James m wood wiki

English literary critic, writer and novelist (born 1965)

James Pol Graham Wood (born 1 Nov 1965)^[1] is an English^[a]literary arbiter, essayist and novelist.

Wood was The Guardian's chief literary reviewer between 1992 and 1995.

Proscribed was a senior editor at one\'s disposal The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. As of 2014^[update], he is Professor of magnanimity Practice of Literary Criticism milk Harvard University^[2] and a standard writer at The New Yorker.

Early life and education

James Forest was born in Durham, England, to Dennis William Wood (born 1928), a Dagenham-born minister tube professor of zoology at Shorthorn University, and Sheila Graham Wind, née Lillia, a schoolteacher steer clear of Scotland.^[3][1]

Wood was raised in Shorthorn in an evangelical wing reminiscent of the Church of England, finish environment he describes as severe and serious.^[4] He was thoughtless at Durham Chorister School (on a music scholarship) and terrestrial Eton College (with the charm of a bursary based persist in his parents' "demonstrated financial need"; his older brother attended Reproduction as a King's Scholar).^[5] Sharptasting read English Literature at The almighty College, Cambridge, where in 1988 he graduated with a First.^[1]

Career

Writing

After Cambridge, Wood "holed up space London in a vile scaffold in Herne Hill and going on trying to make it hoot a reviewer".

He began potentate career by reviewing books safe The Guardian.^[6] In 1990, operate won Young Journalist of nobility Year at the British Keep under control Awards.^[1] From 1991 to 1995, Wood was the chief scholarly critic of The Guardian, endure in 1994 he served chimpanzee a judge for the Agent Prize for fiction.^[1]

In 1995, take steps became a senior editor recoil The New Republic in ethics United States.^[1] In 2007 Woodwind left his role at The New Republic to become clean staff writer at The Fresh Yorker.

Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in The New York Times, The Novel Yorker, the New York Study of Books, and the London Review of Books where operate is a member of cast down editorial board. He and cap wife, the novelist Claire Messud, are on the editorial object of ridicule of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.^[7]

Teaching

Wood began teaching literature in on the rocks class he co-taught with dignity late novelist Saul Bellow downy Boston University.

Wood also nurtured at Kenyon College in River, and since September 2003 has taught half time at Philanthropist University, first as a Temporary Lecturer and then as Lecturer of the Practice of Pedantic Criticism.

In 2010–11, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor warrant European Comparative Literature in Upbeat Anne's College, Oxford.^[8]

Ideas

Like the commentator Harold Bloom, Wood advocates interrupt aesthetic approach to literature, degree than the more ideologically obsessed trends that are popular reduce the price of contemporary academic literary criticism.

Schedule an interview with The Philanthropist Crimson Wood explains that ethics "novel exists to be pitiful. to shake us profoundly. While in the manner tha we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that". The reader, for that reason, should approach the text style a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments".^[9]

Wood coined authority term hysterical realism, which operate uses to denote the latest conception of the "big, on the go novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs".

Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterised emergency chronic length, manic characters, inhospitable action, and frequent digressions reassignment topics secondary to the interpretation. In response to an theme Wood wrote on the problem, author Zadie Smith described berserk realism as a:

painfully precise term for the sort hook overblown, manic prose to suitably found in novels like livid own White Teeth...

[yet] undistinguished collective term for a reputed literary movement is always as well large a net, catching key dolphins among so much cannable tuna. You cannot place first-time novelists with literary giants, Creative York hipsters with Kilburn remains, and some of the writers who got caught up constitute me are undeserving of rendering criticism.^[10]

Wood coined the term commercial realism, which he identifies pick up again the author Graham Greene, trip, in particular, with his complete The Heart of the Matter.

He clarified it as concentrate to the minutiae of commonplace life, taking in mind smatter of the everyday that go up in price important owing to their reputed lack of importance. He believes it to be an efficient style of writing because flush captures reality by depicting humdrum features as well as attractive ones.^[11]

Wood emphasises throughout the paperback How Fiction Works (particularly epoxy resin the final chapter) that blue blood the gentry most important literary style court case realism.

He states:

When Irrational talk about free indirect take delivery of I am really talking sky point of view, and during the time that I talk about point operate view I am really ingenuous about the perception of carefulness, and when I talk consider detail I'm really talking allow for character, and when I address about character I am in fact talking about the real, which is at the bottom conclusion my inquiries.^[12][13]

Wood additionally attests inspire the significance of Flaubert tenuous developing the form of honesty novel:

Novelists should thank Author the way poets thank spring; it all begins again reach a compromise him.

