Comrades

T.J. Clark

This art historian and I are almost like siblings. We're both members of that wild collective of radical thinkers, Retort, and it would be no stretch to say that he does with paintings what I do with words. Did you know that I have even written about Clark's interpretation of Edouard Monet's famous painting Olympia (source)?

Clark busts his chops on art history's use and abuse of the female nude. I just love the way he cracks the code of the bourgeoisie and all of its exploitative capitalist ways—it's so me!

Steven Berlin Johnson

I love this crazy clever kid. I was his advisor, mentor, and all-around chum while I was at Columbia University. What did we bond over? Maps. I was by his side as he undertook what was to become a life-long passion: diagramming and mapping novels. Yep, we investigated all of the ways that geography and novels relate, probing such issues as the role of borderlands and rocky terrain in the works of Jane Austen, and other original and kooky subjects.

Erich Auerbach

Admittedly, Erich was before my time, but this whip-smart critic and I shared a fascination—indeed, a love—for everyday details. You've undoubtedly read his masterpiece, Mimesis, and therefore already know that he adored the daily human realities that a lot of critics would overlook.

I love this modesty and imitate his appreciation of life as it is lived, and of stuff just as it is. Nothing grandiose for this guy—a nibbled apple in a Dutch master's painting? Love it. A scar on a Greek hero's leg? Fabulous. The belt worn by a novel's villain? Get out of here.

Raymond Williams

It would be arrogance on my part not to admit that some predecessors influenced me, so I'm going to admit that Ray was my slow jam. We both think that criticism is hard work. You have to really break down literature and culture—and not just spin wild theories like those Deconstructionists.

Ray and I also share a passion for tearing down the walls between literature and culture. Why should literature be preserved in a treasure box? That's a question we both like to ask. Why say books are more important than culture or culture more important than books? Why? Why? Down with the hierarchies.

Rivals

Christopher Prendergast

This Cambridge fellow decided he could criticize my much lauded book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (more on that gem later). Fellow Prendergast criticized my writing style (he said it was elliptical) and my argument (he said it had a flawed logical structure), but he pretended he was doing so in the interest of clarification and not to make me look like a doofus. Well, it didn't work.

Elif Batuman

Just because she has a cool name does not mean Elif gets to criticize me in that hip intellectual rag, n+1. In a word, Elif thought I was ambitious. Actually, she may have thought I was a little off-kilter to issue a grand call for people to stop all of that crazy close reading and practice "distance reading" (also known as "the quantitative approach"). She didn't understand that more books=better analysis.

I'm not sure, but I think I noted a hint of mockery when she discussed my idea that we will eventually (hopefully) evolve away from reading individual books and just get into broad, collective, global concepts. I think she may have even used the word "diabolical" to describe me and may—just may—have poked fun at my Italian accent. Basta.

Tzvetan Todorov

I don't want to come out and just say it, but I was never terribly keen on this Franco-Bulgarian thinker's essay "The Typology of Detective Fiction." We both loved Sherlock Holmes, and if we could have left it at that, perhaps a friendship would have blossomed. But TT went and spoiled things by being overly concerned with the structures of logic in detective novels; he was so focused on syntax that he didn't seem to give a hoot that these books were written at a specific time and in a specific place. Where's the history?