James Wood

James Wood (born 1965 in Durham) is an English literary critic and novelist. He is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a literary critic at The New Yorker.

Life

Wood was born in 1965, in Durham, England, where his father was a professor of zoology at Durham University. He was educated at Durham Chorister School, Eton College, on a music scholarship and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature. In 1990, he was the winner of the British Press Young Journalist of the Year Award.

In August 2007, Wood became a staff writer at The New Yorker, leaving his post as a senior editor at The New Republic, which he joined in 1995. Wood was the chief literary critic of The Guardian in London, from 1992-1995. In 1994 Wood served as a judge for that year's Booker Prize for fiction; the winner was James Kelman's "How Late It Was, How Late." He is also an editor at large of The Kenyon Review. Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books where he is a member of its editorial board.

Wood began teaching literature in a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University. Wood also taught at Kenyon College in Ohio, and since September 2003 he has taught half-time at Harvard University, first as a Visiting Lecturer, and then as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.^[1] He is married to Claire Messud, an American novelist. They live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their two children.

Critical views

Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments."

Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth…"^[2]

Pro

In reviewing one of his works, Adam Begley of the Financial Times wrote that Wood "is the best literary critic of his generation," a sentiment that has also been expressed by writers and critics William H. Pritchard, Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Cynthia Ozick, Christopher Hitchens, and Saul Bellow. In an interview with Clive James, Martin Amis described Wood as "a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining."

In 2008, Wood was named one of the top 30 critics in the world by Intelligent Life, the lifestyle publication from The Economist^[3].

Con

In the 2004 issue of n+1, the editors criticized both Wood and The New Republic writing, "Poor James Wood! Now here was a talent—but an odd one, with a narrow, aesthetician’s interests and idiosyncratic tastes... In the company of other critics who wrote with such seriousness, at such length, in such old-fashioned terms, he would have been less burdened with the essentially parodic character of his enterprise."[1] James Wood wrote a lengthy reply in the Fall 2005 issue, explaining his conception of the "autonomous novel," in response to which the n+1 editors devoted a large portion of the journal's subsequent issue to a roundtable on the state of contemporary literature and criticism.

Bibliography

Wood is the author of three books of criticism:

• The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 2000)
• The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
• How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

He has also produced an autobiographical novel:

• The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003)

Wood has written introductions to:

• Selected Stories of D. H. Lawrence (Modern Library, 1999)
• Collected Stories of Saul Bellow (Penguin, 2002)
• The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov (2001)
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2001)
• The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2002)
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
• La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
• Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Library of America, 2003)

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: James Wood

• Keynote speech at the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize awards gala, including audio and video clips

Interviews

• An interview with James Wood on The Marketplace of Ideas
• The Harvard Crimson

Criticism

• What Would Wood Think
• Collosal critic reality check needed
• Celebrate the force of fiction
• The Prime of James Wood from The New York Review of Books