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Sunday, August 06, 2006
Literary Links c/o Google Reader
[I meant to continue writing the daily literary link compendia, but have a dissertation to write.]
Renowned Chaucerian Y.T. delves into the distant past to provide yet another example of why people who do “The Deconstruction” really ought to read Derrida.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wraps up his New Chaucer Society conference coverage with a discussion of the new Chaucer being created by the brilliant Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog:
The specific Chaucer these readers encounter, moreover, foregrounds the place of enjoyment in the study of and artistic encounter with the Middle Ages. The Chaucer that the blog offers, it strikes me, is very different from the Chaucer of the NCS conference. Whereas the latter is serious, pious, ponderous (the vast majority of papers I attended focused upon the most sober of Chaucer’s works), Le Vostre GC of the blog is joyful, playful, cutting, inventive. My guess is that the blog’s ebullient version of Chaucer is going to have a strong if quiet impact upon the visions of the author that future scholars will dream.
Chad Orzel laments the sorry state of genre fiction. Particularly interesting is his discussion of why the science is disappearing:
I also think there’s a problem here with changing audience expectations regarding the pace of a story. The effect is probably easier to see in movies, particularly if you do something like watching the original and the remake of The Italian Job in close proximinty—the re-make moves a lot faster, and to modern eyes, the original is really, really slow. You couldn’t make a caper movie that moved at the pace of the original Italian Job these days without getting blasted by critics and audiences—look at The Score with Robert DeNiro, for example.
[ ... ]
This ties into the science thing because the expectation of faster pace makes it that much harder to sneak in explanations of “good science.” If you expect the story to move at a fairly leisurely pace, you’re less likely to be bothered by an “As you know, Bob ... “ discussion of rocketry (or whatever) than someone who’s expecting things to move along a little more briskly.
[Initally, I balked at including Chad’s post. He seems like a nice enough guy, but earlier in the week he had the gall to say I’m not Lloyd Dobbler. As if.]
Mr. Kotsko showcases his New Critical chops:
The speaker wishes to command vessels sailing smoothly over the sea—the sea here being only implicitly referred to, as the speaker does not want to face the chaos it represents for him—but equally recognizes that his command post is only “temporary.” The usage of “even” in this line is in line with the more archaic emphatic use of this word in the King James Bible and other early modern English literature, setting up the speaker’s masterful use of bathos. One would expect “I am an admiral, even a commander of ships” or something similar, but instead one gets, “Im an admiral, even a temporary one.” The reader is prompted to supply an “if” and reverse the phrases, producing “Even if a temporary one, I am (nevertheless) an admiral"—the speaker’s choice of word order and phrasing here betray a surface level defiance, which is nonetheless shot through with insecurity.
Our own Miriam B. wrote a fascinating post on William St. Clair’s unconscionably priced The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period:
As a shot across the bows in the literary history wars, this book may be aggravating to more than one class of critic. On the one hand, St. Clair’s reader-centric model of literary history takes dead aim at narratives based on “the canon"—not because he denies that some literary works are greater than others, but because he finds that such judgments are near-useless as either organizing principles or historical explanations. On the other hand, this model is equally unfriendly to literary history practiced on more recent theoretical principles. For example, he shows that while many Romantic women wrote poetry, only Felicia Hemans managed to attain a temporary “new canonical” status (in the form of later nineteenth-century reprints); the others vanished almost as soon as they appeared, or (as in the case of L.E.L.) barely managed to hang on by their fingernails. St. Clair isn’t warning us against “recovering” these poets—after all, an author may be historically or even aesthetically interesting without having anything that resembles a widespread readership. But I suspect that he would argue that the “women’s tradition” model of literary history is, at best, of dubious worth; after all, there’s no proof that the women even read (or even knew of) each other’s work.
[She’s also added a “Personal Favorites” column to her sidebar. She may have done so ages ago, but since I rely on Google Reader, I only noticed it yesterday. Point being, there’s no reason her favorites shouldn’t be yours too.]