Over the last couple of months, I’ve written five lengthy posts about A Drunken Dream Fantagraphics’ collection of stories by the great shojo manga-ka Moto Hagio. I’ve spent so much time on this book for a number of reasons. Hagio is a central figure in the history of shojo, a genre in which I’m interested. Matt Thorn, the volume’s editor and translator, is one of the most important manga critics around,so anything he does is worth thinking about carefully. And, finally, this is meant to be the first in a series of reissues of classic shojo tales by Fantagraphics. That’s an exceedingly worthwhile project, and I wanted to draw attention to it.
To finish up my series, I thought I’d look briefly at what other critics have said about A Drunken Dream.
I certainly haven’t been alone in seeing this book as important. Deb Aoki at About.com gave it 4.5 stars and said it was “a long overdue glimpse into Hagio’s 40-year career. Melinda Beasi picked it as her book of the week, calling it gorgeous. David Welsh in a discussion of the best manga of the year similarly, if more somberly, commented that on best of the year lists, “Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (Fantagraphics) didn’t seem to make much of an impression outside of dedicated manga readers, which is disappointing to me as a dedicated manga reader.”
So…many stars, pick of the week, should be on best of lists. Check, check…check! Sounds good! Long awaited collection by a manga master, critics love it — there must be a lot of juicy articles out there discussing why the book is so wonderful, right? Right?
Well, as you’ve probably guessed, that is not right. It is wrong. Because, while there has been a lot of praise directed at the book, there has been very little sustained criticism beyond vague generalities. The book is Important, it Moves People Deeply, it is Beautiful and the work of a Great Artist — but why it’s important, what’s moving, and the exact nature of the beauty in question are all tripped over lightly. Wonderful as this book is, it seems, it hasn’t actually inspired anyone to want to pause for a moment to, you know, think about it.
For a flavor of what’s out there, here’s a discussion of probably the most accomplished story, “Hanshin,” by two different reviewers.
Other stories explore the complexity of familial relationships. “Hanshin: Half-God,” for example, depicts conjoined twins with a rare medical condition that leaves one brilliant but physically deformed and the other simple but radiantly beautiful. When a life-threatening condition necessitates an operation to separate them, Yudy, the “big sister,” imagines it will liberate her from the responsibility of caring for and about Yucy, never considering the degree to which she and Yucy are emotionally interdependent.
From there, it’s fascinating to watch Hagio set aside visual delicacy for a style that matches her unflinching commitment to emotional detail. Take “Hanshin: Half-God,” a tale of conjoined twins. One is beautiful but virtually unable to function, with her bright, starved, ugly sister literally doing all of the heavy lifting. The amount of punch Hagio derives from the scenario is just staggering.
Both of these short reviews are essentially plot summaries; they frame the story as emotional melodrama, about the interactions between two sisters. Unfortunately, Hanshin is not a story that is about its plot; it’s poetic and evocative, not primarily narrative. The conflation and confusion of identity that’s at the core of the story is completely lost — unmentioned in Welsh’s review and turned into “emotional interdependence” in Dacey’s. Both assume that which the story insistently question, i.e., whether there are two people there at all. Or for that matter, even one.
I’ve enjoyed work by Kate and David in the past; Kate’s actually been kind enough to post on HU a couple of times, and one of her thoughtful comments inspired a roundtable on HU earlier this year, which she helped organize. But despite my appreciation for their work, in this case, I think Kate and David’s approach to Hagio — basically a few sentence discussions of each story focusing on plot with a few quick accolades — is almost completely useless. Or perhaps worse than useless. After reading those descriptions of Hanshin, you’d think that it was about a moral or about relationships. In short, you’d actually know less about the story than you would have if you hadn’t read a review at all.
There have been a few discussions of the book that have taken a more fruitful approach. I think without exception, they’ve been by people writing from outside the manga blogosphere; people who don’t see themselves as especially focused on shojo or manga. Joe McCulloch at Comics Comics covered the comic only briefly, but managed to pin down both the book’s thematic obsessions and its (not inconsiderable) faults.
The other nine stories are b&w, but proceed in much the same way – pioneer Hagio’s identity here, now, is that of a super-direct communicator of torment in the absence of love and the thrall of art. She is not a subtle worker — remember, some of this work is squarely aimed at children, rarely suggesting any poetic image or lingering character motivation that won’t eventually be spelled out via dialogue or narration — and some stories lapse into a self-pitying rapture, only kept from falling to pieces by artful visual compositions. A near-wordless vision of a ghostly woman watching a boy grow to a man (inevitably capped by a tearful confrontation!) borders on saccharine, while a double-barreled blast of soap opera sees a suicidal girl hauled off death’s doorstep by a rough but handsome man who *gasp* turns out to be her new biology professor, resulting in detailed, evolution-themed educational segments (not unlike the learning bits in Golgo 13 or a Kazuo Koike manga) inevitably lashed to Our Heroine’s Dark Secret. “I wonder if humans will evolve into angels?” she muses, probably gauging the reader’s appetite for comics of this tone.
I actually think there’s more subtle poetry there than Joe does, and I think Hagio is at her best when she’s not being as direct as all that — but “communicator of torment in the absence of love and the thrall of art” is a phrase that can’t be much improved upon.
Probably the best review of A Drunken Dream was written by another CC contributor, Nicole Rudick. Rudick placed Hagio in the context of science-fiction and fantasy creators like Tarkovsky, Cocteau, and Philip K. Dick, arguing that the central theme of the manga-ka’s work is fantasy vs. reality, or internal worlds vs. external ones.
The confusion about what exists as fantasy and what exists in reality is especially well done in “Hanshin,” where the conjoined twins—simultaneously a single being and two distinct people, one ugly, one beautiful—are mirrors of one another, interchangeable reflections. This relationship offers the possibility of transcendence, but only for one sister, and Hagio leaves the ending unresolved in the same way the ending to “Iguana Girl” is unsettled: How much of the character’s conflict exists only in her mind? And does that make it any less “real”? The notion that there might not be one, objective reality is echoed in the fiction of Philip K. Dick, who had published most of his novels the decade before Hagio began writing the earliest tales in this collection (they span from 1977 to 2007). I’m not certain, however, whether Dick’s work would have been translated into Japanese by then, so it seems unlikely she was influenced by him. Still, the theme of powerfully shifting perceptions is significant in the narratives of both writers.
Again, I don’t agree with all of Reddick’s review; I think she glosses over the clumsiness with which Hagio handles these themes in some cases (as in “Bianca”) But she’s absolutely right that Hagio’s strongest stories center not on what happens, but on what may or may not be happening — and to who, if anyone.
The last review I want to discuss is a much maligned piece by Chris Mautner. Like Rudick and Jog, Chris is not primarily writing for a manga crowd, and his essay reflects that. It’s focused primarily on trying to think about how alt comics folks will react to Hagio’s work.
Dream, on the other hand, has both feet firmly planted in the world of shojo manga. The ten tales that make up this book all consist of overly sincere, heart-on-the-sleeve-style work. There’s very little ironic distancing and self-effacing humor here, although it does peep its head out occasionally. Mostly though, that’s been ignored in favor of heightened melodrama and earnest heart-tugging. While it avoids the sort of contrived, romantic, situation-comedy type plots that mark a lot of the shojo manga that has been translated into English over the past decade, there can be little doubt that Dream has more in common with Fruits Basket and Boys Over Flowers than Red Colored Elegy or Abandon the Old in Tokyo.
As I said, Chris (who has also posted here) has been raked over the coals for this approach, both by Matt Thorn in comments and (less confrontationally) by David Welsh. Both Thorn and Welsh argued that Chris was denigrating femininity — lumping Hagio in with modern shojo and damning them all as over-earnest melodrama for those who like pink. Chris disavowed any such prejudice and apologized.
All of which rather obscured the fact that his review, whatever its faults, was actually trying to struggle with a fairly important issue — which is, how are we supposed to place, or think about Hagio’s work? Is Drunken Dream an art comic? Is it just another example of shojo genre fiction? If it’s an art comic, how do we reconcile its genre trappings, its sporadic clumsiness, and its sometimes painful forays into cliche? If it’s genre fiction, are we interested in it for historical reasons — and/or why should a modern audience pay attention to it rather than to genre fiction that is more modern and less clearly dated? Chris sees “A Drunken Dream” as problematic — in terms of how to classify it, how to evaluate it, how to think about it and how to approach it. He doesn’t arrive at any answers, and (as he’d be the first to admit, I think) his piece has some serious problems (though I’m inclined to think it’s because he was not sufficiently harsh, rather than because he was unfair.) But, in any case, he’s asking questions that need to be asked when you look at a work like “Drunken Dream” which is, for various reasons and in various ways, difficult.
Kate and David and other writers focused mostly on manga (like Ed Sizemore) didn’t ask those questions. Kate did provide some historical context for the stories, which was certainly helpful — but historical context isn’t really the issue. Instead, what I’m talking about is the difference between a review aimed at buy/not-buy, and criticism aimed at struggling with a work’s themes and inner logic, and with its place as a work of art within the world of comics and beyond.
I want to be clear: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buy/not-buy reviews. I publish that kind of writing on HU all the time (by, for example kinukitty) and I’m pleased and proud to do so. And I have no doubt that, for example, Deb Aoki knows her audience quite well, and is entirely justified in thinking that they, as a whole, are not especially interested in (let’s say) a 10,000 word discussion of mirror imagery in Hagio’s stories.
