The Believer Reviews Shiv Kotecha's The Switch

Charlie Markbreiter has reviewed Shiv Kotecha's new book, The Switch (Wonder, 2019), for The Believer. The central question for Markbreiter: "What if avoidance works?" An excerpt:

...He writes poems instead of writing his dissertation. It’s possible to imagine that the narrator’s hyper-specific, research-based lines of poetry (on the Russian Formalist Viktor Shlovksy or the poet Jack Spicer’s “fictional diaries of Oliver Charming), smattered with literary-historical gossip, were once notes for a dissertation. In this sense, The Switch is part of an expanding genre: “leaving academia lit.”

The book’s mix of poetics and lines of critical prose thus also feel like a way to talk about the limits of critique (that is, the official though hardly singular form of labor that grad students and academics are paid to perform.) In a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Rita Felski’s book The Limits of Critique (2015), writer Matthew Mullins says that the critic’s job as “is to interrogate the text, diagnose its complicity with social forces, rebel against this complicity, and extol the virtues of texts that do this work for us.” While critics have become increasingly suspicious of critique’s “panoptic eye,” they cannot find a way out of it, finding themselves in a critique of critique which is itself still… critique. “We have reached a point of diminishing return, a vicious circle,” Mullins writes. “The more suspicious we become of critique, the more we are captured by its style.” The Switch is less a critique of a critique than a way to ease out of it by writing poetry...

Or the other way around? Read the entire review at The Believer.