Welcome to The Valve
Login
Register
Valve Links
The Front Page
Statement of Purpose
Current Authors
John Holbo - Editor
Scott Eric Kaufman - Editor
Aaron Bady
Adam Roberts
Amardeep Singh
Andrew Seal
Bill Benzon
Daniel Green
Jonathan Goodwin
Joseph Kugelmass
Lawrence LaRiviere White
Marc Bousquet
Matt Greenfield
Miriam Burstein
Ray Davis
Rohan Amanda Maitzen
Sean McCann
Guest Authors
Past Authors
Laura Carroll
Mark Bauerlein
Miriam Jones
Most recent articles
Tonight we’re gonna blog it like it’s 2666
On Meditation As A Western Practice
Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature
eBooks, Piracy, and Stockpiling
The End(s) of The Mill on the Floss
Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
Original Aura
Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?
Avatar and Disability
Behold The Man II
Kindle or Netbook?
Don Draper is, of course, never himself.
I Don’t Care What The Critics Say, I Love Mad Men (and the Sopranos and the Hills)
Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary
Adam Bede Again
Most recent comments
ajay on Avatar and Disability
Joseph Kugelmass on On Meditation As A Western Practice
laufeysson on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Joseph Kugelmass on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Jonathan Dresner on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Julia Glassman on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Bill Benzon on Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”
Joseph Kugelmass on On Meditation As A Western Practice
laura on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Joseph Kugelmass on On Meditation As A Western Practice
laufeysson on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Merja on Tonight we're gonna blog it like it's 2666
Aaron Bady on Tonight we're gonna blog it like it's 2666
laura on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Luther Blissett on On Meditation As A Western Practice
Archives
Syndication
Articles
RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0 | Atom
Comments
RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0 | Atom
Validation
XHTML | CSS
Credits
Powered by Expression Engine
Logo by John Holbo
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
Blogroll
2blowhards
About Last Night
Academic Splat
Acephalous
Amardeep Singh
Beatrice
Bemsha Swing
Bitch. Ph.D.
Blogenspiel
Blogging the Renaissance
Bookslut
Booksquare
Butterflies & Wheels
Cahiers de Corey
Category D
Charlotte Street
Cheeky Prof
Chekhov’s Mistress
Chrononautic Log
Cliopatria
Cogito, ergo Zoom
Collected Miscellany
Completely Futile
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
Conversational Reading
Critical Mass
Crooked Timber
Culture Cat
Culture Industry
CultureSpace
Early Modern Notes
Easily Distracted
fait accompi
Fernham
Ferule & Fescue
Ftrain
GalleyCat
Ghost in the Wire
Giornale Nuovo
God of the Machine
Golden Rule Jones
Grumpy Old Bookman
Ideas of Imperfection
Idiocentrism
Idiotprogrammer
if:book
In Favor of Thinking
In Medias Res
Inside Higher Ed
jane dark’s sugarhigh!
John & Belle Have A Blog
John Crowley
Jonathan Goodwin
Kathryn Cramer
Kitabkhana
Languagehat
Languor Management
Light Reading
Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
Lime Tree
Limited Inc.
Long Pauses
Long Story, Short Pier
Long Sunday
MadInkBeard
Making Light
Maud Newton
Michael Berube
Moo2
MoorishGirl
Motime Like the Present
Narrow Shore
Neil Gaiman
Old Hag
Open University
Pas au-delà
Philobiblion
Planned Obsolescence
Printculture
Pseudopodium
Quick Study
Rake’s Progress
Reader of depressing books
Reading Room
ReadySteadyBlog
Reassigned Time
Reeling and Writhing
Return of the Reluctant
S1ngularity::criticism
Say Something Wonderful
Scribblingwoman
Seventypes
Shaken & Stirred
Silliman’s Blog
Slaves of Academe
Sorrow at Sills Bend
Sounds & Fury
Splinters
Spurious
Stochastic Bookmark
Tenured Radical
the Diaries of Franz Kafka
The Elegant Variation
The Home and the World
The Intersection
The Litblog Co-Op
The Literary Saloon
The Literary Thug
The Little Professor
The Midnight Bell
The Mumpsimus
The Pinocchio Theory
The Reading Experience
The Salt-Box
The Weblog
This Public Address
This Space: The Fire’s Blog
Thoughts, Arguments & Rants
Tingle Alley
Uncomplicatedly
Unfogged
University Diaries
Unqualified Offerings
Waggish
What Now?
William Gibson
Wordherders
<< The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies | Front Page | Public Enemies >>
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Reminder: Villette Reading Starts Next Week
Posted by Rohan Amanda Maitzen on 07/02/09 at 01:36 PM
Just a reminder: The Valve’s Second Annual Summer Reading Project, on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, starts up on Tuesday, July 7. Discussion will open then for the first eight chapters. For the full proposed schedule, see here. (To review last year’s Adam Bede event, start here or here.) Last year’s was, overall, such a good experience that I propose adopting the same simple guidelines for our discussions this time:
1. Let’s be cautious about “spoilers.” Some of us have read the novel before, or have read enough about it to know the story. Others are new to it. I’ve found that opinions are often divided on the issue of “spoiler alerts.” Personally, I think it’s nice to allow other readers to enjoy suspense and surprises, especially in a long book when curiosity about what happens next can be both pleasurable and motivating. Others see little or no value in such deference to plot, or argue for the interpretive benefits of knowing key developments ahead of time. Perhaps we can compromise by alluding to events beyond the ‘assigned’ material obliquely or elliptically, if the occasion arises.
2. By all means let’s bring in critical or contextual knowledge from “outside” the novel if we think it bears interestingly on our reading. But let’s avoid doing so in a way that shuts down discussion--by, for instance, implying that everything we might think of to talk about here has already been said, and better, by others--or that we can’t talk intelligently about this book unless we’ve read 86 others.
3. It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.
As before, the pace or format of the weekly posts can be changed if a consensus emerges that we are going too fast, or too slow, or would benefit from better defined starting points for discussion, or whatever.
Hope to see you here on Tuesday!
Add a comment:
