The “Ulysses” Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit by Cecilia Konchar Farr (review)

Cecelia Konchar Farr’s focus in The “Ulysses” Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit is immediately clear in the book’s title. The author provides her readers with a new set of guidelines for judging literary works, specifically novels. What impresses me above all about Konchar Farr’s argument is, however, not what it contributes to a revised assessment of the novel—though I will come to that in a moment—but what it contributes to the current state of literary analysis. The “Ulysses” Delusion is an ideal model of clear, thoughtful, balanced, witty, and well-written criticism—something I find in extremely short supply these days. Konchar Farr is also willing to include memorable and relevant accounts of her own reading experience, providing more than a glimpse of the critic as a real person. In fact, Konchar Farr’s measuring rod for assessing novels, asking that they be absorbing, relatable, discussable, and informative—a list of qualifications she lightheartedly refers to as ARDI (pp. 6–7)—is equally applicable to literary criticism itself, and Konchar Farr’s own writing succeeds admirably. This book really is a page-turner.

Konchar Farr contends that the standards the professional literary community uses for granting novels literary merit and canonical status need to be reassessed. Both the academic community and the world of professional reviewers, she argues, have focused on elements that ignore or even reject the very characteristics most avid novel readers seek and enjoy. The result is that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) tops the professional community’s lists of best novels while readers choose to indulge in the works of George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling. This is the titular “Ulysses delusion.” Konchar Farr is not by any means asking that we dismiss aesthetic standards and simply rate novels according to their popularity—though she does ask that we stop rejecting them for that reason. In the book’s ten chapters, she applies her ARDI qualifications to a number of novels that pass her test—including Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and all the Harry Potter books—and to a number that fail—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) and E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), along with all the novels of Jodi Picoult and, yes, Ulysses.

I will admit—as Konchar Farr herself indicates, particularly in her footnotes—that many of her claims are not new, at least in the academic community. A number of the chapters that make up this book were written and originally published over ten years ago, and much of what she puts forward has already been addressed. I do not know of any universities that continue to oppose the inclusion of popular works in the literary curriculum. It is not, of course, only the classroom that has broadened its scope. Scholarly conferences and publications are replete with panels and papers focused on popular novels, and as Konchar Farr notes, the scholarly field of “Middlebrow Studies” has seen wide growth over the past decade (p. 162, n. 12).

When it comes to the professional assessment of newly published novels, on the other hand, the issue might still be a pressing one. Judging by those books selected—and not selected—for review in prominent literary publications, the community of professional reviewers has not, in this respect, caught up with the academy. In any case, Konchar Farr’s development of appropriate aesthetic standards for making such judgments is an important undertaking. Rather than giving in to current popular demands in the hope that our students will read something rather than nothing, Konchar Farr has provided legitimate criteria, both for and against those unschooled preferences, and her individual analyses are engaging and convincing.

In addition to providing solid aesthetic grounds, Konchar Farr makes a convincing argument for the essentially anti-elitist and feminist framework of her revised standards. It...