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Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Upcoming Book Event: Lionel Trilling’s The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel
On Wednesday, The Valve will begin hosting a book event on Lionel Trilling’s The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel. Stephen Schryer (previously discussed) will moderate. Stephen is the author of “Mary Mccarthy’s Field Guide to Us Intellectuals: Tradition and Modernization Theory in Birds of America” (Modern Fiction Studies 53.4) and “Fantasies of the New Class: The New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University” (PMLA 122.2).
Contributors will include Miriam Burstein, Eugene Goodheart, John Holbo, Michael Kimmage, Joseph Kugelmass, Sean McCann, Mark Shechner, Michael Szalay, and Harvey Teres.
For those unfamiliar with Trilling’s work or know him only as a critic, the first 140 pages of his other novel, The Middle of the Journey is available online.
Comments
It’s a pity Mr Schryer’s two cited articles are unavailable for reading online to those without a password. What really is the rationale for restricting access to articles published in these journals? There are so few people interested in reading these pieces anyway. Why not put them up for all to read? I don’t see that anyone is served by restricting access… Am I the only one to think this way?
Tom, shoot me an email (scotterickaufman [at] gmail [dot] com) and I’ll send you a copy of them. (For the record: I don’t think there should be pay-wall restrictions, for the very reasons you cite.)
For those of you interested in Walter Landor, on whome Trilling bases his main character, you might want to check out Iain Sinclair’s wonderful novel-like thing, *Landor’s Tower, or the Imaginary Conversations*. Sinclair may very well be England’s best living writer, and he is certainly one of its greatest living stylists. I’ve written that line about 1023 times on this blog, and I stand by it.
Scott: Many thanks for your kind offer to forward the articles. My note to you, with my email address () was inexplicably bounced back to me.
Tom
[Editor here: His email bounced because I stupidly wrote “gmail [dot] net” instead of “gmail [dot] com."]
The Columbia University alumni magazine has an excerpt from The Journey Abandoned online:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Summer2008/feature3.html
I have an anthology that calls Trilling’s story “Of This Time, Of That Place” “one of the finest stories published in Partisan Review during the 1940’s.” The student characters are said to be based on Ginsberg and Kerouac.
Tom/Scott - I agree that access should be improved (and prices lowered) for those unaffiliated with a university, but the point of the paywalls is to attract money from institutional electronic subscriptions from universities, an essential source of revenue that helps to ensure the financial viability of these publications. I suspect a reason why the prices for individual downloads are kept high is that journal publishers know that if readers realize that the content is available cheaply, or free, online, many will cancel their print subscriptions (anecdotal evidence suggests that many who get institutional online access are discouraged from taking up print subscriptions).
On the plus side, most publishers don’t seem all that worried about small-scale redistribution (eg by email) of downloaded articles, and a few even explicitly permit it…
What Tom Wood said, but I don’t want to read the articles.
Without Trilling, there would have been no Ginsberg, and for better or worse, Western Civilization would have survived.
That’s an amazing collection of scholars, SEK: I will read them with bated breath.
Terrible book choice ... how disappointing.
FWIW Sue, this was offered to us by Columbia U Press and there are a number of Valvites who are quite interested in Trilling. It wasn’t intended to be an affair like the Adam Bede affair, but rather a conversation headed up by scholars who’ve been recruited to reflect on the target book at whatever length and in whatever form they choose.
’It wasn’t intended to be an affair like the Adam Bede affair, but rather a conversation headed up be scholars who’ve been recruited to reflect on the target book at whatever length and in whatever form they choose.’
I realize that, Bill, just my opinion, hope it goes well.
Suppose I’m just not qualified to be regarded as a ‘Valvite’ or a ‘scholar’, huh? Ah, well!
"Offered to us”? Is Columbia U Press using the Valve to gin up publicity, or something? The event does seem to have more than the usual number of guest posters.
Sue, in this context “Valvite” is simply someone who blogs here.
Rich, I mentioned the book in a link post and Columbia got in touch with me. I forwarded their message to Scott and, I believe, Holbo. They - mostly Scott I presume - took it from there.
Using the Valve for PR? I assume that’s why they contacted us. And I assume that’s why other presses coughed up book copies for Valve reviewers, though I don’t know how many book events took advantage of PR copies. Academic journals routinely receive unsolicited review copies which are then passed on to reviewers. Some journals routinely run lists of books received.
And the ‘context’ of ‘scholars’, Bill?
The Milky Way Galaxy.
What’s your point, Sue? Beyond the initial link post and forwarding an email about the book, I had nothing to do with this business. If you don’t like the choice of book, that’s fine. I wasn’t interested in it either.
Well, Bill, my ‘point’, really, was that the terms ‘Valvite’ and ‘scholar’ - perhaps unintentionally - implied an elitism to which I strongly object.
There is an undoubted air of ‘us and them’ about The Valve and the fact that it is often not apparent to the ‘hosts’ makes this worse; as I said elsewhere, it’s as if it’s an exclusive club.
The reasons you gave for the ‘choice’ of book, other than advertising for CUP, seemed to me to emphasise this.
You mean it’s inappropriate for people to pursue an interest in Trilling?
No, Bill, that’s not what I meant as well you know. To reiterate:
At first, I merely said I didn’t like the choice of Trilling but you can’t like everything so ‘c’est la vie’. You then chose to express The Valve’s reasons for the choice in terms which seemed to me rather exclusive and elitist, unfortunate traits which this blog often displays and this, I do think ‘inappropriate’.
Answered your question, Mr Benzon? Let me know if not, always happy to clarify.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a Valve event on the Trilling book. It seems like a very minor work—an unfinished first draft of a novel from a famous critic who wrote one other novel that I’d never heard of—but Trilling is a long-standing Valve interest.
The CUP thing was of note because, review copies aside, it didn’t seem to me like the idea for a book event had ever been suggested by a non-blogger here before. And the previous book events (not reading groups) haven’t been novels; they’ve been critical works. That’s the kind of thing that seems OK to me because there’s already been Valve material about Trilling, but I hope that it doesn’t become a regularity.
The next Valve book event should be on Northrop Frye’s *Anatomy of Criticism* and/or Fredric Jameson’s *The Political Unconscious*. Will all of our interest in genre literature, why not more interest in the study of genre?
Or we could have a Valve Blues Book event, with Amanda Petrusch’s new book and Maryanne Somethingorother’s book *In Search of the Blues*, and we could have great fights about the authenticity and even existence of Delta blues. Maybe Sean Wilentz and Griel Marcus could guest moderate.
Or, best yet, let’s all read Korsi’s swift-boating of Obama.