James Douglas Graham Wood (born 1 November 1965) is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist.

Wood was The Guardians chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995. He was a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. , he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Early life and education

James Wood was born in Durham, England, to Dennis William Wood (born 1928), a Dagenham-born minister and professor of zoology at Durham University, and Sheila Graham Wood, née Lillia, a schoolteacher from Scotland. He was educated at Durham Chorister School (on a music scholarship) and at Eton College (with the support of a bursary based on his parents' "demonstrated financial need"; his older brother attended Eton as a King's Scholar). He read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1988 he graduated with a First. In 1990, he won Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Teaching

Wood began teaching literature in a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University. Wood also taught at Kenyon College in Ohio, and since September 2003 has taught half time at Harvard University, first as a Visiting Lecturer and then as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.

In 2010–11, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.

Ideas

Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than the more ideologically driven trends that are popular in contemporary academic literary criticism. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting... to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that". The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments".

Wood coined the term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs". Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterised by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a:

Wood coined the term commercial realism, which he identifies with the author Graham Greene, and, in particular, with his book The Heart of the Matter. He clarified it as attention to the minutiae of daily life, taking in mind elements of the everyday that are important owing to their supposed lack of importance. He believes it to be an effective style of writing because it captures reality by depicting banal features as well as interesting ones.

Wood emphasises throughout the book How Fiction Works (particularly in the final chapter) that the most important literary style is realism. He states:

Wood additionally attests to the significance of Flaubert in developing the form of the novel:

Reception

In reviewing one of his works, Adam Begley of the Financial Times wrote that Wood "is the best literary critic of his generation".

Martin Amis described Wood as "a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining." Fellow book reviewer and journalist Christopher Hitchens was fond of Wood's work, in one case giving his students a copy of Wood's review of the John Updike novel Terrorist, citing it as far better than his own.

In the 2004 issue of n+1, the editors criticised both Wood and The New Republic, writing: Wood wrote a reply in the Fall 2005 issue, explaining his conception of the "autonomous novel" and pointing out the editors' hypocrisy in criticizing negative book reviews in an essay that was "itself a wholly negative attack on negativity":

In response, the n+1 editors devoted a large portion of the journal's subsequent issue to a roundtable on the state of contemporary literature and criticism.

Upon the publication of Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, in 1999, Harold Bloom wrote that Wood is "an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time." However, in a 2008 interview with Vice magazine, Bloom stated: <blockquote>Oh, don't even mention [Wood]. He doesn't exist. He just does not exist at all. [...] There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away. [...] A publisher wanted to send me [Wood's] book and I said, "Please don't." [...] I told them, "Please don't bother to send it." I didn't want to have to throw it out. There's nothing to the man. He also has—and I haven't ever read him on me—but I'm told he wrote a vicious review of me in The New Republic, which I never look at anyway, in which he clearly evidenced, as one of my old friends put it, a certain anxiety of influence. I don't want to talk about him.</blockquote>

Awards

Wood was a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.

Personal life

In 1992, Wood married Claire Messud, an American novelist.</small>

References

  • James Wood at The Guardian
  • James Wood at the London Review of Books
  • James Wood at The New Republic
  • James Wood at The New Yorker
  • Text and video of keynote speech at the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony