“What works well; why is this moving me?” Wood asks. “The novel exists to move us, to shake us profoundly. When we’re rigorous about feeling, we’re honoring that.”

Wood says he hasn’t encountered any hostility from academia over lecturing without a Ph.D., which he feels is “rather remarkable.” He acknowledges that his lack of specialization might hinder his approach in someways, but also thinks it could help. He’s not interested in the “roads, byways and lost lanes” of academic research, though he suspects most academics aren’t either. Some authors he will be lecturing about in his next class—among them Bellow, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan—may even visit the classroom.

Although the class will study a “living literature,” Wood does not ascribe to a distinction between “new” and “old.”

“There shouldn’t be a break between contemporary and canonical literature,” he says. “The canon is always being made, by writers themselves, reading the canon.”

He does, though, acknowledge that this is a hard fact to grasp.

“When we read grandly canonical works we forget that they’re made, that they’re written.” In general, he notes, there is a tendency to critically evaluate contemporary literature but to leave older works unquestioned—as if they’ve been mere “fact” for as long as they’ve existed.

An example Wood cites is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, one of his favorite authors. Wood doesn’t allow his reverence to dissuade his critical eye—it’s easy, he says, to forget that “it was constructed word by word by a suffering, sometimes joyless, woman in Sussex.”

Wood believes that studying contemporary fiction “might encourage [students] to evaluate canonical works as well.”

“The problem is less to convince people that contemporary writing is living than it is to convince them that canonical literature is not dead,” he says.

Gaining a Foothold

Wood got his start as a critic immediately after college. During his time at Jesus College in Cambridge he won a prestigious prize sponsored by the Guardian for his undergraduate journalism. After he graduated he wrote to the Guardian’s literary editor and asked for a job. He got it, but his early assignments were short—five to eight-hundred word reviews. He later became deputy editor of the magazine’s book page, but even that didn’t yield the sort of expansive, in-depth criticism he longed for.

“It was really not until I got to the States that I got to do longer [reviews],” he says. Wood began working at the New Republic in 1995, which allowed him to write much longer pieces.

He says he always knew he wanted to do an “odd” form of journalism—something between literature and the more formalized institution of journalism.

“It was a way of being in the world [of literature] and not being in the world,” he says. “It was a way of being in London and writing things that people would read, but also…staying close to the thing I care about most, literature.”

The idea of migrating between these two worlds is a significant one, particularly because the division has only recently developed. “Until the late nineteenth century,” Wood notes, “criticism was done by writers…[Henry] James, [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge…there’s a reason why James’s criticisms seem congruous with his novels. I don’t think there’s much difference, in James’s mind, between writing a novel and writing a book [of criticism].”