As I'm sure you noticed, it has been longer than usual between posts. Though I would truly love to post soon, I just can't seem to find the time or motivation. There are two reasons for this:
1) The next time I post, I will have earned the title of 'Master.'...I guess not really, although it would undoubtedly fuel my ego if any of my readers called me that. In reality I have entered the last few weeks of M.A. classes, which means I am knee, nay, navel deep in studying and researching for both Comprehensive exams (the equivalent of a thesis) and final papers. At this very moment, in fact, I am procrastinating on finishing a particularly devilish annotated bibliography. Needless to say, I hope you will bear with me.
2) The next book on my shelf is James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie... As I'm sure would be obvious to anyone familiar with the Leatherstocking Series, it is not a post that I have been overly eager to write...
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Canon
“The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.” -Harold Bloom
As a student of English as well as an avid reader the issue of canon becomes very conflicted for me. This always seems to come up for me, at least internally, whenever I talk to...well, anyone outside of the academy about books. I can't remember how many times I've been talking to someone about some abstract idea and it comes up in the course of the conversation that a book they had read had been particularly insightful on the topic. The subsequent conversation goes something like this:
-Have you ever read [book] by [author]?
-No I haven't heard of it.
-Oh, you gotta read it. [author] talks all about [subject in context]. Its a great book. You would like it...
At this point in the conversation I have two options; 1) take the high road and tell the person that I will definitely look it up. I don't like being insincere but I don't want to burst their bubble since the topic is clearly exciting to them. 2) If I have the time and the listening ear of my audience I expound my philosophy on selecting books as outlined at length here:
When I was very young my grandmother set aside a set of old paperbacks for me that she had bought years before for my mother. The set fit perfectly inside of a plastic case, each book fitting evenly next to the other to form a complete collection. The set consisted of childhood classics like Black Beauty and Treasure Island, a set undoubtedly designed to introduce a young audience to what is termed generally 'Classic Literature.' I think one of the important aspects of this set (sadly lost, now) was that its construction attempted to collect the essential representatives of literature in one compact space, building, to me, an odd hierarchy of literature, as if there were a certain number of important books that one must read in order to be considered 'well-read.'
To a certain extent I will agree that there are certain books that are unanimously part of what we now call The Canon; we can't imagine American Literature without Mark Twain and we can't conceive of British Literature without Shakespeare. But it is 'everything else' that becomes difficult to define. My bookshelf represents one person's attempt at defining this thing called 'Canon' but it is something different to everyone. The same attempt is made by numerous book publishers, as can easily be seen in some of the supposedly 'complete' collections printed by Everyman's Library, Penguin Classics, and The Modern Library. New critical modes have even further eroded this concept of Canon with theories like New Historicism placing the legal records of an English burgh on par with The Second Shepherd's Play as literary artifacts. As a result we, as readers, have to learn to lower our noses when a supposedly non-literary person suggests a book since, who knows? It may just be important.
That said: If I will return to Harold Bloom's suggestion above that we should only read the best of what is written, I am forced to admit that literary texts do tend to form a sort of hierarchy and be it a result of Westernization or academic preference Shakespeare is on top and Marlowe will forever be in his shadow; Fenimore Cooper simply cannot live up to Twain's brand of Americana. Whenever I am placed in the awkward situation above I am subsequently forced to admit two things: the first silently, that I am very aware where the book being suggested is on the literary totem-pole, and the second out-loud, that with my particularly long list of books to read (many more of which are on Bloom's list merely as a factor of my chosen profession) I highly doubt that I'll ever have a moment to read a book about a drug-addict's recovery or the history of a 60's folk musician hangout (apologies to Taylor and John).
As a student of English as well as an avid reader the issue of canon becomes very conflicted for me. This always seems to come up for me, at least internally, whenever I talk to...well, anyone outside of the academy about books. I can't remember how many times I've been talking to someone about some abstract idea and it comes up in the course of the conversation that a book they had read had been particularly insightful on the topic. The subsequent conversation goes something like this:
-Have you ever read [book] by [author]?
-No I haven't heard of it.
-Oh, you gotta read it. [author] talks all about [subject in context]. Its a great book. You would like it...
At this point in the conversation I have two options; 1) take the high road and tell the person that I will definitely look it up. I don't like being insincere but I don't want to burst their bubble since the topic is clearly exciting to them. 2) If I have the time and the listening ear of my audience I expound my philosophy on selecting books as outlined at length here:
When I was very young my grandmother set aside a set of old paperbacks for me that she had bought years before for my mother. The set fit perfectly inside of a plastic case, each book fitting evenly next to the other to form a complete collection. The set consisted of childhood classics like Black Beauty and Treasure Island, a set undoubtedly designed to introduce a young audience to what is termed generally 'Classic Literature.' I think one of the important aspects of this set (sadly lost, now) was that its construction attempted to collect the essential representatives of literature in one compact space, building, to me, an odd hierarchy of literature, as if there were a certain number of important books that one must read in order to be considered 'well-read.'
To a certain extent I will agree that there are certain books that are unanimously part of what we now call The Canon; we can't imagine American Literature without Mark Twain and we can't conceive of British Literature without Shakespeare. But it is 'everything else' that becomes difficult to define. My bookshelf represents one person's attempt at defining this thing called 'Canon' but it is something different to everyone. The same attempt is made by numerous book publishers, as can easily be seen in some of the supposedly 'complete' collections printed by Everyman's Library, Penguin Classics, and The Modern Library. New critical modes have even further eroded this concept of Canon with theories like New Historicism placing the legal records of an English burgh on par with The Second Shepherd's Play as literary artifacts. As a result we, as readers, have to learn to lower our noses when a supposedly non-literary person suggests a book since, who knows? It may just be important.
