative critic Erich Auerbach, and the strange alliance of neurology and aesthetics, as well as in lighter pieces about reviewing and list-making, Krystal brings his own brand of discriminating intelligence to a spectrum of received opinions whose flaws and cracks otherwise go unnoticed.

Table of Contents:
Author's Note 1. Prélude. 2. A Sad Road to Everything 3. Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures without the Guilt 4. It's Genre. Not That There's Anything Wrong with It 5. What is Literature? 6. Should Writers Reply to Reviewers? 7. LISTEN To The Sound It Makes 8. Listing Toward Oblivion 9. Erich Auerbach: The Critic in Exile 10. "The Shrinking World of Ideas Postscript

About the Author :
Arthur Krystal has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. He is the author of The Half-Life of an American Essayist, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, and Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic. He lives in New York City.

Review :
"I picked this book for reasons that are fairly obvious, and it actually didn't come out this year. It came out in 2016, and it's a collection of essays called This Thing We Call Literature by Arthur Krystal. He's a book reviewer and literary critic, and I read something he wrote early on this year and was so blown away by it that I had to go buy the book. He's a really clear, simple, direct writer. In this time, in the Trump era, where there's a backlash against postmodernism and there are these culture wars and conflicts, especially concerning academia, Krystal's book is really a defense of the canon, or at least, a defense of the idea that we should be arguing for the value of a canon. He has such a measured, enjoyable tone." -- Rider Strong via "Literary Disco's Best Books We Read [in 2018]", Literary Hub "As Jeremiahs go, Arthur Krystal is an affable, erudite one, who dispenses his opinions with humour but also with steel [...] A typical Krystal essay or review balances insight, sense and humour [...] This Thing We Call Literature is 'essentially a lament and not a condemnation of the general literary culture' although there is condemnation of those who trumpet the new as the great, or elevate the second rateâ [H]is longest essay is a consideration of Erich Auerbach [...] a well-rounded portrait of a man who seemed to share Dante's sense of tragic destiny [...] a critic with occasional failings, but a master of the philological approach to literature. Krystal's interest in Auerbach suggests there is life in high culture yet." -- Tony Roberts, PN Review "Arthur Krystal's fourth collection, This Thing We Call Literature, gathers ten essays on a double subject: the special dialogue that connects one reader with one author, and what all such dialogues have in common .... The mid-century proponents of general ideas of culture and literature have faded, and the ideas have faded with them. In striking contrast, Krystal's essay on Auerbach celebrates a way of reading that seems perennially and immediately present: in Auerbach's phrase about a soul in Dante's paradise, "a living reality." Krystal's essay achieves criticism's most useful task: it sends a reader back to an author with renewed excitement." --Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books "...[Krystal's] subjects are writing and reading, once acknowledged as practices central to being a thoughtful, reasonably well-educated person, and now the objects of casual disparagement and neglect, threatened with slow extinction. An unapologetically bookish (though seldom pedantic) fellow, Krystal does his damnedest to sound hopeful but is too honest to fall for happy talk...Obvious here is Krystal's celebratory impulse. In each of his essays, he reminds us there is much to lament but even more to revel in. A well-read person is more likely to be good company than a nonreader, he suggests. A love of books implies, but doesn't guarantee, a sensibility of substance. The world is littered with bookish boors and monsters. Perhaps literature is merely the thing that fills the literature-shaped hole inside some of us. Krystal always returns to the reader, one person alone with a book and the tradition from which it emerges." --Patrick Kurp, Los Angeles Review of Books "Krystal is a gifted essayist, and those who have read him over the years will find everything they've come to appreciate about his style in This Thing Called Literature--the bold pronouncements, the expertly timed hedge, the fluid prose, and the wide reading." --The American Conservative "Several times on each page Arthur Krystal writes something you want to remember, something you know will come in handy and qualify as what Kenneth Burke called 'equipment for living.' This slows down reading, of course, which is always a good thing, and leaves some pages almost opaque with underlinings and notes, but Krystal regularly writes things you may have thought in passing, or wish you had, but failed to articulate in words. ... Detractors will dismiss him as 'elitist' or 'reactionary' but he is neither. He really loves literature. That used to be a not uncommon condition, like being able to sing in key or do the backstroke. Now it's come to feel like having a notably trivial hobby." --Anecdotal Evidence "If you've never had the pleasure - and challenge - of reading the witty, trenchant cultural criticism of Arthur Krystal, who's been called "the George Clooney of the essay world," you might start with his new collection This Thing We Call Literature. The Clooney reference fits because Krystal's prose is confident, intimate, seductive...[A] commitment to the serious or high minded need not rule out humor, charm, self-deprecation. [Krystal's] screed is against the loss of literary standards; against those who value the ordinary and the meretricious equally with the classic and essential; against those for whom craft and discipline seem to matter less than "sharing" their feelings." --WSHU Radio