Comments on: Bad Books and Bad Commentariats

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:14:11 +0000

I also don’t agree with Elias’ case that this is necessarily bad (or always avoidable – historical fiction sometimes has to give the modern reader something to hold onto, and sometimes this is precisely so that it can highlight the difference that Elias wants to see).

I did however take the bit about good novelists as implying that such “bad” novels can be “good” in other respects.

The style didn’t strike me as studied enough to make it designed to do anything. Just standard academese – which may reveal a great deal about academia as a whole, but shouldn’t be over-read as a basis for a claim about any particular individual.

Of course, I’m basing *that* on the fact that I hardly noticed it myself…

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:43:41 +0000

Yes. I do think, however, that her contribution is overwritten in a manner that's designed to make it more a statement of authority and less the opening move in a conversation--and not in a way that creates some other kind of intellectual clarity. In that sense, I think it's ok to single it out as an example of "academic writing". She defines the historical novel in a fairly dogmatic way and suggests a very strong standard for how to read the "tipping point" of badness in that genre. If I understand her correctly, however, what she's saying is that historical novels which do not properly attempt to represent the past as another country, as different, slip into badness. That using the past as a mirror or mimesis of the present is by definition bad. This seems really rigid to me, as well as a kind of backdoor positivism that would bug me a bit even if were coming from a historian but seems especially out of place for a literary critic. I'm not sure which historical novels would qualify as good in this sense. Not many.

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:56:16 +0000

The bit about Amy Elias’ sentence is more unfair than you let on. Elias goes on to make the point that the flaw that she is discussing – which has nothing to do with style – can be found in otherwise excellent novelists. So to sneer at Elias’ prose in a manner that implies that she is somehow claiming that she is a better writer than her targets…