How to Write About Literary Nonfiction

Sub-genres of the chronicle or the essay: the note, the fragment, the diary entry, the maxim, the aphorism, the anecdote, the column, the blog entry. Whether these constitute chronicles or essays depends, of course, on whether they are essentially observational (chronicles) or argumentative (essays.)

It would, I think, simplify book reviewers' lives to know this. It might even save them from succumbing to the sort of genre name-calling frenzy that obviously afflicted the writer of this unsigned piece at Littrix.de online. It's about what sounds like an interesting German book, Henning Ritter's "Notebooks," albeit one unlikely ever to be translated into English (but the site does have a bit of it translated and available in PDF form.)

Writes the reviewer (emphases mine) :

It is rare for the author's “I” to address the reader in any of the philosophical and political précis, reading notes, maxims, and anecdotes that have been compiled in his Notebooks. Ritter deals sparingly with autobiographical details and direct self-ascription, allowing them to dissolve almost entirely within the cosmos of his stupendous erudition. Rare as well are his commentaries on the conditions of our age. Over the course of more than four hundred pages, there are at best a dozen entries pertaining to concrete current events and cultural topics. The catastrophes and developments that now hold the world in suspense, or did only a few years ago, merely serve Ritter as keywords to fan out surprising historical or ideological interrelationships. To illustrate, in one passage he spans an arc from the cultural policies of the GDR to Germany’s age of small states. One of his longer entries, which begins by mentioning the September 11 attacks, turns out to be a trenchant commentary on the special theological problems surrounding Islamic intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in 1966. This book’s predominant perspective is that of looking into the past. As Ritter explains at the outset, he is presenting only a selection of his personal observations, about one tenth. The writing of the notations coincides roughly with the quarter century during which he set the standard, in an official capacity so to speak, for contemporary cultural debate—the years from 1985 to 2008 when he headed the humanities desk at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His notes served as the intellectual counterpoise his temperament required and were originally not intended for publication. Unfettered by the topical focus and reader orientation his position demanded, his writing allowed him to conquer the domain of associations and to soar intellectually; he was able to indulge himself with abandon and examine both well known and less known thinkers of bygone epochs in a way that was not in keeping with the times.


Two excerpts from the translated portion of Ritter's book:

According to Carl Schmitt, no human thought is safe from reinterpretation. This holds true for one's own thoughts as well. They are infinitely adaptable, and one must therefore protect them from one's own reinterpretations. Novelty has long ceased to be what it was at the beginning of the twentieth century—a shock that promised an increase in knowledge.

The idea that newness is authentic per se has lost some of its sheen. What once amounted to productive provocation of a customary way of viewing things, has turned into the custom of looking away whenever the promise of something new is held out. Novelty became repetitious the moment it turned into an artistic convention.