On Reviewing, redux

The latest issue of the American Book Review arrived in my mailbox today. The title of the editorial--"Criminal Editors"-- immediately caught my eye, and so I read it first. What, I wondered, could that be about? What it's about is a lawsuit an author is bringing in a French court against the editor of an international scholarly journal for publishing a review that basically characterized the plaintiff's book as meticulous but not going as far as it might have in exploring its subject matter. The ABR editorial refers to the review as "negative" (presumably because that's how the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it in its article NYU Professor Faces Libel Lawsuit in France for Refusing to Purge Negative Book Review. Imagine, if every editor had to work in fear that every review that's not a glowing rave might provoke a lawsuit.

Soon after it appeared, Ms. Calvo-Goller wrote to Mr. Weiler, saying that the review, by Thomas Weigend, director of the Cologne Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law and dean of the faculty of law at the University of Cologne, was defamatory. She asked that the review be removed from the site....

....Mr. Weiler refused to remove the review but offered to publish a response from Ms. Calvo-Goller, "so that anyone reading the review would immediately be able to read her reply," an approach that "would have amply and generously vindicated all possible interests of the author of the book," he wrote in the editorial. "I continue to believe that in all the circumstances of the case ... removing the review by Professor Weigend would have dealt a very serious blow to notions of freedom of speech, free academic exchange, and the very important institution of book reviewing."

Faced with what he notes is "the heavy financial burden of defending such a case — expenses which are in large part not recoverable even if acquitted," Mr. Weiler has appealed for "moral and material assistance" from the academic community and writes that he is optimistic that he will be acquitted at trial. "Any other result will deal a heavy blow to academic freedom and change the landscape of book reviewing in scholarly journals, especially when reviews have a cyber presence as is so common today."

You can read this so-called "libelous" review that the author is claiming "could cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion" here. (As someone who has received a few vitriolic reviews in her time, I have to wonder how she would have reacted to receiving an actual hammering.)

The author, by the way, is a senior lecturer at the Academic Centre of Law and Business in Israel. I find myself wondering if she teach law students. Only yesterday I was reminded of all the potential damage John Yoo could be doing in his role as teacher.

I'm also reminded that I recently came across a news item about a lawyer using the law to bludgeon his opponents-- viz., Juneau County Distrinct Attorney (in Wisconsin), Scott Southworth, who

warned that teaching a student how to properly use contraceptives would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor punishable by up to nine months behind bars and a $10,000 fine. He said it would be promoting sex among minors, who are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin.

This is presumably because Wisconsin State has just passed a law "requiring schools that teach sexual education to adopt a comprehensive approach." In Juneau County, at least, the teachers charged with teaching sex education are caught between a rock and a hard place. (The AP story can be read here.) And I'm also wondering whatever could such a law mean, that minors "are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin"? They have a law prohibiting that? I'm wondering what a "minor" is. Any Wisconsin folks reading this who could clue me in? But to get back to Southworth's campaign and the new law:

Wisconsin schools aren't required to teach sex education. But under the new law, which was backed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, schools that do must teach a range of topics, including the benefits of abstinence, the proper use of contraceptives, how to make responsible decisions, and the criminal penalties for underage sex. Parents can choose to keep their children out of the classes.

Southworth says he is not trying to bolster his reputation as a social conservative for a potential run for higher office, but his stance has proved popular with antiabortion groups.

Matt Sande, the legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, which opposes the new law, said every district attorney in Wisconsin should follow Southworth's lead.

Sex education is contributing to the delinquency of a minor?
A negative review is libel?
Torture is legal and a prerogative of the POTUS?

Using the law to bully people who don't have the resources to defend them has become utterly commonplace. Bet that editor never imagined he'd find himself hauled into court on such a charge.

But do get back to "Criminal Editors," here's Jeffrey R. Di Leo, in his ABR editorial:

If book reviewing is to distance itself from the perception that it is simply a promotional service for the publishing industry, then it needs to engage in legitimate practices....As an editor, I face both positive and negative reviews on a regular basis. The backbone of reviewing rests on reviewers competent to handle the books they have been assigned and level of honesty regarding their responsiveness to the text before them. Reviewers with an ax to grind or a preconceived notion of what they are going to say before they even read the book are to be avoided. However, if a fair assessment of a text results in a negative consequence, then it is the obligation of the reviewer to report it and of the editor to publish it. Anything less compromises the integrity of the review process.

He also notes that reviewers tend to err "on the side of sympathy" when they feel themselves reacting negatively toward a book-- or else simply refuse to write the review.

