CRITICAL QUARTERLYPub Date : 2026-07-17Epub Date: 2026-02-12DOI: 10.1111/criq.70036
Jess Cotton
{"title":"Literary Journalism on Trial: Janet Malcolm, Criminal Character and the Legacy of New Journalism","authors":"Jess Cotton","doi":"10.1111/criq.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How literary is literary journalism, and is recognising the inventiveness of nonfictional writing the same as categorising it as fiction? Or to put it otherwise: does fiction always imply a failure to account for the facts, and when does inventiveness become fiction? These are the questions that Janet Malcolm insistently poses in her writing from the late 1970s when she left the realm of writing on art and architecture and the essay form and established herself as a reporter.<sup>1</sup> In her first longform piece for the <i>New Yorker</i>, which was published in 1978, Malcolm reports on a family therapist, Salvador Minuchin.<sup>2</sup> In her observation of his ethically dubious reworking of psychoanalytic practice into a popularised form of therapy, Malcolm not only established herself as a writer but found an analogy for how to expose forms of misplaced authority. In the piece, Malcolm observes her subject as he observes his patients in the observation room in the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, which is constructed as a one-way mirror in which the therapist observes the family, but the family cannot see the therapist. This one-way mirror is the scene of Malcolm's reading, one that she returns to throughout her career to ask what sort of art we want from journalism, and how journalism can hold its subject—and itself—to account.</p><p>In <i>The Journalist and the Murderer</i> (1990), Malcolm invites the reader to rethink a practice that is at the heart of journalism—objectivity—and one that is particular to the longform journalism she practices—its literariness. This style of journalism, Eric Heyne observes, whilst maintaining the status of nonfiction writing, has the dramatic power and complexity of fiction—that makes it of literary interest.<sup>3</sup> The book concerns a lawsuit between Jeffrey MacDonald, who was convicted in 1979 of murdering his wife, Colette, and his two daughters, Kimberly and Kirsten, in February 1970, whilst serving as an Army Special Forces physician, and Joe McGinniss, the author of a book on the crime <i>Fatal Vision</i> (1983).<sup>4</sup> McGinniss had established himself as a journalist with <i>The Selling of the President</i> (1968), which exposed how Richard Nixon's campaign crafted a presidential persona through the media, but this was his first venture into crime writing.<sup>5</sup> Malcolm first met McGinniss in 1987 after MacDonald had brought a case against him for misrepresentation. As she describes it, Malcolm had anticipated a meeting between fellow journalists but instead she found McGinniss chose to play the role of naïve subject—as MacDonald had played it with him. Malcolm's account is an investigation of the uneasy relationship between a journalist and their subject.</p><p>On the suggestion of his lawyer, Bernard Segal, MacDonald had approached McGinniss to write a book about him—from the perspective of the defence team, to bring in the money that was needed to cover his legal fees. The c","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 2","pages":"39-56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CRITICAL QUARTERLYPub Date : 2026-07-17Epub Date: 2026-04-17DOI: 10.1111/criq.70044
Natalie Ferris
{"title":"‘reportless places’: Janet Malcolm and Collage","authors":"Natalie Ferris","doi":"10.1111/criq.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As well as devising dozens of individual works on paper and producing more than a hundred of her collaged bookmarks, later in life Malcolm also conceived of her collage work as forming discrete series: ‘Free Associations’ (2011); the ‘Emily Dickinson Series’ (2013); and the ‘Jesus Collages’ (2015).<sup>9</sup> Working in this way demonstrated the growing seriousness with which she regarded her collages, and that she, as noted by David Salle, eventually ‘wanted to think of them as art’, even if she remained uneasy about adopting the identity of artist.<sup>10</sup> Each grouping draws upon a specific cache of materials: the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practised in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, many of whose patients were themselves émigrés; the curious typewritten transcriptions of Emily Dickinson's late drafts known as the ‘Lord Letters’; and stickers of a found image of Jesus Christ that Malcolm had reproduced in sheets in earthen red tones. The items she deploys in cryptic formulations, across all three of these series, register her lifelong fascination with psychoanalysis, photography, art and literature.</p><p>Observing the full range of this work, the aesthetic choices have a deliberateness to them and yet revel in the strangeness of their enterprise. As Lee Siegel suggested, ‘the paradox of Malcolm's collages is that they embody an exactness which appears to be both inevitable and freshly, almost casually, arrived upon’.<sup>11</sup> Potent imagery of barren landscapes, planetary phenomena, minimalist sculpture, medical scans, portraiture and clinical instruments points to the cryptic nature of Malcolm's found texts. She works with the handwritten, the typewritten, the typeset and extracts from letters, poems, private records, academic texts, professional notes, coupons, graphs, charts and diagrams. These elements are assembled in such carefully constructed combinations that it is as if they have been placed within vitrines for inspection. Many of the materials she collected were drained of colour or degraded in substance—the collages themselves demonstrate a penchant for semi-translucent sheets of fine paper, often black and white or yellowing white, sometimes as fragile as tissue paper. These ‘scraps of paper’, Malcolm felt, have ‘an archaic and melancholy air about them’.<sup>12</sup> All the collages are concerned, to some degree, with veiling and disclosure: filmy sheets of yellowing paper overlay typewritten notes from therapy sessions; diagonal lines or geometric shapes obscure tabulated information; and the elision of image and text at points is suggestive of dreamlike revelations.</p><p>Malcolm presides over some strange coincidental unions in these series, whereby seemingly unrelated documents or imagery harbour hidden attachments. In one example, Malcolm describes pasting images of the astronomer David Peck Todd alongside transcriptions of Emily Dickinson's correspondence and later discovering, to her astonish","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 2","pages":"73-91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CRITICAL QUARTERLYPub Date : 2026-07-17Epub Date: 2026-03-22DOI: 10.1111/criq.70042
