Of least concern: a new book, a poem on its publication, and excerpts (and a video)
I thought I'd say something on how the publication of a new book, that used to be much looked forward to, fills one with sadness.
Artwork by Vanessa Bell, from the cover of Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, published in 1924. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.
This odd formulation – ‘non-peer reviewed essay’ – is a response to the excessive deference paid in India by academia to the idea of peer review: an instance, in a sense, of academia deferring to itself and to the sacred value and respectability it accords to sociological verifiability. In the process, we have been gradually forgetting the essay’s eccentricity as a form and its independence from conventional truth value. Some of the thoughts in this mission statement are, as would probably be obvious, pertinent both to the academic and the journalistic article.
This symposium wishes to reconsider essays that have a deep seriousness of intent but deliberately reject the processes and accoutrements of legitimacy required by academic journals as well as by the conventions of mainstream journalism, non-fiction, and popular history. The emergence of the non-peer reviewed essay also questions the construct through which American academia in particular has defined any kind of hybrid prose enquiry: belles-lettres.
A certain shift that involved rethinking essayistic form and expression was made possible by publications like the London Review of Books in the 1990s and early 2000s, by platforms like n+1’s ‘The Intellectual Situation’, the Books pages of The Caravan magazine in India, and the White Review in the United Kingdom. Some of these forums changed subtly or even disappeared (as is the case with the last example) while others have obstinately pursued their agenda of open forms and critical thought. It should be added here that the peer-reviewed essay has itself narrowed down over the recent decade into a site of citation.
Academia often ignores the revival that critical thought has had in the last thirty years in the non-professional domain of the essay – in some cases, of the personal essay that has a specific autobiographical subject, which also might turn out to be a critical essay. This segue between the personal and the critical was once a formative characteristic of modern criticism in writers such as Tagore, Woolf, and Lawrence. Ironically, in some of these writers, the essay, notwithstanding the fact that it carried the particularities of personality and style, explored or embodied, in crucial instances, the idea of a radical impersonality very different either from the sociological objectivity that is one of the peer-reviewed essay’s ambitions or from the notion of ‘fairness’ or balance in a review.
I’m restricting myself to the Anglophone world here, but this is not to say that this history has not reshaped, in similar or different ways, intellectual non-peer reviewed (and peer reviewed) work in other languages. Part of the rethinking of the ‘non-peer reviewed’ emerged from a Europe beyond Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Scandinavian detective novels – the Europe of Sebald, Walser, and, now, the excellent Annie Ernaux – which, characteristically, has led to a radical opening up. On the other hand, it needs to be noted that the revival has engendered a spurious sense of ownership that has largely left the non-European non-Anglophone essayist (writing, say, for Charbak or Hakara) dispossessed.
The contemporary remaking of this form has been particularly important to those who, in the period of globalisation, have noted with dismay the marginalisation of poetic practice and the immovable dominance of the novel. But there continues to be a kind of ignorance of this revival and of its provenances and implications, which include an impact on both fiction and non-fiction writing that is today referred to slightly glibly by catchphrases and terms like ‘autofiction’ and ‘genre-bending’.
The history of the non-peer reviewed essay and its crucial relationship to critical thought has also undergone a kind of erasure in the academy, in that academia both knows and teaches that history (when students are asked to read, say, ‘A Room of One’s Own or ‘The Metaphysical Poets’) while seldom addressing the way it informs its own practices – which remain overtly demarcated, professionalised, peer-reviewed, and, despite the apparent crisis in the humanities, self-perpetuating.
Venue: Seminar Rooms 1, 2, & 3, India International Centre, New Delhi
Opening Remarks
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: ‘Seeing Double, Hearing Double: An Experience of Reading’ [Chair: Khwaja Ovais]
Lara Choksey: ‘Peer Review in Public: The Case of Sociobiology’ [Chair: Shubham Gupta]
Lunch Break
Colin Vanderburg: ‘Quiet Please, Critics at Work’ [Chair: Vedika Kaushal]
Brian Dillon: ‘Essays and Affinities’ [Chair: Vighnesh Hampapura]
Edwin Frank: ‘The Fiction of Original Response’ [Chair: Maya Joshi]
Amit Chaudhuri: ‘What on Earth Does Non-Fiction Mean?’ [Chair: Carlin Romano]
Lunch Break
Sumana Roy: ‘Disobedient Women and the Terror of Reviewer 2’ [Chair: Aparna Chaudhuri]
Jon Cook: ‘The Essay’s Situations’ [Chair: Sanchit Toor]
Panel – ‘What Can the Essay Do?’
