GMU Pop Culture Journalism

James Wood: Most Dreaded Literary Critic

Written on September 27, 2010 – 9:17 pm | by Aisha Jamil

 

A Harvard professor in his forties and a staff literary critic for the New Yorker writes book reviews. Sound boring?

Well, maybe a little, but James Woods isn’t just any plain old critic. He’s been called the best literary critic in the world.

Woods, who was the chief literary critic for The Guardian and an editor at the New Republic, signed onto to become a staff writer at The New Yorker three years ago. Woods is known to have an aesthetic approach in his literary criticisms.

He has coined the term “hysterical realism”, which is a genre that has a strong distinction between its bizarre prose, plotting, characterization and details. In layman’s terms, it’s one of those novels that are filled with complex vocabulary, long sentences, detail-oriented word choice and confusing plot twists. Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses” are two such examples. He refers to it as the “damning genre.”

“Novelists need to stop explaining how the world works and instead tell us how somebody felt about something,” wrote Woods in The Guardian.

Woods is definitely one of the most unique critics in the literary criticism industry. According to New Yorker’s literary critic Sam Anderson, he is been described in many acknowledged in many different ways: grudgingly, eagerly, nervously, warningly and mockingly. Woods is definitely a tough and “most dreaded” literary critic of our time.

Since Woods is an expert in the world of books, he has written three books about criticism himself:

• “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (2000)
• “The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel” (2004)
• “How Fiction Works” (2008)

He has also produced an autobiographical novel:

• “The Book Against God” (2003)

To read some of his book reviews, click on the following websites:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/04/20/090420crbo_books_wood

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2009/04/reading-orwell-james-wood.html

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/12/james-wood-eleven-favorite-boo.html