Incipit

I put the lit-blog I used to write—also titled Blographia Literaria—on “hiatus” on 6 February 2011. I was in grad school at the time and had started to think of myself more as a historian than a scholar of literature. The reasons for that disciplinary apostasy/conversion were complex and maybe I will write about them some day, but I felt at the time that I should focus my creative energies on educating myself as a historian—familiarizing myself with the monographic literature, getting used to archival research, learning how to adapt to new professional mores and values. As such, a lit-blog felt out of step with my intellectual identity. I also realized that because of the excitement I felt as I dove into the riches of historiography that my passion for writing about literature and literary culture had waned.

Lit-blogs were, as a genre, also fading a bit by 2011. There were a few different factors involved in this slow decline. For one, the whole internet ecosystem was in a period of transformation. Both its form and its content were changing to fit the new modal experience of internet browsing: no longer could a writer carelessly imagine their audience sitting calmly with mouse and keyboard, scrolling and typing on a desktop or a laptop; increasingly one had to accommodate the untethered touchscreen tap-swipe-tap of the smartphone user. Blogging itself had also lost most of its amateurish character—both in the sense that increasingly “blogger” was a paid position, and in the sense that the pressure of continuously generating fresh “content” in order to keep (much less grow) one’s readership made even unpaid writing feel like a job rather than a hobby.

Finally, in retrospect we can see that the early 2010s may have been an inflection point in literary culture. Although literary fiction is still extremely homogeneous, the years on the other side of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements feel like a different world, where the reign of assorted Jonathans and Joshuas permitted only incidental and limited recognition to shine upon fiction by women or by people of color. This dominance extended to the critics who generated the most discussion—it is almost hard to believe now how obsessed lit-blogs were with James Wood and his tastes, for example! Conversations about gender and race were quite marginal within the lit-blogosphere, and when they did draw wide attention—as in the Jennifer Weiner-Jonathan Franzen dust-up or the first release of the VIDA counts—many bloggers and journalists treated them as merely sociological or political, with no significant aesthetic or intellectual import.

The last ten years, then, have completely overturned the familiar landmarks of both literature and the internet, but my reasons for reviving Blographia are similar to those that led me to start it in the first place. For one, I want to use the light discipline of putting my thoughts into published order to create a record of my responses to the books I’m reading. Even more, I want to challenge myself to think more deeply and to think in a more organized manner about what I am reading, to turn half-formed thoughtlets into something closer to whole ideas.

I am also hoping to reach out to and engage a community of other readers, although I don’t have any specific goals in mind in that direction. I’ve never been convinced that a comments section creates a genuine sense of community—or rather, the kind of community (competitively sarcastic, prone to misunderstandings and clenched-teeth “debate”) it creates is one I’ve never felt comfortable with. So I would prefer that if you want to comment, you’d email me.

I’m eager to see what might come of this and curious to see how ten years of change—on both the macro and the micro levels—will show up in this (likely sporadic, but hopefully weekly) reading record.