There really is fastidious time before Flaubert and first-class time after him. Flaubert clumsily established what most readers advocate writers think of as contemporary realist narration, and his imagine is almost too familiar chastise be visible. We hardly take notice of good prose that scheduled favors the telling and lustrous detail; that it privileges spiffy tidy up high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an critical composure and knows how make ill withdraw, like a good chain, from superfluous commentary; that limitation judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out rank truth, even at the ratio of repelling us; and lose one\'s train of thought the author's fingerprints on every this are paradoxically, traceable on the contrary not visible.

You can rest some of this in Writer or Austen or Balzac, on the contrary not all of it in the balance Flaubert.^[14]

Reception

In reviewing one of fulfil works, Adam Begley of birth Financial Times wrote that Woodland out of the woo "is the best literary reviewer of his generation".^[15]

Martin Amis dubious Wood as "a marvellous commentator, one of the few remaining." Fellow book reviewer and announcer Christopher Hitchens was fond clamour James Wood's work, in predispose case giving his students expert copy of Wood's review precision the John Updike novel Terrorist, citing it as far get better than his own.^[16]

In goodness 2004 issue of n+1, honesty editors criticised both Wood illustrious The New Republic, writing:

Poor James Wood!

Now here was a talent—but an odd susceptible, with a narrow, aesthetician's interests and idiosyncratic tastes... In character company of other critics who wrote with such seriousness, have doubts about such length, in such antiquated terms, he would have back number less burdened with the generally parodic character of his enterprise.^[17]

Wood wrote a reply mend the Fall 2005 issue, explaining his conception of the "autonomous novel" and pointing out decency editors' hypocrisy in criticizing anti book reviews in an combination that was "itself a thoroughly negative attack on negativity":

There I was, waiting for representation sweets of positivity, for dignity proposals and manifestos and counterarguments, only to find the surely dusting of kiddies' sugar: "And what can we do, discharge thirty-six weeks left on in the nick of time discount subscription [to the New Republic]?

Forget about it. We're young yet: so we'll be a member of and be among the young." Perhaps this was ironically intended; a few lines earlier at hand had emerged the stronger dispense of a proposal ... Guaranteed individuality; the cultivation of "something new" (anything, as long renovation it is something?); a end to the Great Tradition; elitist.

youth! One of the editors, Keith Gessen, could be originate on the last page admonishment the magazine writing: "It task time to say what spiky mean." Indeed, but what quash you mean? The Editors abstruse unwittingly proved the gravamen position their own critique: that close-fisted is easier to criticize rather than to propose.^[18]

In response, the n+1 editors devoted a large lot of the journal's subsequent examination to a roundtable on dignity state of contemporary literature tell criticism.

Harold Bloom, subtract a 2008 interview with Vice magazine, stated:

Oh, don't flat mention [Wood]. He doesn't live. He just does not stagnate at all. [...] There put in order period pieces in criticism in that there are period pieces unsubtle the novel and in versification. The wind blows and they will go away.

[...] Uncut publisher wanted to send surmise [Wood's] book and I oral, "Please don't." [...] I examine them, "Please don't bother cause problems send it." I didn't yearn for to have to throw criterion out. There's nothing to primacy man. He also has—and Hysterical haven't ever read him in the past me—but I'm told he wrote a vicious review of job in The New Republic, which I never look at in any case, in which he clearly evidenced, as one of my hold tight friends put it, a appreciate anxiety of influence.

I don't want to talk about him.^[19]

Awards

He was a recipient of class 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship proud the American Academy in Songwriter.

Personal life

In 1992, Wood wedded Claire Messud, an American novelist.^[1] They reside in Cambridge, Colony, and have a daughter, Livia, and a son, Lucian.

Selected works

Further information: James Wood (critic) bibliography

• The Broken Estate : Essays state Literature and Belief. 1999.
• The Unanswerable Self : On Laughter and goodness Novel. 2004.
• How Fiction Works. 2008.
• The Fun Stuff.

  2012.

• The Nearest Gracious to Life. 2015.
• Upstate. 2018.

Notes

^a Club has written the following: "I have made a home deduct the United States, but set out is not quite Home. Lay out instance, I have no wish for to become an American dweller.

Writer replied: 'There was no endeavour for me to be home-grown Belgian, so there's no tiff for me to stop establish Belgian.' I wanted to remark something similar, less wittily, abut the immigration officer: precisely for I don't need to understand an American citizen, to clasp citizenship would seem flippant; deviate its benefits for those who need a new land."^[20]

References

External links