But I also think that an audience that isn’t especially interested in a discussion of mirror imagery in Hagio’s stories is not, unfortunately, likely to be interested in the stories all that much either. I quoted David Welsh earlier expressing some distress that A Drunken Dream hadn’t garnered more popular enthusiasm. But surely that lack of popular enthusiasm is of a piece with the lack of critical engagement. VM is going to have my head for saying this, but…I do think that, compared to art comix, there is little writing from within the manga community that is firmly committed to criticism as opposed to review. I don’t see that as an evil thing, or even as a sign of intellectual laziness — it’s just an indication of what people are interested in. I do believe, though, that as long as those interests are what they are, it’s going to be difficult to find an audience for something like “A Drunken Dream,” which, despite its genre links, doesn’t fit easily into current marketing demographics, and which, therefore, has to live or die as art.
(Does one serve red or white with severed head? I’ve always wondered. Maybe Julia Child says.)
I think there’s two reasons you’re not seeing critical engagement. One, you’re hanging in the wrong places, and two, you’re looking for single-voice, single-work critical engagement in article format.
The critical engagement I see most often is female-based and more of a multi-voiced conversation, often topic centered rather than work centered, and tends to be in female-centric spaces where we’re safe from being mansplained at by the comics boyz. A lot of those discussions are not, hm, even public, taking place in locked communities and frequently occurring not when a work is published by Fanta, but when it’s scanlated. (I know, I know, but so it is.) Sometimes it’s spread out over various private journals and very little of it is tagged or organized.
For instance, I remember a really complicated, really interesting discussion of Underground Hotel, which took places years ago on YD. I doubt anyone is even reviewing it now–it’s considered a classic and was recently released in liscensed paper but I think the critics either already read it and had their discussions or are understandably leery about talking about it publicly or are exceedingly grumpy at the lousy production values. The only discussions I’ve read of the published work are in locked private spaces.
And I can see why. I mean, the last time I posted publicly in my journal about such topics, I had a mainsplainer show up out of the blue within ten minutes, telling me I was wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. It was baffling. Ten minutes. It’s very hard to have a critical conversation at a high level when there’s so much 101 noise. I think a lot of the art comix crowd underestimate the 101 fatigue and plain old misogyny that has driven the manga discussions underground.
I read a couple of reviews of Drunken Dream not mentioned here, one of which was positive but in a reserved way. You can see some of here:
http://oyceter.livejournal.com/tag/a%3A%20hagio%20moto
Personally, I don’t think Hagio is being written up that much because it’s not really that, um, interesting? That’s my guess, anyway. Short stories are a hard sell at the best of times and the art is very old-style. I don’t see this particular work as appealing to the critics I normally read who are primarily interested in the long form (multi volumes). It may be a fine choice to publish as a gateway drug, but for those already addicted to manga….well, I’m not planning to buy it.
I’m not easily convinced to buy something just because it’s of historical value; manga is expensive and I want my pleasure now, dammit.
I doubt I could muster up the enthusiasm to natter on for 10k about Hagio. Loveless, yes (in fact, I could probably write a book. Or five.) Underground Hotel, absofuckinglutely. Fruits Basket, of course. Dr Ten, yes. I would be very leery of writing up any of those but Furuba in public, however.
“A lot of those discussions are not, hm, even public, taking place in locked communities”
That may well be — but seems like kind of its own problem in terms of creating a space for non-standard work. You need a public discussion to get the word out I think; especially about a work like this that isn’t going to necessarily appeal to the the fan demographic.
“Personally, I don’t think Hagio is being written up that much because it’s not really that, um, interesting? That’s my guess, anyway. Short stories are a hard sell at the best of times and the art is very old-style. I don’t see this particular work as appealing to the critics I normally read who are primarily interested in the long form (multi volumes).”
This is kind of the point. Hagio is not appealing to critics who are interested in the shojo genre as genre. If it’s going to spark a conversation, it’s going to spark a conversation because it’s art, and seen as such. That requires a discussion which includes people who are not fans — and who are going to be skeptical. Locked communities filter out the noise, but they also restrict the conversation to like-minded folks. Those like-minded folks aren’t going to be interested in Hagio.
The Oyceter review seems along the same lines as Kate’s and David’s, with perhaps some more detail. I like some of the things she says, but it’s not busting my paradigm….
You need a public discussion to get the word out I think; especially about a work like this that isn’t going to necessarily appeal to the the fan demographic. Well….but is there any reason we should talk up Hagio? To each other or to the public? Hagio bores me, both as genre and as art. I don’t care if it tanks. I’d never have picked it as one to publish.
I’ve got no quarrel with the idea that not a lot of people are talking about Hagio. I only take exception to this recurrent idea that there is, in general, a lack of intellectual manga criticism. I think it exists, but it’s often underground and for good reason.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of risk of writing intellectual manga criticism publicly as a woman. I can’t speak for everyone, but the intellectual-style critics I know personally almost all got stalkers, some of them quite nasty, which is why they all started locking things up or quit writing. It needs to be worth a lot more as art than Hagio to be worth the risk of talking about publicly, I think. And there are certain topics that are known to be wankstorms in the making and plenty of people will avoid criticism that touches on those topics. Like, I’m probably not going to write about Undergrand Hotel because of the whole racism and rape issue, even though it’s kind of a fucking amazing piece of art. It’d get *looks around nervously* er, someone who shall remain nameless out of the woodwork again. (Actually, you might find UH interesting, since it’s a female-written prison movie-style story, except, you know yaoi.)
What in the world — how come “intellectual-style critics” all got stalkers, Vom? Like real stalkers? I’m assuming you don’t mean trolls, but…what in the world?
Oh yes, I absolutely do mean real world stalkers.
Wooooow.
As to why, god only knows but it’s pretty common when women talk online about things that are traditionally male-dominated. There was an article about the sexualized violent threats against, geez, I forget her name now–she wrote one of the big books on HTML coding.
Writing about race and gender can make people flip out.
VM, I have my own reservations about Hagio’s work. Some of it’s wonderful, some of it not so much. But if people don’t want to engage in public, intellectual criticism, for whatever reason, the space for work that requires a public, intellectual space for its existence is going to be severely curtailed.
Nobody has a responsibility to write about anything they don’t want to. But what people choose to write about is tied into what gets written about. Stuff that doesn’t fit easily into current marketing categories, like Hagio, is going to be a hard sell if there isn’t an active community interested in work that defies current marketing categories. Such a community exists, more or less, for alt comics, and even to some extent for super-hero comics. I think it’s less present in manga circles. The links you’ve provided on occasion to LJ forums and the like haven’t really changed my mind about that.
I should maybe say again that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself; it all depends on what you’re looking for from your criticism. And I also am not saying that we need more of a different kind of criticism in order to make more work like Hagio’s available. Rather, I think it’s that more work like Hagio’s won’t become available until more people are interested in that kind of criticism; that is, the criticism and the greater diversity of art would both be made possible by a change in interest on the part of the people who focus on manga. But I think the criticism would be a result of the change in interest more than a cause of it.
And the risk of this comes specifically from writing intellectual manga criticism and writing it as a woman? What’s the prejudice that’s triggering that?
Noah may be underestimating this risk, but I didn’t even know it WAS a risk. (At least, not that it was more of a risk than any public speech.)
I’m trying not to estimate it at all; I don’t think it affects my argument one way or the other….
But…writing online as a woman can trigger unpleasantness. Writing about race or gender or class issues can do so especially (though that may not be what VM is seeing as intellectual criticism solely…?) I know I lost the chance to publish at least one writer because she was being cyberstalked…though she didn’t write about manga, didn’t write in an especially intellectual way, and the stalking was linked to her online persona but not because of controversial opinions specifically, as far as I know.
In any case, it’s somewhat depressing to think that there’s not more engaged manga criticism publicly available because trollish wackos are essentially policing it. I wonder if Stephanie and kinukitty see things this way as well? Maybe they’ll weigh in….
OK, so it’s not uniquely bad for manga writers?
I mean, I know that women writing online, especially writing about feminist issues, get a disproportionate lot of nasty and degrading comments and letters, some of which are actionable as violent threats. I think Sierra’s maybe the person you’re talking about, VM?
But I haven’t heard that they get actual physical stalkers, though, at least not at a particularly higher rate than anybody else. The severity of Sierra’s case appears to be unusual for mainstream writers. If that’s happening to women in the manga community (et al.), that seems like an especially serious ante-upping.
Detailed discussions of gender, race, nature of relationships, homosexuality, consensuality in various manga, are the examples I can think of off the top of my head. Since a lot of manga is titillating, I suspect that’s part of it, since sex always attracts the crazy. I guess I’ve seen it happen so often I kind of forget all the various details of the arguments of what tipped people off into crazy land. But it’s definitely a risk, yes.
Maybe it’s gotten better, as I don’t follow a lot of the up and comers these days. The big (ie, scariest) ones I can think of are from two to three years ago and there’s at least three of them, but you know, my circle is pretty small so it had/has a big impact, I guess. Some of the ones I know about aren’t public.
Oh, saw your comment after, Caro. Yes, that’s the one I was thinking of.
I’m not sure I’d say it’s particularly worse or better than the rest of the online community. I don’t have any idea. Outside of the comics and social circles, I mostly read pet forums, which are also mostly female and never seemed to have stalkers of any sort, which may make it more of a sharp contrast? Arguments, sure (just try to talk about which pet food is better, OH MY GOD.)
I suspect part of it is that the other ones I’m thinking of, the ones more, in person and very manga specific, had to do with homosexuality, now I think of it, which is definitely a manga thing more than one might see in, say, geekery in general? I don’t know whether it’s OK to talk about the details, except that it was quite scary.
Noah:
“Unfortunately, Hanshin is not a story that is about its plot; it’s poetic and evocative, not primarily narrative”
Hanshin is one of the most directly narrative stories I’ve ever read in comics, let alone manga; a goes to b goes to c, in an inexorable, almost brutal way.
VM: basically, your complaint boils down to “those mean guys!”.
Look, if your critiques are going to be inaccessible behind firewalls– as far as I’m concerned, as far as the world is concerned, they don’t exist. It’s futile of you to exalt their quality. They are non-existent, Vom.
It’s problematic for you to ask that this intellectual and sexist horror be accepted on pure faith.
And this:
VM
“I think you’re underestimating the amount of risk of writing intellectual manga criticism publicly as a woman. I can’t speak for everyone, but the intellectual-style critics I know personally almost all got stalkers, some of them quite nasty, which is why they all started locking things up or quit writing. It needs to be worth a lot more as art than Hagio to be worth the risk of talking about publicly, I think.”
Vom… we ARE talking about comics, you know?
You’re not bravely leaking facts about the regime in Myanmar, okay?
Have a little perspective. If some male acts like a misogynist creep about a shojo manga, ask yourself: what kind of nerdy doof would even think to comment on this viciously?
So you take your precautions, have the creep banned and warned, e basta cosi!
Don’t fall into the ‘self-defined victim’ trap.
Since I received the Hagio book in the same package as the first volume of Cross Game, Adachi’s latest series, I suppose a comparison between them was inevitable for me, despite their differences. Basically Adachi is a lot more commercially popular than Hagio- he’s as big as anyone in Japan- and like Hagio, works within genre fiction idioms without being subservient to them. Also like Hagio, Adachi is an incredible cartoonist with a ton of work out there that will quite possibly never come out, possibly because of the manga and anime community’s fickle relationship with surface style.
Also- “I doubt anyone is even reviewing it now–it’s considered a classic and was recently released in liscensed paper but I think the critics either already read it and had their discussions or are understandably leery about talking about it publicly or are exceedingly grumpy at the lousy production values.” This is very depressing to me. How bad would the production values have to be for you to not support financially the release of a book that you love? I understand economic hardship, but if we don’t support the authors of the works we enjoy… sigh. You know the rest of the lecture. Sorry for bringing it up.
Hmmm.. just read a description of “Under Grand Hotel”. I think I get the wariness a bit better now. Sounds like a pretty interesting exercise.
“VM: basically, your complaint boils down to “those mean guys!”.”
Oy, Alex.
Sexism is basically about “those mean guys.” That’s how it works. Sneering at people when they point out that it’s a problem isn’t bravely flying in the face of conventional wisdom. It’s adding to the problem.
Harassment online can be wearisome, very upsetting, and can have real-world effects if the harasser is willing to escalate sufficiently (messing with accounts, contacting employers, or what have you.) VM is talking also here about having it escalate to actual stalking, which can lead in some cases to physical violence. The person I was trying to get to write for HU who had to give up her online presence because of stalking had kids. Dismissing her very real concerns about her and their safety because they don’t happen to live in Myanmar is, if you’ll pardon the expression, really fucking stupid. And it’s why feminists have had an uneasy relationship with the left for a long time, since lefties like yourself seem unable to help yourselves from making these kind of idiotic equivalencies, the point of which is always that the problems of other people far away are more important than the problems of folks closer to home.
I’m not entirely sure that I agree with VM that this dynamic has especially hurt manga criticism — but it certainly can have an effect on women’s participation online.
“Hanshin is one of the most directly narrative stories I’ve ever read in comics, let alone manga; a goes to b goes to c, in an inexorable, almost brutal way.”
I think this just makes no sense, Alex. The actual plot is almost nonexistent, and the reality of all of it is extremely suspect.
Having said that…your summary there is actually more helpful than the reviews I quote above, precisely because you aren’t actually retelling plot points, but are instead focusing on the evocative aspects of the narrative….
Sean,
UGH is really an interesting comic. I think it’s great art, but very very problematic art at the same time. As for the production values, it’s printed on 4″ wide, very cheap newsprint paper, which is just depressing. I’ve heard it’s not possible to read the words, which is why I have waffled on buying it. I probably still will, but I’ll be cranky about it.
>>it’s printed on 4? wide, very cheap newsprint paper>>>
Oh… Yikes! Makes a lot more sense now. Some day there will be an edition of Lone Wolf and Cub that’ll be readable as well….
One day we will have Touch in English and I will be able to stop complaining every time something remotely related to Adachi comes up. Reading Cross Game was just.. delightful and painful. It made me want to get on a plane and find his studio and volunteer myself as a background artist, not because he needs me, but because I want so much to participate in making work like that. (and then maybe I can convince him to stop all the gratuitous self-insertion…)
Noah,
I don’t doubt there are ugly and dangerous males prowling Manga forums. My point is that these are the exception: they are PSYCHOS.
It’s a very different thing when VM stigmatises “mansplainers”- which, basically, seems to mean males who contradict her.
We are still talking about Manga, yes?
Alex…as a less heated response, perhaps….
I don’t think people have an obligation to discuss books publicly. A lot of manga criticism is more keyed in to a kind of book-club, talking among friends model. I think this is the case even for writers who do write publicly, in some cases. That’s not wrong in itself, and can have the advantage of not having to go to first principles at all times, as VM says. But I think it creates problems for a book like Drunken Dream, which is old and in the wrong format and from the wrong publisher. For a work like that to be welcomed, there needs to be a community committed to seeing manga as art within the context of a larger, public conversation about art. And that community isn’t there at the moment (a fact which has positives as well as negatives.)
Ah, hadn’t seen yours Alex when I posted mine, but I think it basically works as a response.
I would note that a couple of psychos can have a large effect on a relatively small community.
Just as a point of interest, I did actually recently review Under Grand Hotel. It was for a column of short reviews (that’s just the structure of the column), and I’m sure it’s not intellectual enough for anyone’s taste here, but I said what I thought was important.
I like that review! And…we run reviews along those lines here with some frequency, damn it. That column in particular is fairly close to what Kinukitty does.
Everything doesn’t have to be intellectual or academic or whatever. I just think it’s hard to make a case for Hagio’s work (or for other work that comes out of left field for whatever reason) if you don’t take a couple steps in that direction. But as you say, there’s not particularly any reason to do that for a BL column aimed at people who are already committed to the genre.
Alex, no. Mainsplaining has a particular meaning. It applies to a dynamic where (typically) uninformed guy leaps into a discussion that is happening among informed women, usually about something female and or/sexism, and tells them how ‘it really is’ in a condescending fashion and expects to be considered an authority because traditionally men have been listened to over women. Mansplainers can be either gender, but typically a man. Hilarious examples include telling women how to cure PMS or that sexism doesn’t exist.
It’s a dynamic that occurs frequently in discussions of gender, feminism, etc. There are variants, like whitesplaining.
Good discussion of the dynamic and the term here:
http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2010/01/28/mansplaining/
vommarlowe said:
“Well….but is there any reason we should talk up Hagio? To each other or to the public? Hagio bores me, both as genre and as art.”
She bores you, maybe, but that’s your problem. :) In my opinion, Hagio’s short stories are not, on the whole, as compelling as her long-format works, none of which are currently (legally) available in English. A Drunken Dream has a few standouts, even if not every story is equally stellar, and it’s interesting as a record of the variety of genres and audiences that Hagio wrote for. (The book is being described as shoujo in most commentary, but only a handful of the stories were actually published as shoujo; there’s seinen and alternative and a lot of josei stories in the mix.)
I challenge anyone to read A Cruel God Reigns and find it boring “as art”, blatantly manipulative melodrama notwithstanding; even if you can’t read Japanese, just picture-reading the pages will still knock you over (and tear your heart out with the aforementioned melodrama). Hagio needs something along the lines of Vertical’s Tezuka binge; a systematic effort to release a significant number of her major works, not as genre comics but as the compiled legacy of a major, influential and genre-spanning creator (I’m hoping Matt Thorn and Fantagraphics will do something about this soon).
On the UGH bunkoban: it’s… a bunkoban. It’s the same size as a Japanese bunko edition, i.e., tiny (A6). Apparently someone on the Japanese end insisted on the bunko edition (I think because there were some art updates?), so that’s what we got. The paper quality is the same as DMP’s other manga; not quite as good as a Japanese release, but not “newsprint”. On the plus side, the bunko edition is two volumes rather than three, so there was less of a wait for the end of the story.
(Actually, you might find UH interesting, since it’s a female-written prison movie-style story, except, you know yaoi.)
Also the mangaka’s admitted influences were a fondness for American pro wrestling and HBO’s “OZ”.
VM, as far as the production values go, I didn’t find UGH all that terrible? Yes, I’d have vastly preferred a larger format to better appreciate the art, and the paper’s not the greatest I’ve ever seen, but it’s no worse than the usual stuff 801 or TokyoPop uses, and the print quality is fine; and as noted above it’s a double-length edition, so while the price is about twice that of the usual Dark Horse Koike bunko, it’s also about twice the page count. I didn’t find the print too small to read, but YM(and eyes)MV, of course.
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Noah:
This is one the snottiest pieces you’ve written to date: it’s a smug, self-congratulatory attempt to prove that you do “criticism” while the rest of us run “book clubs.” I actually wrote a piece of criticism; if you’d bothered to discuss the first part of my essay, you’d have noted that I devoted a number of paragraphs to contextualizing Hagio’s work in the greater history of shojo manga which, last time I checked, was part of the critical process.
