February 23, 2009

Prof. William Pritchard '53 reviews "Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits" in Boston Globe

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included a book review by Henry Clay Folger Professor of English William H. Pritchard ‘53. New Yorker film critic David Denby’s new book Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits is, says Pritchard, a “densely packed, thoroughly readable foray into a contemporary phenomenon” and “an aggressively humorous anatomy of current invective.”

Although snark has been around since Juvenal and has found expression in literary figures as Swift and Pope, Denby’s real interest is in snark’s proliferation (or metastasis) in contemporary political and technological culture, Pritchard writes. Pritchard reports that for Denby, the fodder of race and sex and gender, combined with the ubiquity of the internet, have resulted in a literary culture lacking nuance and taste: “Irony and satire have been replaced by a debased mode of snarkery.”

Pritchard takes particular interest in Denby’s analysis of Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist:

Denby shows, conclusively to these eyes, how her criteria of judgment are exclusively aesthetic, often sex-related; her own personality contains a “girlish, kittenish side … which has often soothed men even as it teased their inadequacies.” He says Dowd predicted that Gore’s concession speech in 2000 would be self-righteous and self-serving, then never qualified her remarks when the speech turned out to be a dignified and unself-serving one. Dowd mocked Hillary Clinton’s breaking into tears during the campaign, calling it “weirdly narcissistic” in its “Nixonian self-pity.” She saw Clinton’s campaign against Obama (“Obambi,” she called him) as “an imaginary sex war” rather than an authentic struggle for the nomination. What Denby’s pages on Dowd provide is a reasoned case against a gifted writer whose powers of ridicule take precedence over everything else. He also shows readers why their irritation with Dowd’s column is part of a larger cultural pattern.

Snark, Pritchard concludes, makes “necessary distinctions between [snark] and something better,” and does so “with wit and passion.”

Mina Suk '99 | February 23, 2009 10:43 AM | Alumni | Faculty

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