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What's the Problem?
Reader comment on: The Scorn of the Literary Blog

Submitted by Tom, Jun 13, 2007 11:15

Good literary criticism is a highly complex form of civilized discourse, and is generally not to be found in blogs. One seldom finds it in book reviews either, for that matter, so I'm not sure that all the bother about rank and status accomplish much. Book reviews and blogs are both useful when they provoke us to pick up a book we might never have heard of. They are usually not, in the sense of literary criticism, vehicles for original thinking. So what? Most of the literary bloggers apparently have a lot more time that the rest of us, and some of them are pretty adept at finding the good new stuff. In a world that is flooded with publications every year, the common reader needs all the help he can get picking his way through to something that genuinely enhances his experience. Both blogs and reviews are necessary tools for sorting, and that includes not only new literature, but new literary criticism as well.


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