I don’t mind the fact you hated A Drunken Dream. I fully recognize that Hagio isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, especially the sentimentality of Drunken Dream‘s earliest stories. But I *do* mind having you dismiss the work I do at my blog, especially when there are many readers — myself included — who don’t think you need to insert the work “hermeneutics” into an essay for it be intelligent.
I have a number of criticisms of your criticisms, Noah, but as I’m not a critic, I probably won’t express them in an appropriate way.
We, the manga blogging community are primarily reviewers. Some of us add context, history, perspective to our reviews. We are not academic writers (although that does exist,) nor are we seeking to do dispassionate literary or artistic criticism. Critical writing is so often no more than personal opinion wrapped in a veil of dispassionate objectivity. (Claiming objectivity in a comment is now grounds for rejection at Okazu, since I don’t believe in the existence of “objectivity.”)
You are looking down your nose at blogs where the primary purpose is to tell people a book exists with the hope that they will buy it. Your comments demean both you and the blogs you chose to be dismissive about.
You’re also setting a bar rather randomly for manga bloggers. “*I’m* looking for this particular kind of discussion, and since none of you are doing it, clearly manga blogging isn’t really worthy.”
Moto Hagio’s work is about emotion, more than execution – although I think her execution is also excellent. She talks about her family, her issues with her mother, how this obsessed her. The stories chose reflect that. But if reviewers talk about this, we’re not being real critics. The historical context of her work you’ve declared irrelavant.
Personally, I find the illusion of objective critical thinking laughably dumb. Seriously – the fact that you didn’t resonate to most of the stories in Drunken Dream is – objectively speaking – the fault of the creator? When I read commentary like that, I find it rather more delusional than objective. All your critical thought comes down to – you just didn’t really like her work. Which is not at all objective, but is really apparent in your reviews.
I really liked Drunken Dream. I can’t compare Moto Hagio with Western artists and other manga artists in a meaningful way. I’m not a art critic. Her stories moved me. The fact that she’s seen as a trailblazer interests and impresses me. I *like* her work. It’s not an objective critical comment – but at least it’s not delusional.
I’m not sure what the point of this post was, other than being a desperate cry for attention. Since people are talking about it, I guess you succeeded.
Well, criticism is certainly a legitimate subject of criticism.
Hey Kate and Erica.
First, I didn’t dislike Drunken Dream. I love some of the stories. I thought others were really bad. My reaction was mixed, not negative. And the whole point of this piece is that I think she should have *more* attention, not less.
Second, Erica, I’m not at all sure what you’re responding to. I didn’t say my reviews were objective. I don’t think they are. I wasn’t asking for objectivity. I was asking for a thesis…a discussion of what about the stories did or did not interest a critic, how that’s tied to other art, to the culture, to poetry, to ideas, and to the world. Ruddick’s essay doesn’t use the word “hermeneutic”, but she connects Hagio’s themes and obsessions to other writers in a way that’s illuminating and interesting. That’s not “objective”, but there’s meat on it in a way that let’s me see where she’s coming from and enter into a conversation with her. Whereas, if you just say “I *like* her,” there’s not really anywhere to go.
“She talks about her family, her issues with her mother, how this obsessed her. The stories chose reflect that. But if reviewers talk about this, we’re not being real critics.”
Actually, I think a piece talking about all those would be great. The historical issues I was talking about were the broader context Kate gave in her piece. I will reread her piece as she suggests, but I didn’t really see much effort to relate those to individual stories, or to construct a thesis around individual stories in that way. I wish I had. But as I said, I’ll read it again.
“You are looking down your nose at blogs where the primary purpose is to tell people a book exists with the hope that they will buy it. ”
I really went out of my way not to look down my nose at anyone. I said over and over and over again that there’s nothing wrong with writing that sort of review, and that I in fact publish such reviews frequently, and even occasionally write that sort of review myself. I noted in the piece that I’ve found Kate’s writing very valuable in various contexts…and I consider myself lucky to publish Erica’s column, which I always find useful and interesting.
My limited point was that the review approach is not especially useful for understanding Hagio, and that as long as that is the prevalent approach, I don’t think work such as hers is going to find the foothold that David and others have hoped it would.
Kate: ” it’s a smug, self-congratulatory attempt to prove that you do “criticism” while the rest of us run “book clubs.””
Nobody knows their own heart, obviously, but such was not my intent. The essay was sparked because I went looking for interesting discussions of A Drunken Dream online, not because I wanted to prove that such didn’t exist.
For the record, there are lots of things I like about the manga blogosphere’s approach to criticism more than I like the art comics approach. I’ve talked about some of them here.
For the record, there are lots of things I like about the manga blogosphere’s approach to criticism more than I like the art comics approach. I’ve talked about some of them here.
Could have fooled me from the essay above, Noah, as the whole thing smacks of condescension.
Hey Anna.
“I’m not sure what the point of this post was, other than being a desperate cry for attention. Since people are talking about it, I guess you succeeded.”
As Alex says, part of thinking about art is thinking about what other people say about art. I’m interested in Hagio, in shojo, in manga criticism, and in how those things relate to each other. So thinking about those was the point of the post, though people obviously have different takes on how successful it was.
I’ve seen other people in the twitterverse express confusion about why I would have written this as well…so maybe I’ll expand just slightly.
I want there to be more space for work like Hagio’s. I think that for there to be that, there needs to be somewhat different approach to her work. I’m trying to explain why that is.
I also think it’s healthy in general for critics to try to engage each other’s work and to argue about approaches and ideas. I think it makes it clearer where everyone is coming from and why…and I think it can lead to smarter, or at least more pointed, writing.
And, in general, I think it’s important to engage with people who disagree with you, not just about whether a given book is good or not, but about what you should be doing as a writer and why.
You like to listen to yourself talk, don’t you? ;)
Your entire essay reeks of self-importance and pseudo-intellectualism. “Look at my big words. I am intelligent!” “I declare myself better than my peers, therefore it must be true!”
When it comes to reviews, there are plenty of things I look for opinions on. Is the artwork detailed? Are the plot twists and turns handled well? Are the characters fleshed out or left one-sided? I look to trusted reviewers to give me opinions on these things in order to decide if a volume is worth checking out or not.
I do not, however, need to be spoonfed the idea that there is further meaning in a manga than what is written on its back cover. I don’t need to be told that such meaning exists and I certainly don’t need to be told what that meaning is. At the end of the day, someone else’s opinion on the deeper meaning of art means next to nothing to me. It only has personal value to me if I see that meaning and understand it for myself on an emotional level.
I understand that you are of the mind that the insights one gets while taking in a piece of art should be analyzed and discussed until the meaning is stripped down to nothing more than words in black and white – but not everyone is like that.
I see reviews as a treasure map to the locations of worthwhile manga, not as a diagram of what I should be finding once I get there.
And I see this essay as a peek into the inner thoughts of a closed-minded “art critic” who can’t quite fathom that others might enjoy art in a way different than their own.
Erica: “Claiming objectivity in a comment is now grounds for rejection at Okazu, since I don’t believe in the existence of ‘objectivity.'”
You subjectively arrive at any such claims of objectivity? Or is it objective that there are claims of objectivity?
Noah: “I didn’t say my reviews were objective. I don’t think they are. I wasn’t asking for objectivity. I was asking for a thesis…”
So you don’t think the analysis of Hagio’s work would actually be improved by what your wanting to see in criticism. When you analyze something, you don’t think there’s any truth to what your saying?
You guys.
fuck, “you’re” for both “your”s.
Hey Shari.
“You like to listen to yourself talk, don’t you?”
I’m a writer. What can I tell you?
I actually say, over and over, in the essay, that it’s fine for people to write and enjoy different kinds of criticism than I like. Book reviews are cool if that’s what you want. Hell, not infrequently it’s what I want. Reviews can be great; works of art in there own right at their best. My point was simply that a community that is interested in book reviews is not going to have a lot of space in its heart for A Drunken Dream, which (for reasons of genre, history, content, etc.) isn’t particularly congenial to that kind of approach.
There’s a possible fissure here between what you’re saying and what Kate is saying, incidentally. You’re rejecting my request for a different kind of criticism; Kate’s saying that she has actually written the kind of criticism I’m asking for and I’m ignoring it out of something like ill-will.
Charles: “So you don’t think the analysis of Hagio’s work would actually be improved by what your wanting to see in criticism. When you analyze something, you don’t think there’s any truth to what your saying?”
Well, it might be improved…but only from a particular perspective, or for particular reasons. And I think there is truth to what I’m saying, but not “objective” truth.
You really think objectivity is the best standpoint from which to look at art? Art’s such a weird culturally determined thing, tied up in emotions and individual reactions…I just don’t see how arguing for an objective framework is especially helpful in discussing it.
I think objectivity is a necessary component to any analysis of art. You can’t escape it without dismissing your own statements as irrelevant.
Absolutism is another matter.
Noah, I do see the point you’re trying to make. I think, though, that the way you’ve presented the argument is causing some irritation.
For example, you write, “I do think that, compared to art comix, there is little writing from within the manga community that is firmly committed to criticism as opposed to review. I don’t see that as an evil thing, or even as a sign of intellectual laziness — it’s just an indication of what people are interested in.”
Even though you’re saying you don’t think a review-style approach is “intellectual laziness,” just by expressing that phrase it somehow gives the impression that it could be construed as such.
Does that make sense? It’s sort of like telling your husband, “Oh honey, I don’t think you’re a tubby, drunken lout!” I’m sure he’s going to wonder how, if that’s really true, you came to arrive at such a precise description! :)
Hey Michelle. That’s a pretty funny analogy.
