James Wood
Reflections on the Practice of Literary Criticism
I shall consider two types of judgment, in relation to my work as a critic and book reviewer. The first type of judgment is what we might think of as the arsenal of any decent project of good reading—searching for meaning; accruing and then learning how to use a kind of hermeneutic wisdom; looking for patterns; learning what to look for in a work of art. We might call this first type secular judgment. The second type of judgment is closer to religious judgment: judging, choosing, selecting, casting in and casting out, a process strongly associated, of course, with that terrifying apparition, the critic. I will examine the relations between these two types, and the ways in which, in literary studies, the first kind of judgment has steadily come to eclipse the second.
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007 and is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He was the chief literary critic at The Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in three volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Fun Stuff, and Other Essays (2012). He has written a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008), and two novels, The Book Against God (2003), and Upstate (2018). Wood also serves as a board member of the Einstein Forum.