The “I” of Criticism: An Introduction to Vivian Gornick (Live Online)

“Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events,” writes Vivian Gornick, but rather “when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.” Raised a red-diaper baby by working-class Jewish parents in the Bronx, Gornick’s prolific career as a literary critic, journalist, and memoirist offers a window onto the cultural and political life of New York City in the second half of the twentieth century. She dwells on the hopes and disappointments that shaped American socialism, the women’s movement, the idiosyncrasies of life in New York City, and the tradition of American letters, engaging with works by Herman Melville, Emma Goldman, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, and Joan Didion, among others. In prose that is rigorous, witty, warm, and self-implicating, Gornick poses vital questions in our own moment of skepticism about the form of the personal essay. How does memoir (and how do other forms of life writing) relate to literary fiction, and to criticism? What forms of political, philosophical, and historical knowledge can the memoir yield?

In this course, we will read excerpts from Gornick’s major works—including The Romance of American Communism, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, The Odd Woman in the City, and The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative—as well as select essays on feminism, literature, New York City, and the practice of (re-)reading and criticism. How might we read Gornick with and against contemporary feminist theory and praxis? What can her insistence on documenting the “affective life of the Communist Party” teach those on the American left today? How did the personal narrative become a preferred device for representing the condition of outsiderness? And what allows a memoir to succeed, in Gornick’s words, as “literature rather than testament”?

“The ‘I’ of Criticism: An Introduction to Vivian Gornick” will also run in person.