I thought about whether to include that line or not. I decided to put it in because I thought that many people might think I was accusing various folks of intellectual laziness whether I mentioned it or not. I wanted to explain that that was not what I was doing…and I wasn’t sure how to do that without saying so specifically.
Good post. I really enjoyed “A Drunken Dream” (certainly some stories more than others), but I admit it’s hard for me, even myself, to be sure whether I’m admiring it as “a great Art Comic” or just as “a genre manga that’s much better than the other genre manga, in this case shojo genre manga, that’s out there”.
In any case, I generally don’t like to make a distinction between genre- and non-genre works… I’d like to say that this is because *all* genre works should aspire to be Art, and to hell with the ones that are satisfied just being genre, like saying “I just like it because I like it” is some Get Out of Criticism Free card. No form of entertainment or escapism has a “right” to be free from criticism, whether from inside its intended audience or without. Everything deserves to be picked to pieces equally, and there’s nothing I hate more than hearing people claim some special exemption for their own favorite stuff…. please, y’all, go ahead and write a savage criticism of my favorite Dungeons & Dragons adventures from childhood, I won’t mind, I promise. -_- We’re all worthless dumb humans, so of course our thoughts are all subjective, but objectivity is worth holding up as an (unattainable) ideal.
Really, though, the only thing you can do if you want a certain type of critical response is to write it yourself. And you have, which is great. You make a good point as to whether “A Drunken Dream” is caught in some sort of neither-here-nor-there halfway realm between Genre and Art. My response as someone who needs to read more Hagio, I guess, is that it drinks from both, that some stories are more clearly for juveniles whereas others are more adult, and that…. well. Now I have to go and reread your essays.
I’ll also say, as the flip side of “all Genre should aspire to be Art”: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with genre per se. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having your artistic goal be to achieve a certain emotional reaction in your audience. Being able to do this in an effective fashion, one that breaks through people’s barriers and wariness of cliches, is an achievement.
Hey Noah,
I wasn’t going to address the actual content of your post, but I’m feeling more and more that I should, especially as someone who generally likes you and has frequently defended your motives/sincerity to other manga bloggers.
The truth is, like Kate, I found this post insulting and dismissive of what we do as manga bloggers. To some extent, I can only speak for myself, of course, but I can tell you that I take my readership very seriously and that I care deeply about what I write. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t yet adequately addressed Drunken Dream as a critic, and there are a number of personal/incidental reasons for that. I have not yet written out my thoughts on the book, beyond a general appreciation of its existence. But when I do, I can pretty much guarantee that it will not be what you think it should be. Why? Because I actually don’t find that kind of writing personally compelling, nor does it have anything to do with why I love and write about manga.
My focus as a reader/critic/human being is now and always will be discussion/analysis of a work’s emotional content. That is what I know about, and that is what I’m most interested in and qualified to write about. That is what my background prepares me for. That is what I care about in the world. The real purpose of fiction in my life is that it gives me the opportunity to interact directly with someone else’s inner life. This is not only what I find most compelling about other people, but I’d even go so far as to say it’s the way I best connect with the human race as a whole. It’s is a delicious smorgasbord of humanity. It’s where people communicate what’s most important to them, often even within formulaic structures and “fluff” pieces. It is, on a very basic level, a window into another person’s soul.
What I find limiting about literary or academic criticism is that it (in my experience) very often marginalizes the things I think are most important about a work of fiction (sometimes even life in general) and what I most wish to convey to my audience. Obviously, people who really enjoy and value that type of criticism are going to disagree. I can accept that. I’m not writing for them. And by the same token, I know that really, you’re not writing for me (or readers like me). But to actually say that my approach (or that of any one of these very dedicated writers) is “completely useless”? That is, in a very real way, dismissing us and our work, so I’m not sure how you can be surprised when we recognize and acknowledge that.
My priorities are my own, no more no less, and they are certainly very different from Kate’s, David’s, Ed’s, or anyone else you’ve mentioned here. I value each of their perspectives precisely because they are not the same as mine, but to be perfectly frank, I don’t think you read any of our blogs regularly or deeply enough to have a handle on what those priorities are. The fact that you’d paint them all with the same brush demonstrates that quite clearly.
Obviously, if you want to criticize other critics, that’s your prerogative. But if you’re going to tell us that what we value is useless, you should be prepared for us to be offended. I like you, Noah, I don’t think you’re a bad guy, and I frequently enjoy your writing. But I found this post genuinely offensive.
Whew. Noah, I haven’t seen such a violent reaction to your criticism since you published “In the Shadow of No Talent”.
People…personal attacks on Noah and gang-ups don’t help the discussion.
Hey Jason. Thanks. If I get you (or Shaenon) to write about A Drunken Dream, I’ll kind of feel like this post, and perhaps my existence, is justified.
Hagio raises interesting and weird questions about genre. I think Ruddick was right to compare her to PKD…she sometimes uses genre tropes in a metaphorical way that is analagous to art writing without actually being art writing, very like what Dick did (as opposed to writing genre as if it were artier literature, which is more what, say, Samuel Delaney does.) It makes her hard to get a handle on.
Just to be fair, I don’t think anyone was saying that Hagio shouldn’t be criticized. More that I shouldn’t have criticized the manga blogosphere in this particular way.
Melinda:
Your school of fiction was established over 200 years ago: sentimentalism.
It had its virtues, but there are good reasons why sentimentalism is generally deprecated today.
Hey, who was it who said personal attacks don’t help the discussion? Melinda concedes her priorities are hers, and is willing to afford other perspectives the right to exist and be appreciated by somebody. Can you not do the same?
I didn’t make a personal attack on Melinda. (Actually, that’s what you’ve just done on me.)I made a measured observation based on literary history.
One can contest that, of course, but shrieking at me for daring to comment on her approach is basically worthless in the context of this exchange.
And, no, I don’t subscribe to the absolute relativism you’re propounding.
With the disclaimer that I have not read the manga criticism in question here and do not have an opinion about whether it is intellectual or academic or not or whatever, can I question a little bit the idea that intellectual criticism is “objective”?
I tend to think of the difference between a review and a more “intellectual” essay to hinge on how much the article attempts to analyze how the artwork works — how it makes sense, how it’s put together, what it references — and to present that analysis in a way that another person can follow the logic and see where the reading is coming from, even if they don’t agree. I’d use the word “responsive” for the type of writing we’re calling “subjective” here. I think academic writing is extremely subjective too — it’s just more analytical and less responsive.
That’s the kind of writing I thought Noah was asking for. I can see his point that some books are better served by that treatment than others. Am I misunderstanding?
I’m an extremely academic writer, but the way I analyze, my priorities, the questions I ask and the bits of art that catch my attention, are just as subjective as anybody else’s. It’s just that when I think about them, I put a good bit of distance between my reactions and my analysis. Sometimes this preference goes to the extent that I’m not reacting at all emotionally to the art – just analyzing from the get go — or analyzing first and THEN getting emotionally involved in the coolness of the analytical tricks. (This happens frequently with Godard.) I really enjoy interacting with art that way. I probably enjoy it as much as other people enjoy more emotional engagements.
I mean to imply no hierarchy by saying that, other than one of personal taste. I just wanted to make the point in agreement with Erica that critical objectivity is overstated. I would be highly suspicious of any academic who disavowed the influence of his or her own subjectivity in the process of analysis…
If by measured observation you mean “What you like sucks. Everybody thinks so.”
Hey Melinda. Thanks for responding.
Do I sound especially surprised or angry that people are offended? I think I’ve mostly tried to respond to the substance of people’s responses and haven’t chastised anyone about their tone. As I said, I tried to express my appreciation for other people’s approaches, but I don’t have a problem with people coming after me with a certain level of animosity if that’s what they’re feeling.
I don’t think that the type of criticism you do is useless. I mean, I publish writing by you when I can! I think the criticism about Hagio that I singled out was largely useless…for particular reasons, which I attempted to explain.
The issue here really isn’t emotional content vs. academic criticism, at least not from my perspective. Chris Mautner’s review wasn’t especially academic, for example — though it wasn’t exactly about the emotional content of the work either.
Maybe I can try to explain it this way…I think focusing on emotional content can work well if everyone is on the same page as to what emotional content means and what emotional content you are looking for. If there are a lot of common baseline assumptions in place, you can talk about how a work makes you feel viscerally and have faith that your audience can follow you. You don’t need to contextualize the work in terms of genre or art, or in terms of other works of art, or other cultural factors. You don’t need to figure the work out, in short (through academic approaches or other approaches) because you and your audience have passed that point; you’re on the same page.
The problem is that Hagio, because of history, genre, aesthetics, and other factors, is an artist who I think really does need to be figured out. A community that is interested in feeling works of art rather than figuring them out (often as a prelude to feeling them!) isn’t as a whole going to want to be bothered with her. I think this is why there is less interest in her book than David or others might like.
Oh…and contra Alex, it’s fine if people want to personally attack me. I don’t mind.
Noah,
I think perhaps by talking about my own approach, I’ve accidentally let the conversation astray. I went into it at such length, because I wanted to effectively express how seriously I take the task of writing about manga and why I feel compelled to do so. But I did not, by any means, intend to imply that my approach is related to that of the other critics you mention in this article. In fact, that is not the case at all. Kate, for instance, does not approach manga in that way at all. So I’m really not arguing for the validity of my approach specifically.
I do think, though, that you don’t spend enough time reading manga blogs as a whole in order to make some of the broader generalizations you do here–and let’s be honest, you’re not just talking about the Hagio pieces. You’ve used your opinions about the Hagio pieces to make assumptions about the manga blogosphere (and some of its particular writers) as a whole, and you acknowledge as much in the post (and in your description of the post on TCJ). I think you seek them out on particular occasions (say, when you’re searching for reviews of Drunken Dream or whatever you’re writing about in the moment), but these are blogs I read *every day*. I interact with their writers daily on Twitter. I read their short reviews, their longer ones, their essays, their roundtables–the many different ways in which they talk about manga, some of which is deeper that others, some of which is more intellectually motivated, some of which is aimed at casual consumers of the medium. These contributions run the gamut, usually even within the work of a single writer.
What’s dismissive about your post, is that you take a single example (even a single paragraph) of someone’s writing about a single work and use it to characterize, not even just *their* work as a whole, but the work of the entire community. You began your point with Hagio, but you moved on to something larger than that, and I’m not sure you realize just how demeaning (and, frankly, inaccurate) your conclusions are. This is what I’m trying to point out to you. I really hope you will take it seriously.
(Please forgive my typos. I’m hoping they are obvious enough not to obscure my meaning.)
“Oh…and contra Alex, it’s fine if people want to personally attack me. I don’t mind.”
Fuck you!
Hey Melinda. It’s true that I don’t read nearly as much of the manga blogosphere as you do. I stop in from time to time, as you say. I don’t follow it more because…well, because the writing in general strikes me in the way it strikes me. That’s an impression I’ve gotten over some years now.
I’ve had this same conversation in a fairly different context just recently, but my response is similar. I understand the demand for expertise, and am sympathetic to some extent. On the other hand, I think there’s some worth in the impressions of an outside observer who isn’t necessarily an expert or enmeshed in the community. The fact that a certain amount of response to the piece has been more or less frankly anti-intellectual doesn’t make me think I’ve entirely misjudged (not that there’s not a place for anti-intellectualism, of course!)
I certainly don’t want to demean anyone. I think the approaches taken to criticism by people in the mangaverse are entirely valid. I don’t doubt any of their commitment to writing, to their audience, or to manga or art.
“(Please forgive my typos. I’m hoping they are obvious enough not to obscure my meaning.)”
You’re meaning’s clear. My apologies for not having an edit function…maybe some day….
On the other hand, I think there’s some worth in the impressions of an outside observer who isn’t necessarily an expert or enmeshed in the community.
I think that’s a valid point. I also think I probably value the esteem of my colleagues more than you do, so I’m less likely to criticize them publicly in such a broad manner, even those outside my own particular community. This is not necessarily a good (or bad) thing, but I don’t doubt it’s the truth.
The reason I decided to comment here today, though, is that you keep saying that you didn’t want to demean anyone, that it wasn’t your intent to suggest this or that about book clubs, criticism, and so on. But it’s clear that you have, in fact, done so, at least from the perspective of a whole lot of manga bloggers, only a handful of whom have determined it prudent (or at least necessary) to come over here and say so. And from following your blog pretty closely, I notice that this happens a lot. So I kind of wanted to take a stab at explaining to you why what you say comes off the way it does, in case you had some interest in thinking about that and possibly avoiding having it happen quite so much. I think that any points directed at the manga blogosphere you might have been able to make here as an outsider are largely obscured by the fact that you genuinely insulted a whole lot of people (me included), whether that was your intent or not.
If you’d like to create more space for works like a Drunken Dream, constructing a sphere for intellectuals to write “Die, little girls die,” to one another is less important than actually encouraging people to go out and buy the work. Only series and authors that are commercially successful tend to get “more space” in the English speaking world. I’m not sure what you’ve been trying to accomplish with bitter criticisms and this essay which alienated the larger manga blogosphere, but I certainly hope you accomplished it.
Hey ABCBTom. Several of my essays about Hagio were very enthusiastic. And in general lengthy analysis or discussion of a work is a better way to make the case for its importance than a thumbs up or thumbs down review. And criticism, even bitter criticism, is to me a sign that you’re taking the work seriously — that you expect something from it.
Be that as it may, though…I think your premise is somewhat flawed. You say only series that are commercially successful will get more space…but having more space is also a way that works become commercially successful. The argument is circular to some extent. Hagio doesn’t fit for various reasons; I don’t think any amount of critical advocacy is going to make her fit. I’m not arguing that critics need to write differently in order to promote Hagio; I’m arguing that the fact that critics don’t write differently is of a piece with the reasons that Hagio doesn’t fit.
And I explained why I wrote this piece further up the thread, if you’re interested.
Melinda, thanks again for coming over here, and for still being willing to talk to me. I appreciate it (and Kate, Erica, and other’s comments as well.)
Seems to me that Noah offended and threatened this cozy little club of people “affirming” each other.
Burn him!
Eeesh, just make things worse why don’t you, Alex.
As Melinda pointed out, I’ve pissed off various groups at various times, so it’s not like the manga community is especially touchy as these things go. Maybe it’s not them, but me.
I do agree that Drunken Dream needs more critical analysis, but that seems to be more of a topic for a Manga Moveable Feast than a buy/don’t buy review. Generally, among fans, it’s in bad form to discuss all of the content in a new work before people have a chance to read it. This may not really be a problem with 1940s Wonder Woman comics; I honestly wouldn’t know. I do hope we have a Drunken Dream MMF with a delightful coffee-house atmosphere where we can discuss whether Girl on Porch With Puppy or Bianca is more insipid.
I think this blog’s discussion of xxxholic was the semi-inspiration for the MMF. I could be wrong about that though; Melinda would probably know better than I.
“Generally, among fans, it’s in bad form to discuss all of the content in a new work before people have a chance to read it. ”
The no-spoilers thing is a good example of what I’m talking about. It just seems completely inappropriate and, yes, useless in this context. Hagio’s work is, as I said, poetic and evocative; it’s not about the twist ending in the first place. Moreoever, it’s historical; the stories are all twenty or thirty years old. They’re classic works. Seeing them as plot-driven suspense stories that are going to be spoiled by an analysis of the whole story is just completely wrong-headed. If you’re depending on suspense to sell Hagio to your audience, you might as well give up.
Noah, regarding the MMF, I’m actually not sure about that one way or the other. The first Feast I participated in was To Terra…, which was at least three Feasts in. Matt Blind, Ed Sizemore, David Welsh, Kate Dacey, or Erica Friedman I believe were some of the original founders of the MMF, so they’d remember more clearly how it all began.
I’d go so far as to say that the no spoilers thing is actually THE salient example: the “intellectual” assumption is exactly the opposite. Critical analysis is always written with the assumption that anybody reading is completely familiar with the work at hand.
“Constructing a sphere for intellectuals to write ‘Die, little girls die,’ to one another is less important than actually encouraging people to go out and buy the work.”
Just for the record, as a feminist intellectual with a not-insignificant anti-capitalist streak, this offends me.
I realize it was emotion speaking, but that doesn’t make it fair. It’s a generalization, and a very inaccurate one.
It also feeds a sense that those of us who prefer the more skeptical, intellectual/analytical approaches to art really truly would not be welcome in fan communities like the one you guys represent.
Which may in fact be the case, with some justification. Intellectual discourse is to no small extent about tearing things apart, so it isn’t a “fan-like” behavior. But a systematic intolerance for that kind of discourse is also part of Noah’s point that everybody’s upset about.
There appears to be a real — and possibly unbridgeable, at least on the Internet? — separation between the responsive and the analytical approaches to art, and I would be really interested to hear the perspective of the fan community about the advantages and limitations of that separation.
Some of these comments are giving me massive secondhand embarrassment squick. Seriously. Are we trying to encourage discussion of manga here? Or not? Because from where I’m sitting it really looks like not.
Seeing them as plot-driven suspense stories that are going to be spoiled by an analysis of the whole story is just completely wrong-headed.
OK, Noah, I’m going to unpack this. I really like you and I truly believe that you want more manga criticism. But this is–no. This sentence is a problem.
Someone just told you that there is a different cultural more in manga critical circles, OK, and instead of thinking about this, acknowledging it, asking for more information about where it comes from or why, or honoring it, you just say it’s ‘completely wrong headed’. Doing things differently does not automatically mean doing things wrong and you just slapped a massive value judgment on a whole group of people who you are, theoretically, trying to encourage to talk to you. That is not helpful to improving relations and understanding.
There *are* people who discuss entire stories in manga circles, and there are ways around it, and ways to indicate that an essay will do that, and instead of finding that out, you’ve slapped the whole group with ‘completely wrongheaded’. *headdesk*
Just, y’know, a tip on communication styles and why you might be getting so many angry comments from the manga crowd.
To follow up on VM’s comment here, I think if you’re looking to *reviews* to be that place where people discuss manga without worrying about spoilers and so on, that’s very much the wrong place to look. I’m generally careful about spoilers in a review as well (unless I’ve labeled it with warnings), because most manga fans don’t expect to find spoilers in a review. If I want to talk about a series in-depth without that kind of restriction, I’ll write an essay, host a roundtable, or participate in some other kind of activity that is clearly intended for in-depth discussion down to the last word. Even in the most mainstream corners of the manga blogosphere, we do much more than write reviews. In fact, I’d say I personally do less of that than anything else. Much to the dismay of publishers.
Hey VM. I knew this was the more. It’s not an unusual protocol for reviews even beyond the mangasphere. I don’t think it’s wrong all or even most of the time. It makes complete sense if you’re point is a buy or not buy discussion.