Justina Robson, by the way, discusses her experience of the costs for reviewers (in the sf field) for writing less than unalloyed praise, in her review of Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes for Strange Horizons this week.

Seven years later...

The new issue of the American Book Reivew (September-October 2009) arrived in my mailbox a few days ago, and I was interested to see that the issue's Focus section is "Innovative Fiction by International Women." Most ABR issues have a Focus section, a Feature section, plus a section of uncategorized reviews. The content of the Focus section can vary, but sometimes, as in this case, it consists simply of an introductory essay followed by reviews.

Christina Milletti, the editor of this particular Focus section, begins by noting that the American Book Revew published a special issue devoted to "Innovative Women Writing Fiction" back in 2002. (This is an issue that stands out in my memory as wonderfully compelling.) Milletti recalls that issue's introduction:

At the time, guest editor Stacey Gottlieb called attention to the paradoxical spirit of the assignment: she not only wondered, for instance, how the relationship between gender, writing, and innovation could be measured, but also "whether such gender-specific roundups were even needed anymore."

Indeed. The way my spirits lifted when I saw that special issue, the way I snatched it off the rack at Bulldog News, made the answer to that all too clear. Milletti continues:

Now, seven years down the road, little has changed. The strategies for approaching innovative writing by women have settled ("stalled" might be a less tactful word) into two camps: those who propose the feminine is revealed in experimental work through specific stylistic devices-- i.e., a fluidity of prose, the nonlinearity of narrative elements, a decentered or nonhierarchical plot structure-- and those who are more hesitant to connect gender with writing techne. In short, the same body of questions remains core to the task at hand again. The focus of this special issue-- "Innovative Fiction by International Women"-- gives us a chance to once again revisit the problem that women innovative writers pose to readers. First, let me note the obvious: that, among writers and critics alike, there remains an ongoing discomfort with the question of "difference"-- to be more precise, the relation of "gender" to "genre." How, after all, do we "classify" women's fiction? Is it a subdivision of the great rubric "fiction"? A "literary subculture," as Nancy K. Miller unhappily remarks, given the "statistical majority" of women? Is women's fiction a "minor" literature, a "political" literature, a literature "of its own"? What is its object? Representation, for instance? Readership? Resistance? (Is an objective as such necessary?) And who writes it? Is women's fiction written by women, or is t a literature about women? Is it a feminist literature? Does it represent a "tradition"? (If so, whose tradition?) Finally, what do we mean by women's innovative fiction anyway. Innovative... compared to what?

Milletti looks to Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuch's Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction (1989) for possible answers, but comes away dissatisfied. She soon returns to the raw fact that stubbornly remains:

Certainly, the consequences for the historical production of women's texts are evident. As Susan Howe reminds us, for instance, even so-called "recognized" women writers are still often neglected; "Emily Dickinson and Gerturde Stein," after all, "are clearly among the most innovative precursors of modernist poetry and prose, yet to this day canonical criticism from Harold Bloom to Hugh Kenner persists in dropping their names and ignoring their work." It would appear, in short, that even when we hope to showcase the work of women, how the idea of the feminine is used and deployed (even with optimistic intentions) is itself at issue. I'd therefore like to propose the following: that we begin to create forums in which the idea of the "feminine" is also at stake-- not merely designated as a simple condition of inclusion. That we begin to question who, exactly "we" is: how are "we" a "collective" body of women writers? What conditions connect us? What circumstances keep us isolated from one another? How can we speak together, if not strictly, as one? After all, do all innovative women writers agree on the wealth of meanings the terms "woman" or "innovative" invoke? What we may very well discover is that women's innovative fictions are not founded in gender-- so much as in the critique of gender.

Milletti offers as an example a brief reading of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (1977), and then offers even briefer characterizations of the work by women writers reviewed under the umbrella of the Focus section.

I enjoyed reading this Focus section, particularly Milletti's essay. And yet, how much more satisfying it would have been to have been given a taste of Milletti's idea of a forum discussing the issues she raises, that she proposes in the middle of her essay. Or critical essays on the books under review addressing some of her questions with respect to the individual writer. Instead, because these were ordinary reviews written without reference to the Focus, I find myself feeling discouraged, for I came away with the sense that it is still apparently necessary to have a special feature on women writers in order to read reviews of these books that would have fit comfortably in any issue of the ABR-- books by some very well known writers (Rikki Ducornet, Lynne Tillman, Lydia Davis, Janet Frame, Mary Caponegro), plus work by three writers I had not encountered, Bhanu Kapil and Magdalena Tulli, and Christie Montalbetti.

I hate to say it, but we've got a long way to go, baby.