The American Scholar's Wonderousy Awful Cover Story

Allow me this diatribe...I just read an article in the latest The American Scholar entitled Wonder Bread by Melvin Jules Bukiet. I found it to be one of the worst written scholarly articles I have EVER read.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/wonder-bukiet.html

Below I will attack certain parts of the article I found particularly ridiculous.

Zany anecdotal tangents fly off the narrative and within sentences via the BBoWs’s favorite units of typography, dashes, parentheses, and italics (because they’re so bursting with ideas that they’ve got to tell you — now)<---oh no, I'm just like the people he hates!



People the author of this The American Scholar piece hates on (in no particular order)

Jonathan Safran Foer

Nicole Krauss

Alice Sebold (attacks well deserved, sort of out of place in this piece i think)

Myla Goldberg

Sue Monk Kidd (again, comparing JoSaFo to the hack who wrote The Secret Life of Bees is almost enough in itself to show this guy knows nothing of what he speaks (Where is a Marshall McLuhan-esque character (Dave?) when I need one?))*

Dave Eggers

Benjamin Kunkel (kunkel must be PISSED! n+1 HATES McSweeneys...though Kunkel has been published in the Believer, self-admittedly making himself a bit in the middle of the conflict)

Michael Chabon (seriously?!)

Paul Auster (because he's from Brooklyn and has a novel with authors as characters?)



he later admits:

Not to begrudge success in any form because the BBoWs are one and all (well maybe not Sebold and Kidd) better written than the vast majority of genre books that comprise most bestseller lists, but this is bunk.



That’s because Kavalier and Clay have no inner life. They are finely inked cartoons without a third dimension. <-------------------did he even read the novel?


Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes. <--------this makes no sense whatsoever! I have no idea how this makes Lethem better than Eggers or Foer

A second novel by Myla Goldberg and a third book by Dave Eggers travel geographically and emotionally far beyond their initial efforts. Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy is set among working-class Bostonians during the influenza epidemic of 1918 and Eggers’s What Is the Whattakes its protagonist from a ferocious civil war in Africa to ambiguous comfort in America. Perhaps needless to say, neither particularly appealed to the authors’ original readership. <------needless to say? apparently needless to document...for an article in the American Scholar, there is a shocking lack of evidence/research to back up such claims

Unfortunately, Helprin was banished from the precincts of wonder when he turned into — or revealed himself to have always secretly been — a neocon and insisted in his nonfiction that the world is a dangerous place. This is especially ironic because the BBoW authors who have learned from him are fundamentally conservative. Though the individual authors are vociferously leftist, they remember and yearn for Ronald Reagan’s blissed-out Morning in America, during which they spent their formative years.<-----that this man teaches at Sarah Lawrence and is published in The American Scholar perhaps says more about the state of academia and scholarship in America than I'd care to believe

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it. Your father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.<----wow. this man, who has apparently written seven books of fiction and edited three anthologies, has basically stated any and all fiction that is not true to real life (realist) is worthless and "in violation of human experience." Damn, I never knew Kafka (among many many many others) was "in violation of human experience"..jeez, I must not understand the human experience...also "sex murders"? really?


clearly displeased,
Brian

p.s. more on Kunkel:


Dwight’s maundering and meandering prior to his rescue is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s urban peregrinations in The Catcher in the Rye, which Michiko Kakutani picked up on when she fascinatingly reviewed Indecision for The New York Times in the voice of Mr. Caulfield. This makes sense not only because Wilmerding resembles Salinger’s hero, but because, despite its Manhattan-centrism, The Catcher in the Rye may be the ur-BBoW.

*jeez, I do** use parentheses


**and italics-though I stay away from the dash unless being obnoxious like now...I'm glad he doesn't mention ellipses...or foot notes