I Haven’t Any Right to Criticize: Editing Book Reviews for American Periodicals

I Haven’t Any Right to Criticize:Editing Book Reviews for American Periodicals Craig Monk In Small World (1984), British academic and novelist David Lodge shows us how one enthusiastic notice, well-timed and well-placed, can create a scholarly phenomenon. Esteemed critic Rudyard Parkinson, resentful that he has even been asked to stoop to write a review, decides to use the opportunity to take revenge against a rival: he resolves to make an academic star of little-known Philip Swallow and, by so doing, antagonize Morris Zapp, a character modeled by Lodge after Stanley Fish. This fictional series of events has stayed with me for the length of my professional career. I think about it often. Do reviews actually make a difference in the reception of our scholarship? Is being asked to review a book an honor, or is it a chore? How have reviews changed, and how are they changing, in the era of blogs and tweets? I once started a minor skirmish in the Evening Telegram, the local paper in my adolescent home of St. John’s, Newfoundland, through an amateurish, snarky notice of a small-press collection of stories, and so I have long had some sense of what can happen when you write, publicly, about the work of others. As a graduate student, I decided to put some emphasis on publishing reviews, printing fifty-eight of them, as of this moment, and so I can claim to have acted with the growing conviction that this work really still is important. Not surprisingly, I can also say that that I am proud to have curated the book reviews section for American Periodicals for approximately four years, beginning with the twentieth volume in 2010. My greatest professional ambition, when James Tanner announced, in 2002, that he was going to step down from the editorship of AP, after a long and distinguished run, was to see whether I could replace him. It was not simply hubris, though I was, at the time, a newly-promoted Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge, then a small, liberal arts institution in the southern part of Alberta, Canada. I had started my working life as a magazine [End Page 15] editor, dropping out of university, briefly, to work in the field. I thought that American Periodicals represented for me a great opportunity to combine my scholarly interests with my practical experience. Needless to say, the move to the Ohio State University, with its talented team of editors and a partnership forged with the university press in Columbus, was the right decision made by the Research Society for American Periodicals. But the incoming editors were very kind to me, offering me the opportunity to review a book on Chatelaine magazine and helping me shepherd through to publication a piece I wrote in 2005 on New Yorker coverage of hockey in 1920s Manhattan. It is hard to imagine a more Canadian indoctrination to the AP community than that, eh? If reviewing has been essential to my own identity as a scholar, the activity has also helped me make valuable professional contacts. Though I have traveled the conference circuit for nearly twenty years, I do not take naturally to the rhythm of its networks. One of my first publications was a review of Ann duCille’s The Coupling Convention (1993), and through that assignment I met, in a virtual sense, Richard Gray, who was then helping edit the Journal of American Studies. He was very generous with me and, from his position teaching U.S. literature at the University of Essex, Professor Gray was an inspiration, as I sought to fit in as one of the few graduate students at the time reading a similar topic at Oxford. By the end of the 1990s, I had made contact with the editors of the Modern Language Review, through a teaching contact at the University of Reading, as I recall, and I managed to get assigned just about every new monograph in that period sent them about James Joyce, even after I had moved back to Canada. Settling in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I networked with my Modern Language Association colleagues by reviewing books...

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