James Wood (critic)

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James Wood (born 1965 in Durham, United Kingdom) is a literary critic.

Wood was educated at Eton College on a choral scholarship and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature. In 1990, he was the winner of the British Press Young Journalist of the Year Award. Since 1992, Wood has been the chief literary critic of The Guardian in London and has served as senior editor of The New Republic since 1996. In 1994 Wood served as a judge for that year's Booker Prize for fiction. He is also an editor at large of The Kenyon Review. Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, News from the Republic of Letters where he is a Contributing Editor, and the London Review of Books where he is a member of its editorial board.

In reviewing one of his works, Adam Begley of the Financial Times wrote that Wood "is the best literary critic of his generation," a sentiment that has also been expressed by writers and critics William H. Pritchard, Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow. Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in 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."

In the 2004 issue of n+1, the editors criticizing both him and The New Republic said, " Poor James Wood! Now here was a talent—but an odd one, with a narrow, aesthetician’s interests and idiosyncratic tastes... In the company of other critics who wrote with such seriousness, at such length, in such old-fashioned terms, he would have been less burdened with the essentially parodic character of his enterprise."[1] James Wood wrote a lengthy reply in the Fall 2005 issue explaining his conception of the 'autonomous novel.'

Wood is noted for coining the genre 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 characterized 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 "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth…"

James Wood is the author of two books of criticism, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 2000) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), and a novel, The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003). Additionally, Wood has written introductions to Selected Stories of D.H. Lawrence (Modern Library, 1999), Collected Stories of Saul Bellow (Penguin, 2002), The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov (2001), The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004), Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2001), The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2002), The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000), and La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics, 2004).

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 he has taught at Harvard University as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. He is married to American novelist Claire Messud and lives in Washington, DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts with his two children.