Mandakini Dubey, Vineet Gill, Saikat Majumdar, and Cynthia Zarin [Moderator: Gautam Choubey]
I thought I'd say something on how the publication of a new book, that used to be much looked forward to, fills one with sadness.
Editor’s note: One of the threads running through the critic Paul Bové’s rich and complex disquisition and the poet-critic Charles Bernstein’s shorter, sprightly interjection – besides their arguments for and, mainly, against the peer-reviewed essay – is the experience of editing, and contributing to, the journal boundary 2. Bové and Bernstein have sent these essays to Literary Activism for publication prompted by the symposium on ‘The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay’ that took place in March 2025. But they’re also connected to each other by – among other things – boundary 2, of which Bové was the editor and to which Bernstein has been a longtime contributor.
One of the questions these essays raise that speaks directly to Literary Activism – whose website, in comparison to boundary 2, is a tiny and recent venture – has to do with the policy regarding unsolicited pieces, which boundary 2 decided at one point to, controversially, no longer accept, as a response to the plethora of articles it received regularly in the inert form dictated and pre-decided by the conventions of peer review. It was to free itself from having to be dominated by those (by the 1990s) ubiquitous conventions that the journal decided to close its doors to unsolicited material. This meant it met with some strong criticism; because there’s no doubt that, in theory, the policy of open doors to the unsolicited is a good and democratic policy. In reality, though, it might be a way of perpetuating an officially sanctioned mode of writing. To close doors may be a problematic strategy for keeping academic conventions at bay, but it’s a strategy that boundary 2 has adhered to.
Literary Activism too doesn’t accept unsolicited pieces, but its reasons for this are, ostensibly, less pointed or even self-aware: we simply lack the personnel to take them on. Yet it’s true that we’re also, like boundary 2, setting an agenda, and there may be something to Paul Bové’s observation that it becomes more difficult for a publication to set an agenda if it accepts unsolicited material. Here, Literary Activism and boundary 2 are, metaphorically and almost literally, on the same page – but there’s no doubt that it’s not a page without its particular set of problems. Going against the grain of common wisdom, one must believe that setting an agenda is not incompatible with – is, indeed, in some ways inseparable from – seeking the unexpected and being open to writing which is less known, even to the editors themselves. The accidentality and lines of intellectual convergence that brought Paul Bové’s essay to Literary Activism exemplifies, in a way, this desired fortuitousness. Bernstein has, by now, been a longstanding participant in the Literary Activism project. I hope the coming together of Bové, Bernstein, boundary 2, and Literary Activism gives readers a sense of some of the energies and tightrope-walk tensions of the non-peer reviewed essay today.
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These pieces are also to be found in the collection On Failing (ed. Amit Chaudhuri), published by Ashoka University and Westland Books in the Literary Activism series, alongside four more essays, by Michel Chaouli, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunetra Gupta, and Sumana Roy; an essay by, and conversation with, Anurag Kashyap; and a story by Lydia Davis. You can get the collection here.
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‘Nothing is important but life,’ said D H Lawrence. The context of the statement was the case he was making for the novel in an essay, ‘Why the Novel Matters’, published posthumously in 1936. ‘Life’, for Lawrence, is a revolutionary word: an argument against the metaphysical, and a counter to an investment in the hereafter. And, for Lawrence, it’s the early-twentieth novelist who can make this argument most compellingly – not the ‘saint’ or the ‘philosopher’, who are busy with only bits of what the human being experiences. It’s the novelist (Lawrence’s term for a certain kind of thinker) who repositions ‘life’ as an open-ended, non-hierarchical category that won’t abide by our everyday demarcations of what is and isn’t ‘alive’. ‘We have curious ideas of ourselves,’ he says. ‘ We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it… It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own.’
The unstated metaphysical demarcations that determine what we think of as ‘alive’ also informs, of course, how we conceive of, and structure, the bio note. What if the bio note were to embrace a de-recognition of the boundaries that create the outlines of what, by consensus, constitutes ‘life’, a de-recognition that Lawrence claims the novel performs? (By saying the novelist’s subject is whatever is ‘alive’, Lawrence is not suggesting that novelists should write about everything, but constantly reassess the boundaries that cordon off ‘life’.) The bio note would then be non-generic, and each note retain an innate unpredictability, and be brief and expansive at once. This is what Literary Activism’s two new uploads reveal: we bring you the poet Adil Jussawalla’s bio notes in his (soon to be reissued) 1974 anthology, New Writing in India; and the writer Jayant Kaikini’s bio notes from the 2010 issue of the Kannada periodic, Deshakaala, translated from Kannada by Vighnesh Hampapura.
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