I think it makes no sense in terms of a book like A Drunken Dream. That’s what I meant by “in this context”; not that it was wrong-headed for manga or reviews, but that for this particular book I don’t think it works or makes sense.
We did a chapter-by-chapter discussion of AX:Alternative Manga via Twitter a few months back that was a well-received and a lot of fun to do.
http://precur.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/axed-transcript-part-one/
http://precur.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/axed-transcript-part-two/
http://manga.about.com/b/2010/09/27/comics-critics-take-on-ax-alternative-manga-on-twitter.htm
At the time we discussed tackling A Drunken Dream that way next, but wanted to give people time to pick up the book and read it.
perhaps it’s time to do it, but would it be useful and interesting or masturbatory? you tell me.
For a DD-specific example, Ed Sizemore, whose review you link to in this post, also hosted a podcast on the book with a number of other bloggers, where they discussed each story without any concern for spoilers.
Caro,
No, no, no, spoilers has nothing to do with the emotional vs thinking divide.
Manga comes out over the course of many years and in many formats, all of which come out at various times and in various venues, some of which people may have access to at various times. This is part of what makes criticism in manga circles complicated. You say thoroughly familiar with the work as though the work is a single entity, which is actually telling of an ignorance of the nature of manga criticism in practice.
Manga work may not necessarily be a single entity–it may be released in translated volumes, scanlations, currently be released only in French, available in various times and places legally and illegally, and where one is on the spectrum of the work often has to do with geography, comfort with legality issues, and other factors. If a work spans fifteen years, someone may write criticism three years in, or ten years in, and even though it’s been out in scanlation for ten years, it’s only got the first four volumes released officially.
There is a strong need in manga circles to improve the sales of the manga itself, and that function does not necessarily match with the criticism function at all, and it’s not as easy to know where on the ‘how far you’ve read spectrum’ anyone happens to fall.
A lot of criticism, for good or ill, is written in discussion form as chapters come out, for example, and communities will discuss together the latest chapters. That’s not the kind of discussion you’ll see in a buy/not buy review. A lot of critics that I know post their thoughts, often fairly detailed, on new developments in the story, not in just a ‘I reacted so and so,’ but how this implies what and whether that kind of trope has been used before and so on. Those discussions then are often over when the translated volume finally comes out, so there be a second round of discussion at that point, both with people who know for certain what will happen and with people who only know what has happened until now.
When the majority of the works discussed are in a mess of who’s read what, criticism of any kind (emotive, reactive, intellectual) is complicated, because establishing where everyone is on the page so they can start talking is actually an important part of the critical process and is exceedingly far from wrong-headed. We will not even get into the further complications of branching storylines that come from animes, OK? My point is that there are very good reasons for some of these differing mores, and that’s part of why Drunken Dream is such a lousy example of what manga criticism in practice often looks like.
Deb, I’d do an #axed-type discussion of Drunken Dream.
VM, you are awesome.
I think the fact that you have to label spoilers, though, Vom, can make it feel ghettoized. I remember that from when I used to participate in some Live Journal and other fan forums. I ended up feeling like I had to apologize for preferring really academic approaches, so I just stopped participating.
I don’t doubt it’s the very best solution for communities where fans and academics mix, but it’s part of academic culture not to care about spoilers at all — rather to expect them and to believe that even a great familiarity with a work going in does not damage one’s ability to fully experience it.
It’s difficult for academically inclined people, because we have the choice of professional conversations where the stakes are people’s careers and reputations or fan conversations where the stakes are people’s emotions and social culture, and there are very few environments where academic ideas show up but don’t get taken so seriously, where you can just discuss art that way with the stakes nice and low.
Aw, thanks Melinda! The discussions as things come out is often my favorite (critically), but is so hard to return to, because of the way that information is organized. Some day, finding those will be easier, says my little librarian heart.
But Caro, you’re now arguing that manga fans aren’t academics. And, while you may feel ghettoized, and I respect that, the manga fans I know are all academics.
Vom — posts crossed. I’m trying to think of how I’d handle that complex reading situation if I were going to write about manga for an academic journal (which I am by no means qualified to do — just a thought experiement) and I’m not sure.
For clarity, though, a lot of what you guys are describing is familiar to me from fan communities around other kinds of books too, and that’s the perspective I was speaking from. It doesn’t seem from what’s said here that manga culture is dramatically different at the level of social interactions and what it means to be “well-mannered”, although the details would certainly be different.
Wouldn’t fan communities around tv shows have some similar problems due to the episodic character?
OK, I would normally read the other comments before posting one of my own, for obvious reasons – but there are just too damned many of them. They have defeated me. No mas.
I like this post because it brings up something that is interesting to think about. I don’t find it offensive (I did notice a certain tone as I scanned a few words here and a few words there, endlessly scrolling down to finally reach the damned comment box); I find it effective at doing what criticism is supposed to do – make people think about things. Given the seventy-three comments (Jesus Christ), this post has clearly knocked that one out of the ballpark.
Art demands that questions like this be discussed — not that everyone agree on the answers, but that the discussion happens. So, well done, I say (albeit somewhat pretentiously).
I also happen to agree with the overall point being made, as I see it, which is a simple one — that the manga community does not do a lot of serious criticism. This does not mean there is no serious criticism, or that those of us who are writing stuff wot is not serious criticism are lacking. I don’t go seeking a lot of manga writing, but I do poke around somewhat, and yeah – not a lot of serious criticism. I don’t usually want to read serious criticism, so that works out, but the point about some work needing to be treated differently from other work is sound.
Nice essay. I enjoyed reading it, and I enjoyed thinking about it.
I don’t mean to argue that manga fans aren’t academics – just that “fan culture” has different cultural mores from “academic culture.” Individual people can be part of more than one culture — but sometimes the transition is harder than others.
Are most of the people you know academics in the humanities? My net when I say “academic” is probably a little too broad to be accurate ’cause I’m primarily familiar with arts academia.
I wish I’d thought of saying this in my *last* comment, but since I didn’t, I’m essentially spamming. Many apologies.
I was reading over VM’s comment again here, and it brought to mind some of the issues we’ve had with the Banana Fish roundtable I’ve hosted at my blog over the past year. It’s a 21 volume series, published in Japan in the 1980s, and published here in English a few different times–in PULP magazine (partially), in a set of flipped books (only through volume 7 or 8) and finally in a complete set a couple of years ago. There are no known scanlations, and some of the volumes are very difficult to find at this point.
The roundtable consists of several women who have read the full series and several who haven’t, and we’re tackling it two volumes at a time. Since most of the people *following* the roundtable are fans who have read the whole thing, keeping spoilers out of comments has been a challenge. Keeping the discussion on only what we’ve read so far has been a challenge. Oh, and one of the roundtablers is reading the series in Japanese, and the volumes don’t actually begin and end in the same place as the English volumes. It’s kind of a mess. But it’s been very rewarding. I expect the final discussion will be especially interesting, since finally everyone will have read the whole thing. But it’s a process. I expect the conversation could go on even long after the roundtable has completed, since I’ve already heard from some mangabloggers who haven’t read the series yet, but intend to at some point. Then the roundtable will still be there to act as a jumping-off point for more.
Argh, pardon me, BF is only 19 volumes.
Just for the record, as a feminist intellectual with a not-insignificant anti-capitalist streak, this offends me.
Tragically, Japan is a capitalist state where the purchase of food, housing, and rent is still necessary. Supporting artists in a medium that’s being ravaged by widespread piracy is another one of our bizarre, backward cultural mores.
Re Kinukitty’s point, there’s this…
but it’s one essay out of the four volumes I looked at, not counting the one on anime, and it’s in an actual academic journal, not a blog (although it is fully available online.)
ABCBTom: The anti-capitalist comment was meant to challenge you on your implication that writing for marketing purposes is more valuable than other kinds of writing. The idea that intellectual writing encourages piracy is a lovely straw man wearing a rakish hat, but I’m not a crow.
I’m going to assume you concede the feminist point and retract the “die little girls die” business since you didn’t comment on it. Feel free to try and defend that to me if I’m wrong.
Being fair to academic criticism and the types of writing “intellectuals” do — treating them the same way you’re asking to be treated! — in no way precludes reviews being written or artists being supported.
Noah’s point is in fact just the opposite — that for work which would benefit from a wide academic readership, it might even help.
Caro, I may be missing something here (or remembering incorrectly), but I think the “die little girls die” was actually a reference to one of Noah’s Drunken Dream posts, in which he said that as part of his critique.
When I spoke of “Die, little girls die” I was referring to this:
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/09/die-little-girls-die/
I’m not sure how this was an attack on feminism, but I’m sure I’ll soon find out.
Gah! Faster comments than I can respond….
Just quickly to this:
“My point is that there are very good reasons for some of these differing mores, and that’s part of why Drunken Dream is such a lousy example of what manga criticism in practice often looks like.”
This doesn’t exactly go against my points, either in the essay or further down in comments. That point being again…manga criticism as it is constituted seems ill-equipped to deal with this particular book.
Noah, the CLAMP roundtable was absolutely an inspiration for the MMF. You’re remembering correctly.
Thanks for the clarification, Melinda and Tom. Without title caps, I read that as an extension of the thread’s distaste for “objective academic” criticism over more “subjective” criticism, in terms of the conventional gender distinction between those two perspectives. The cultural dynamics of the manga community are often defended in terms of that gender dynamic and that is what I thought the comment was meant to assert, with all intellectuals cast in the “objective, masculinist” academic mode.
I stand by the point that the comment is an over- generalization about what academic criticism is like, what it accomplishes, and what its value is, but it’s not offensive without the specific “intellectuals are against girls” overtones.
Thanks David.
Deb, I would love to see a twitter roundtable along the line of the AX discussion on A Drunken Dream. I’d love to participate in it too…except I don’t really know how twitter works. And, also, everybody now hates me. But I’ll certainly look forward to reading it, and hopefully to eating my words.
Noah, you’re more than welcome to join in once I get that DDream chapter-by-chapter discussion going.
I’m testing out a new software dealio called LiveFyre that would theoretically allow us the immediacy of Twitter w/o having to clog up Twitter.
Will let you know when that’s sorted out.
In any case, don’t worry ’bout it. we’re all grown-ups here. We can disagree w/o it being the end of the world. ;-)
Twitter is probably the easiest place to engage (and get to know) the manga blogging community as a group, these days. I know I’ve encouraged you to join up before, Noah, but I’ll repeat that here.
Yeah, I’m just a technophobe. And I can barely keep up with the blog…the thought of spending additional time on a different platform fills me with primal terror. But I will talk to my hindbrain and perhaps it and I can come to some compromise…
Caro, The episodic nature of TV shows is a little similar, but not nearly as complicated, since the release of TV shows is more even across the aboard–most of the people watching it will have access to the show within a week, whereas in manga it’s in terms of years. The folks I know who are academics are all over the spectrum, some humanities, history, but also math, all kinds of things.
Noah, “That point being again…manga criticism as it is constituted seems ill-equipped to deal with this particular book.” But….that’s not the point you’re making in your essay. If you just left it at that, I don’t think people would be running around flapping their hands and grinding their teeth.
At the end of the essay, you say, “I do think that, compared to art comix, there is little writing from within the manga community that is firmly committed to criticism as opposed to review.”
That’s a big, bold inflammatory statement about an entire genre of criticism and a whole group of active critics, and to support that statement, instead of choosing a typical example of manga work to discuss (which is what a good logical argument would do), you pick a work which is uniquely ill-suited to the usual methods of manga criticism. If I can be a snotty academic for a moment (speaking of formal / not formal critics), this is called a logical fallacy of defective induction, and it makes your argument much weaker. (Yes, I looked it up, because I was feeling like the manga side ought to show our formal colors if challenged.)
Oh yeah, TV would definitely be less complicated. I was just wondering how serious critics of TV handle the situation – TV criticism is enjoying something of a golden age, but I don’t pay much attention to it so I don’t know offhand. From the little I’ve seen, they follow the academic assumption: define what work is in scope for your analysis (respecting whatever degree of comprehensiveness would satisfy the position that Jeet and Charles Hatfield espoused in the Hernandez thread when we roundtabled Charles’ book) and then just assume everybody’s familiar with it without worrying about spoilers. I’m still not completely clear why that approach wouldn’t work for manga, why it’s important in that context to pay more attention to what readers are likely to have read? (I’m not disputing that it is — I just don’t understand why it’s a question of rigor and standards as well as audience…and maybe you’re not actually saying that it is?)
My perspective on “academic culture” definitely wouldn’t fit the social and hard sciences, and it would probably fit history to a lesser degree than it does the arts and miscellaneous “studies”. But it’s AN academic culture, at least. So some of the differences between what you see and what I’m describing might also be differences among academic cultures, although in my personal experience, the people I was interacting with were not academic and there was significant anti-criticism sentiment. But that was not with manga people.
Hmm. Well, it’s one of the points I’m making in the essay. And it’s not one I think that everyone who’s posted here is by any means willing to concede. But yes, you’re right, while that particular argument is supported by your take on Hagio’s unsuitability, the other one isn’t.
You’re arguing that the problem with Drunken Dream, from a manga critic perspective, is that it’s not a series, is that right? Whereas I’m suggesting that the problem is that it requires a more critical approach.
I’m a little skeptical, I guess, because it seems like there are one or two volume series that really wouldn’t present the same problems as Hagio does. For example, David Welsh’s review of the short story collection All My Darling Daughters seems like a useful, thoughtful take that accurately captures the manga’s tone, interests, and themes. There aren’t any of the problems that seem to come up (from my perspective) with Hagio reviews.
“When the majority of the works discussed are in a mess of who’s read what, criticism of any kind (emotive, reactive, intellectual) is complicated, because establishing where everyone is on the page so they can start talking is actually an important part of the critical process”
This is actually pretty interesting to me, since I was on the opposite side of this argument just recently (in terms of arguing that one didn’t have to read an entire work to start talking.) But…establishing where you are so people know where you’re coming from is a little different from being careful not to say anything that will spoil the read for someone else. The first is part of the critical process I’d agree. The second is part of a social process. Social processes are arguably more important than critical processes, and they obviously intersect. But I don’t think they’re precisely the same.
As Caro says, kind of ground zero for academic criticism is the idea that you aren’t going to hurt a work by tearing it apart. The criticism you’re describing takes a different approach. I can see where that could be rewarding and fruitful for many discussions and many books. I don’t know for A Drunken Dream though.
I’m willing to back off of the criticism/review distinction. I don’t need to die on that hill. But it still seems to me like there is a divide. Maybe filet criticism vs. saute criticism? I think manga critics are less comfortable than art comix critics with filet. And while that works in many instances, I think it presents problems with this particular book.
“There’s a possible fissure here between what you’re saying and what Kate is saying, incidentally. You’re rejecting my request for a different kind of criticism; Kate’s saying that she has actually written the kind of criticism I’m asking for and I’m ignoring it out of something like ill-will.”
I’m sure there’s quite a large fissure between what I’m saying and what Kate or other reviewers here are saying. That’s because I’m not in league with them or even particularly interested in their points. I’m simply a manga fan who found your post offensive for my own reasons.
To quote a line from your essay: “But I also think that an audience that isn’t especially interested in a discussion of mirror imagery in Hagio’s stories is not, unfortunately, likely to be interested in the stories all that much either.”
You are making an assumption that people who prefer simple and objective reviews aren’t interested in reading “deeper” works. That could not be further from the truth. I love reading manga that makes me think or feel something special… but I abhor reviews that try to put those thoughts and feelings into words instead of letting the reader find it for themselves.
So please don’t assume that everyone voicing dislike on your post must be from the “other camp.” Frankly, I don’t really care if you reviewers all want to bicker and argue with each other ;)
The differences in your positions are interesting to me. If it were a conversation, they might be interesting to you. However, if you’re just interested in getting up on a soapbox and proclaiming how offended you are, then obviously it will be less relevant.
I’m not making any assumptions about “deeper” works. I don’t know that Hagio’s work is “deeper” than Nana. It’s different.
“I abhor reviews that try to put those thoughts and feelings into words instead of letting the reader find it for themselves.”
Any writing is as much art as manga is. You’re taking a radically anti-intellectual position that boils down to nothing more than genre prejudice. You should read what you want, but given your stated views, I really don’t care whether I offend you or not. In fact, if I’m not offending you, I’m not doing my job.
What he said.
“I’m simply a manga fan who found your post offensive for my own reasons.”
…which, presumably, are private. Why should anybody accord any respect to someone keeping his or her “offendedness” secret?
We’re talking manga here, not rape survivors or Holocaust victims, extreme cases that would justify secrecy as a matter of course.
It reminds me of the all-too often plaint in University classrooms: “When you say —-, I feel oppressed.”
The actual fact or absence of oppression doesn’t matter and needn’t be demonstrated. “Feeling” is enough.
It’s a power play. Just trot out the all-purpose “offensive” and then refuse to define the offense.
“For my own reasons”– well, I suffer a failure of imagination here, because I can’t even begin to understand what non-trivial “reasons” you’d have to justify your “offendednesss”;seems to me you’re seeking an unearned victim status.
Alex, will you get off the secrecy thing? There’s nothing wrong with people wanting to have private discussions about books rather than public discussions about books, for whatever reasons.
And…she explained why she was offended earlier. She feels I’m denigrating short, objective reviews and the people who read them. Also she objects on principle to longer more critically engaged reviews because she feels they come between the reader and the work.
@Alex – Wow… You completely misunderstood my comment, apparently didn’t even read all of my post and then went off on some wild tangent. O_o My reasons for the offense were clearly stated later in the post. No secret there. The comment about them being “my own reasons” was simply stating that my reasons were not the same as Kate Dacey’s or other reviewers who might have a personal stake in what Noah posted. To simplify: [“my own” = “different than others”] [“my own” =/= “mine and you can’t know them, neener neener”] (Which should have been obvious, had you read further into the post where I, you know, stated exactly what was offensive to me.)
@Noah – I can see how every poster’s viewpoint is interesting to you, seeing as how all of the comments from different people are directed at you. I simply mistook your comment as the usual Internet assumption that everyone who disagrees with a post must all be from the same place/peer group and therefore must have the same opinion. I apologize for jumping to conclusions about the comment. I can see how it’s interesting that two different opinions emerged, both in response to the same post. I simply wanted to reiterate that I am not a “white knight” (so to speak) jumping to the defense of the reviewers you mentioned.
Hey Shari. Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying and for taking the time to comment.
OK, fair enough.
There’s actually plenty of academic-style critical work that does try to “hurt the text” by tearing it apart. Chinua Achebe’s critique of Heart of Darkness is that kind of thing…although Achebe isn’t a traditional academic. Plenty have followed in his footsteps on the matter. Not all academic criticism is value-neutral.
That’s an interesting point. I guess the point is that there’s virtue seen in the act of (sometimes cantankerous) criticism itself, whether a work is (or is intended to be) hurt or not….
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