Ivan Franceschini / The Work of Culture

 

Ilustration by Robert Schmit

The Work of Culture

Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University

Ivan Franceschini
Written On 20 July 2021. 

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

— David Graeber (2015: 134–35)

 

Much has been written in recent years about the degeneration of neoliberal academia, which makes for odd and discomforting reading when you are part—as both victim and accomplice—of that system, but few writers have been able to describe the perversion of the system in terms as vivid and inventive as the late anthropologist David Graeber. According to Graeber (2015: 141), the commercialisation and bureaucratisation of academia have led to a shift from ‘poetic technologies’ to ‘bureaucratic technologies’, which is one of the reasons why today we do not go around on those flying cars promised in the science fiction of the past century. As universities are bloated with ‘bullshit jobs’ and run by a managerial class that pits researchers against each other through countless rankings and evaluations, the very idea of academia as a place for pursuing groundbreaking ideas dies (Graeber 2015: 135; 2018). As conformity and predictability come to be extolled as cardinal virtues, the purpose of the university increasingly becomes simply to confirm the obvious, develop technologies and knowledge of immediate relevance for the market, and exact astronomically high fees from students under the pretence of providing them with vocational training (hence the general attack on the humanities). But is that all there is to it?

Tim Parks / The Writer-Translator Equation

 

Rijksmuseum

Jan Ekels (II): A Writer Trimming his Pen, 1784

The Writer–Translator Equation

By Tim Parks

September 21, 2020, 7:00 am

The translator is a writer. The writer is a translator. How many times have I run up against these assertions?—in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets (“Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text,” observed Octavio Paz). Others claim that because language is referential, any written text is a translation of the world referred to.

Tim Parks / Why Read New Books?

Illustration by Winsor McCay

Why Read New Books?

by Tim Parks

November 11, 2014, 2:36 pm

Hasn’t it all been done before? Perhaps better than anyone today could ever do it? If so, why read contemporary novels, especially when so many of the classics are available at knockdown prices and for the most part absolutely free as e-books? I just downloaded for free the original Italian of Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian. It’s beautifully written. I’m learning a lot about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italy. It’s 860 pages long. A few more finds like that and my reading time will all be accounted for. Why go search out the difficult contemporary author?

Tim Parks / To Tell and Not To Tell

Italo Svevo; drawing by Tullio Pericoli

To Tell and Not To Tell

Tim Parks

March 3, 2014, 1:15 pm

“Her husband was deeply hurt when she published her novel…”

“The author’s father was disgusted by what he had written…”

“His wife was furious…” etc.

Is information like this ever more than gossip? Can we learn anything about literature by reflecting on the responses of the writer’s family and loved ones? What Christina Stead’s partner thought about Letty Fox, Her Luck, for example, where the writer presented his daughter by a previous marriage as a promiscuous sexual opportunist. Or how Emma Hardy reacted when she saw her sexual problems discussed in the pages of Jude the Obscure. Or the embarrassment of Faulkner’s parents when he published Soldiers’ Pay.

Tim Parks / Trapped Inside the Novel

Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos
Goma, Congo, December 14, 2012

Trapped Inside the Novel

By Tim Parks

October 28, 2013, 5:03 pm

I wonder how many people share the experience described by David Shields in Reality Hunger, of tackling some large novel, a work essentially conventional in its structure and brand of realism, that weaves together the lives of its characters over a number of years, and simply feeling that the whole exercise has become largely irrelevant. Shields doesn’t present his remarks as a criticism of writers—the name he mentions is Jonathan Franzen—pursuing the tradition of the long realistic novel. Rather, he suggests it is a change in himself, something he believes has been brought about by the utterly changed nature of contemporary life. He considers the variety of electronic media—the proliferation and abbreviation of all forms of messages, the circumstances created by the ever more rapid transit and greater abundance of information, the emergence of a powerful virtual world that becomes more real to us all the time—and he concludes that given this way of life it is hard for the traditional kind of novel to hold our attention. He then looks at a variety of texts that, unlike the traditional novel, weld together chunks of “reality,” pieces of documentary taken from elsewhere, quotations, fragments, provocations, moments of lyricism, and melodrama, perhaps from film or television, newspapers or websites, to create an entirely different reading experience.

Tim Parks / Raise Your Hand If You’ve Read Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Raise Your Hand If You’ve Read Knausgaard

ByTim Parks

July 19, 2014, 9:30 am

Is there any consistent relationship between a book’s quality and its sales? Or again between the press and critics’ response to a work and its sales? Are these relationships stable over time or do they change?

Raise your hand, for example, if you know what the actual sales are for Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. This mammoth work of autobiography—presently running at three five-hundred-page volumes with three more still to be translated from his native Norwegian—is relentlessly talked about as an “international sensation and bestseller” (Amazon) and constantly praised by the most prestigious critics. “It’s unbelievable… It’s completely blown my mind,” says Zadie Smith. “Intense and vital…. Ceaselessly compelling…. Superb,” agrees James Wood. Important newspapers (The New York Times for one) carry frequent articles about Knausgaard and his work. A search on The Guardian website has ten pages of hits for articles on Knausgaard despite the fact that the first volume of My Struggle wasn’t published in the UK until 2012. In a round-up of authors’ summer-reading tips in the same newspaper, the academic Sarah Churchwell remarks that after sitting on the jury for the Booker prize she looks forward to being “the last reader in Britain” to tackle My Struggle.

Tim Parks / Reality Fiction

Reality Fiction

Tim Parks
October 16, 2014, 4:30 pm

It has long been a commonplace that fiction provides a way to break taboos and talk about potentially embarrassing or even criminal personal experiences without bringing society’s censure on oneself. Put the other way round you could say that taboos and censorship encourage creativity, of a kind. But what happens if the main obstacles to free and direct expression fall away?