Sometimes reviews cut deep and hard, especially when there seems no other way to interpret them than that they’ve been tailor-made to diminish you as a whole person, or at least to have plenty of fun shouting you into compliance—all the while remaining indifferent to what’s actually argued in the book.
This review of Literature in Late Monolingualism (appearing in the journal Translation and Literature this month) was just such a gut punch for me. It was so endlessly exasperated by my voice and style, but it also couldn’t find a thing among my actual claims or arguments to refute—and so it stayed almost entirely on the level of tone and feeling. In the end, I was lumped in with David Foster Wallace as “another producer of migraine reads.”
I think the review’s implied moral upshot was something like: I can’t even figure out what this book is after, and I’m feeling put upon for having to read it, and so will you, so let’s agree ahead of time the author has something wrong with him. This hurts, of course, but it is also fundamentally a dodge, an opportunistic disingenuity. The result is anti-intellectual, tightfisted, gracelessly aggrieved… barely a “book review” so much as a “person review” or a “transparency review”.
Let’s back up, though, and think about it a minute: when you go to read a book that is explicitly critical of “monolingualism” (and there are still very few of them), might that not be the right time to consider whether you do or do not foresee that broader questions around stylistic and linguistic normativity (in academic writing) might be worth keeping in mind during the experience? Especially given that the book was in great part concerned, indeed worried, about the cumulative effects of linguistic suppression on actual people who speak and write for a living in this century (and I do include myself as one of those actual people, whether the reviewer does or does not)?
It’s as if the reviewer takes unquestioning umbrage at the prospect that a general critique of monolingualism—which is, as he permits, a “diverse and occasionally bumpy field”— might actually require a “diverse and occasionally bumpy” linguistic-rhetorical-stylistic exploration to get into some of the obscure nitty-gritty of the matter. It’s hard writing on this topic, and I actually do think that some serious bumps are required of us when we’re dealing with language in our age. Opacity is a feature not a bug, and I do operationalize that conviction in my writing, not to create problems so much as to live with them.
But let’s get real: this book is certainly not some kind of deconstructionist’s pleasuredome, begging for a brick. Every one of its 3039 sentences has an identifiable subject, predicate, and purpose. And I rest assured in 2025 that any old LLM—not any piece of “literature in late monolingualism” but rather any Large Language Model—would gladly produce for us in under five seconds a range of plain-language versions of this book. I’m happy to send the PDF.
Nor does the reviewer consider the option of just putting the book back on the shelf and being done with it. They can’t help themselves, it seems, but launch in with a bunch of below-the-belt punches at me (about my pronouns, my Instagram account, who I dedicate the book to, etc.), more or less for the glee of the insinuation. Edinburgh University Press, and the journal’s editors, find all this spiteful personal aspersion suitable to print; I suppose in the spirit of academic freedom, or something. The review even closes with the damning but obvious fact—who among us knew this will be the comparison awaiting us when we get out of bed and write a scholarly book in 2025?—that “David Gramling is no [Percy Bysshe] Shelley.”
I did laugh at that one, but honestly this all was just so hard for me to read—and then to go on and do the rest of my day job, teaching German and literature to 200 students who also deserve my respectful attention. Overwhelmingly, I do accept the hundreds of rejections and criticisms I get on things I’ve written, as just a run-of-the-mill hazard of being alive and employed in a field like ours—and frequently as helpful guides for personal and professional improvement. But this was different, and the old PR nugget “Don’t give it more oxygen” just wouldn’t cut it for me anymore. The only way I could see my way through the moral diminishment was to read the piece aloud to friends and share it.
I, too, struggle with others’ style all the time, including writers and thinkers from whom I nonetheless truly want to learn (Bernard Stiegler, for instance). Many psychoanlaytic writers too (André Green, Paul Bové)—who are admittedly better stylists and analysts than I—write prose that is beyond my attentive capacity sometimes, and so I have to figure out how to put the book down a bit and simply give it some air. That is the solution: not impugning their integrity, under colour of condemning jargonism and excessive neologism.
If you are tempted to write something like this in 2025 about a colleague you’ve never met, I would ask: why? And then I’d suggest, don’t—unless this is obviously a bad person and the evidence suggests they really need to be brought low for others’ benefit or protection. I have never taken a swing at someone in this way and I hope I never will. People are always worth more respect than that, even—and perhaps especially—strangers with a different style and experience than yours.
