I t’s serendipitous that the TLS this week implicitly raises the difference between a literary manifesto and a political one. In her lead review Claire Lowdon assesses three essay collections – by Nathalie Olah, Lauren Oyler and Becca Rothfeld – that “stalk the zeitgeist”, “position themselves as bullshit detectors, calling out hypocrisies of thought and language”, and offer, gratifyingly, “industrial quantities of scorn and outrage” as they survey everything from the decluttering craze to the state of literary criticism.
In Lowdon’s careful, judicious appraisal, and in the arguments of her subjects, we see the value of expertise and discrimination over mere “taste”; of a care for responsible language; of a resistance to the coercive commonplaces of cultural and political thought. As Oyler remarks, for example, “During the Trump administration, culture was held to a particularly strict but not particularly rigorous set of standards … Everything was viewed in the light it could shed on political injustice”. We have seen something similar recently in the arguments over the sponsorship of literary festivals.
The influence of the political sphere on the literary is never wholly reciprocated, alas. “Campaign in poetry, govern in prose” is a much-quoted phrase, but there has been precious little poetry in the campaigning in the UK general election. The various parties’ promises have been met so far with weary scepticism, given their prosaic track records. In his Afterthoughts column this week, Ian Sansom nonetheless confesses that he has been “avidly reading the manifestos”: “Promises, plans, commitments, pledges ... I just love a vision of the fu
