Focus on Literature

Back in 1983, the world still seemed to be in order. In his collection of articles Germanistik als Literatur-kritik (i.e. German studies as literary criticism), Walter Hinck describes German studies as literary criticism and the literary critic as the “man of the first hour” for whom “a new book is like a newly-discovered island”.

Hinck certainly saw the purpose of literary criticism as being to contribute to creating an audience for a book, and even to “extending the audience interested in literature”.

Five years later, however, Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote of the “Twilight of the Reviewers” and in that context, he lamented the disappearance of the traditional, specially-trained critic. All that counted now were the trends to which everyone was paying homage. He claimed that the form of the review could not be saved, and went on to say that “the literary journalist lives on the capital left to him by the critic” and that “when that has been used up, all that remains is waffle.”

The most vehement criticism of contemporary literary criticism was expressed by Daniel Kehlmann in the journal volltext in April 2002: “The very same people who threw in Adorno quotations after every story-like paragraph a few years ago are now full of enthusiasm for the simplest realistic descriptions of everyday life and want to know just as little about the articles they wrote yesterday as they will want to know tomorrow about the articles they have written today. German criticism has returned […] to the complete arbitrariness of talk that at best is influential, but is insignificant when it alternately defends in fortuitous cyclical trends an avant garde that it does not understand and a tradition that it does not know.”

The normative force of literary criticism has been lost. Although there are still brilliant minds, they no longer have the enduring influence of their predecessors. That is presumably partly duet to the fact that the contents of literary criticism have changed. While one used to learn something of the intellectual state of the republic in some critiques and was able to inform oneself of the latest trends by reading them, also gaining a kind of socio-political overview in the process, we now have literary criticism that is closely tied to the publication of a new book and only rarely takes a wider view.

The business of literature has been further commercialised

When in the literary field, traditional literary criticism is displaced by literary journalism, portraits, interviews and home stories replace a serious discussion of texts. This approach takes account of the phenomenon that writers and their heads have often become more important than their books. There is no doubt that the literature business has been further commercialised; while literature still needs literary criticism, the market only needs it to a limited extent. The mechanisms and strategies for getting a book to its readers have become more diverse. There are now literature events, literary agents, houses of literature, spectacles such as “literature trains” that travel through half of Europe, huge literature festivals – the whole field of events and marketing has increased in significance enormously for the dissemination of a book.

The traditional form of literary criticism still exits, but it is complemented by other forms of presentation which are more obviously committed to the idea of service, such as reading tips, brief reviews and recommendations by famous people. Reviews, valued in specialist circles, with their cryptic discussions that are often only accessible to a specialised reader, and sometimes not even to him, are a relic that fewer and fewer newspapers want to afford. Not least, too, because in the long run, readers no longer appreciate such cryptograms.

That does not mean that the quality of criticism today is poorer. The market is now much more short-lived, however. Anything that has not been sold by book-shops within four to six weeks is already returned. That means that the critics have trouble keeping up. In general, there is little opportunity to discuss the latest text in any detail within the context of the author’s other works or to discuss more complex references. Moreover, anything that is not discussed in the literary supplements published on the occasion of the two book fairs in Leipzig and Frankfurt only has slight chances on the market in any case. That means that critiques discuss books in a way that is very much based on their contents and themes. Aesthetic considerations are reduced to standard formulations such as “in epic breadth” or “well-written and stylish” and other such vacuous phrases. Reviews tend to be positive rather than negative, because it is rarely possible to say something negative about the content. And judging the decisive factor, i.e. how the subject matter is transformed into language, would need more time and space, which are not available. A review that tears a work apart is more likely to be dropped if there is a lack of space in any case.

The disappearance of the critic

In addition, freelance, professional critics will soon cease to exist. Economic constraints are responsible for this development. Editors keep the pearls among the new publications for themselves, and their detailed reviews take up a correspondingly large amount of space. Today, some of them are also forced to discuss many titles themselves because no money is available for freelancers.

The second reason for the gradual disappearance of the freelance critic lies in the payment for articles, which has not kept up with the general cost development. The fee of 35 cents per line paid by a national newspaper, for example, is unacceptable for work that takes one to two days. Besides reviews by editors on a fixed contract, only the work of young people still eager to appear in print at all and professors with secure positions who also like to see themselves in the feuilleton page will be published in the future. This development, of course, also has an impact on the quality of the critics.

Sounding out the potential and limitations of literary criticism

Internationally, German-language literary criticism is probably still quite good, even though literary pages are being done away with everywhere. However, I see little that is innovative. There is a canon that is discussed everywhere every season, and many titles that you can forget. According to Thomas Steinfeld, Head of the Feuilleton Section at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, about two thousand of the six to seven thousand literary titles published each year are examined. Of these, just over a thousand are reviewed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine, and five hundred by the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The genre of criticism is without a doubt not very innovative. It is a kind of royal discipline because one works in the same medium, and at best in a way that is almost semi-literary. Language responds to language, text to text. Measuring the text by its own claims, by its concept, and deriving the criteria with which the reviewer can work from the text accordingly, seems to be a workable formula.

Literary criticism should not be primarily a PR instrument, but a vehicle for setting in motion and maintaining a conversation about literature within its contemporary environment, whatever that may be like. There is no doubt that “extending the circle of the public interested in literature”, as Hinck puts it, should be one objective of literary criticism, but it can also have exactly the opposite effect: the pressure of ratings, the ephemeral nature of the work, the poor working conditions for professional critics, the simplifications of presentation and content that seem necessary, and thus the declining quality of criticism. If beyond all this seasonal excitement, more seriousness returned to the discussion of texts, and if there were reflections on the potential, but also the limitations of literary criticism and if the generally increased level of interest in new commitments found expression here, then one would not need to worry about literary criticism.