The review as criticism …

… Book review of John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The conception of “criticism” as the rigorous analysis of literary works was long ago ceded to academic critics as their rightful domain, but equally long ago academic criticism ceased to be primarily concerned with the analysis of literary works—or, more precisely, became preoccupied with analyzing everything but the work itself, preferring the historical, the political, and the cultural to the literary. (In the latest iteration of the “new” in academic criticism, so-called “digital humanities,” text-mining scholars using computer analysis to provide “data” about literary works have essentially made the individual text disappear via “distant reading,” an approach that provides us with quantitative knowledge of an entity called “literature” that makes reading it in any particular manifestation almost superfluous.) If criticism as the assessment of “literary” value is to remain a visible practice, book reviewing may be the only form it can now plausibly take.