Jo Livingstone on Not Believing in Anachronism
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: My guest today, Jo Livingstone, and I first met in the Oxford Wine Cafe in November of 2018. We had the most engrossing conversation that I think two people in this world have ever had about Marjorie Kempe and how a critic can take older works of literature and make them sing to a contemporary audience.
This is one of two of Jo’s unique gifts as a writer and a thinker, the ability to bring an alien past into a familiar present. We see it in Jo’s criticism and in their editorial work for, among other places, The New Republic, Bookforum, and The Stopgap. We see it in the podcast that they co -host with Charlotte Shane called “Reading Writers,” and I know we’ll see it in the book that Jo’s just finished with is called The Unwelcome Presence of Marjorie Kempe.
But I see it exercised with the strongest sense of purpose in Jo’s brilliant and fiery acceptance speech for the Nona Balakian citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which Jo won in 2021.
In their speech, Jo speaks about writing in a state of constant emergency and tells the story of Wulfstan, an English bishop who preaches to his people about the oncoming apocalypse and why they should heed his authority in the face of certain destruction. There’s something a little Trumpy about Wulfstan, but there’s also something in him of the ideal literary critic. And here are Jo’s words. “But every person who takes time out of living through the apocalypse to contemplate it, not only directly, but also through the contemplation of others’ contemplations, is like a Wulfstan at the end of the world, lamenting from his lectern, refusing to stop tolling the bell. Even at the very end of our tethers, in this time of every man for himself, we wrap ourselves in layers of language for no other reason than we want to. Naked self-interest isn’t always so bad.”
For self-interested reasons, I’m delighted to have Jo on the show today.
For a full transcript and details of the piece Jo responded to, head over to The New York Review of Books.
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Jo Livingstone is a medieval literature scholar, a critic, and the 2020 National Book Critics Circle recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. After receiving a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and a PhD in medieval literature from New York University, Livingstone went on to write cultural criticism for The New Republic and currently manages the editorial website The Stopgap with Daniel Lavery. They are currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute.
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