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
{"title":"Janet Malcolm's Self-Portrait","authors":"Jerome Boyd Maunsell","doi":"10.1111/criq.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>My first head-on encounter with Janet Malcolm's work came in the summer of 2005, when an excerpt of what would become <i>Two Lives</i> (2007), her book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, appeared in the <i>New Yorker</i> under the wonderful title ‘Someone Says Yes to It’. I read the piece and cut it out of the magazine, and its first page, illustrated by a talismanic—to me, at least—archival photograph of Stein in Paris in 1904, sat on the table in the living-room where I worked for months that summer, as a challenge and an inspiration. What drew me was Malcolm's unerringly clear voice and style, and her sudden, breathtaking swerves, as much as her subject, Stein. The lines, only a few paragraphs in, where Malcolm chops her print copy of Stein's often-unread near-1000-page <i>The Making of Americans</i> (1925) into six sections with a kitchen knife to solve ‘the problem of its weight and bulk’ made a very strong early impression.<sup>1</sup> A similarly bold rearrangement occurs whenever Malcolm tackles a subject.</p><p>On the back cover of my UK edition of the posthumous <i>Still Pictures</i>, published in 2023, two years after her death—and the nearest thing Malcolm wrote to an autobiography, although she deliberately avoided that term for it herself—she is called ‘America's most innovative biographer’. I wonder how she would have felt about that designation. In <i>The Silent Woman</i> (1994), her book on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm is excoriating about the ethical dilemmas of biography and the veneer of respectability that hides its voyeurism, intrusion and thefts. She was especially wary, too, of the accidental and piecemeal nature of the biographical archive and how easy and dangerous it is to rush to false moral judgements based on incomplete and partial materials. She generally depicts herself as a ‘journalist’: to some extent outside—or just to one side of—the fray, reporting on the story. But for someone so openly distrustful of biography, she often wrote something very close to it—especially in <i>The Silent Woman</i>, <i>Reading Chekhov</i> (2003) and <i>Two Lives</i>—while simultaneously offering a hefty meta-critique of the genre. In her own inimitable way, Malcolm portrays the lives of the central figures she covers. But she avoids the chronological sweep of traditional biographical narrative, preferring to step in with her own investigative story and its haphazardly progressing findings, highlighting ellipses, gaps and inconsistencies thrown up by the archives and case files. She enacts the role of the writer as detective: tracking down leads, following the scent.</p><p>One of the most striking aspects of her approach is Malcolm's ‘I’. Who is this person, exactly? Although foregrounded in the frame as a sleuthing or critical presence, Malcolm usually writes with ‘the self-effacement of the biographer rather than […] the egotism of the autobiographer’, as she put it in a piece on Angelica Garnett and Bloomsbury.<sup>","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 2","pages":"23-38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148534315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Poetics of the Single Sheet of Paper: From Research to Practice","authors":"Jane Partner","doi":"10.1111/criq.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay begins and ends with a single sheet of paper. The first was used by John Donne whilst he was in France in 1612 to write the fair copy of his verse letter ‘To the Honourable Lady the Lady Carey’. Rediscovered in 1970, this is the only holograph manuscript of Donne's English poetry known to survive, and it offers a unique insight into the material ingenuity that Donne employed when setting out his poems on paper. Not only do the constraints of the page become an aspect of verse form, but other physical qualities of the sheet—its ability to fold and wrap, to create interiors and exteriors; its partial transparency and poignant fragility—are also brought to life by the metaphors of paper that Donne uses across his poems of this period. In this imagery, Donne seeks to re-energise the commonplace that paper is to words as body is to soul. The interlinked metaphorical and material strategies in Donne's verse letter to Lady Carey are directed towards a question with which he was lastingly pre-occupied: how is it possible to represent—indeed even to imagine—the paradoxically material immateriality of the soul? In the service of this inquiry, Donne's single sheet manuscript becomes a cognitive tool for the examination of metaphysical questions.</p><p>The second half of this essay traces my research process in making a single sheet poem that responds to the formal questions raised by Donne's manuscript. For Donne and his contemporaries, <i>poesis</i> and <i>exegesis</i>—that is, literary creation and interpretation—were understood to be profoundly interlinked, such that attentive reading was conceived to be generative of new writing.<sup>1</sup> Putting this connection into action, my practice-based research investigates the expressive potential that paper holds for contemporary poetry. The broadside is the poetic genre in which the relationship between a single poem and a single sheet of paper is currently given the most attention. Whilst in the 17th century this form of cheap print represented the antithesis of Donne's coterie manuscript circulation, the broadside is now an experimental poetic form rivalling the material inventiveness of the artist's book. In creating my own broadside, I investigate how a sheet of paper can embody the nature of poetry as an ‘attentional space’ that is ‘set apart’ from everyday language and experience.<sup>2</sup> Jeffrey Wainwright describes how, in what he terms the ‘deliberate space’ of poetry: ‘just as a prayer mat is made of fabric found everywhere but, once laid out, marks off a space from the surrounding daily world, so does the shape of the poem organise language into a space for pause and for different attention.’<sup>3</sup> My essay accordingly shows how a commonplace sheet of paper becomes a material instrument of poetry's transcendent work.</p><p>In early 1612, John Donne was in France with his patron Sir Robert Drury. In Amiens, Donne met his friend Sir Robert Rich, and in January or February th","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"23-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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