That said: If I will return to Harold Bloom's suggestion above that we should only read the best of what is written, I am forced to admit that literary texts do tend to form a sort of hierarchy and be it a result of Westernization or academic preference Shakespeare is on top and Marlowe will forever be in his shadow; Fenimore Cooper simply cannot live up to Twain's brand of Americana. Whenever I am placed in the awkward situation above I am subsequently forced to admit two things: the first silently, that I am very aware where the book being suggested is on the literary totem-pole, and the second out-loud, that with my particularly long list of books to read (many more of which are on Bloom's list merely as a factor of my chosen profession) I highly doubt that I'll ever have a moment to read a book about a drug-addict's recovery or the history of a 60's folk musician hangout (apologies to Taylor and John).
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
"In justification of the highly unprofessional sacrifice to mere curiosity which I thus made, permit me to remind anybody who may read these lines, that no living person (in England, at any rate) can claim to have had such an intimate connexion with the romance of the Indian Diamond as mine has been"
At first the lines above seem a little bit like the musings of Watson before recounting one of Holmes' great adventures. But this novel becomes somewhat awkward when we understand that these words are put in the mouth of the simple groundskeeper whom Collins has chosen to narrate his tale. But more on that in a moment.
The Moonstone is another one of those books on my shelf that has a good story attached to it. In my last two years of my undergraduate degree it was Victorian Literature much more than Medieval that had grasped my fancy. Motivated by the Gothic and Romantic vein of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein I had developed a great affinity for the literature of England's most decadent and most depressing literary eras. Resultingly I developed quite a rapport with my department's Victorian specialist, a professor for whom I have a profound degree of respect for both her strong Feminist beliefs as well as the purposeful strictness with which she ran her classroom. Around graduation time it was customary for the English Department to hold a little luncheon which gave faculty and students a chance to mingle in a less formal setting as well as say their farewells. As is fitting for the English folk, most of these farewells were delivered in the forms of books. Tragically my professor was not present but she left this book in the care of our Department Chair to present at the luncheon. Accordingly it was the first book I read during my summer as an unemployed graduate...
If I were to describe the book in a single sentence I would say that I imagine this to be the result of Charlotte Bronte having read a great deal of Arthur Conan Doyle. The Moonstone takes place on an aristocratic estate and involves the mystery and intrigue surrounding the theft of a precious gem that had been stolen while a group of characters had been on a military tour in India. There is a love story intertwined and the cathartic death of the villain but the most significant aspect of the novel in my memory was its narrative mode.
The story was related in the first person by a man named Betteredge, a groundskeeper/butler to the estate on which the book is set and an unaccountable fanatic of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It is his words which appear above. Now, I have read Robinson Crusoe and despite its supposed fame as one of the first modern English novels I cannot say much to the book's moral or aesthetic merit. Yet the narrator, this Betteredge, whenever events become confusing or difficult, rather than turn his eyes to some religious or philosophical text, somehow manages, within the context of his narration, glean insight from a tale about a man trapped on an island and describing every boring detail of his survival... Now if said butler had been reading Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy I might understand but Defoe? I'm really not sure what Collins was thinking. The only thing I can imagine is that Crusoe maybe had some kind of contemporary cultural significance that is currently lost on me. But be that as it may, I can't say that this at all interferes with the book. Collins' novel is quite fun, slightly slow at parts and not as difficult a mystery as most of Doyle's work, but entertaining nonetheless and an undoubtedly interesting study in Victorian pop-literature.
----
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005.
At first the lines above seem a little bit like the musings of Watson before recounting one of Holmes' great adventures. But this novel becomes somewhat awkward when we understand that these words are put in the mouth of the simple groundskeeper whom Collins has chosen to narrate his tale. But more on that in a moment.
The Moonstone is another one of those books on my shelf that has a good story attached to it. In my last two years of my undergraduate degree it was Victorian Literature much more than Medieval that had grasped my fancy. Motivated by the Gothic and Romantic vein of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein I had developed a great affinity for the literature of England's most decadent and most depressing literary eras. Resultingly I developed quite a rapport with my department's Victorian specialist, a professor for whom I have a profound degree of respect for both her strong Feminist beliefs as well as the purposeful strictness with which she ran her classroom. Around graduation time it was customary for the English Department to hold a little luncheon which gave faculty and students a chance to mingle in a less formal setting as well as say their farewells. As is fitting for the English folk, most of these farewells were delivered in the forms of books. Tragically my professor was not present but she left this book in the care of our Department Chair to present at the luncheon. Accordingly it was the first book I read during my summer as an unemployed graduate...
If I were to describe the book in a single sentence I would say that I imagine this to be the result of Charlotte Bronte having read a great deal of Arthur Conan Doyle. The Moonstone takes place on an aristocratic estate and involves the mystery and intrigue surrounding the theft of a precious gem that had been stolen while a group of characters had been on a military tour in India. There is a love story intertwined and the cathartic death of the villain but the most significant aspect of the novel in my memory was its narrative mode.
The story was related in the first person by a man named Betteredge, a groundskeeper/butler to the estate on which the book is set and an unaccountable fanatic of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It is his words which appear above. Now, I have read Robinson Crusoe and despite its supposed fame as one of the first modern English novels I cannot say much to the book's moral or aesthetic merit. Yet the narrator, this Betteredge, whenever events become confusing or difficult, rather than turn his eyes to some religious or philosophical text, somehow manages, within the context of his narration, glean insight from a tale about a man trapped on an island and describing every boring detail of his survival... Now if said butler had been reading Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy I might understand but Defoe? I'm really not sure what Collins was thinking. The only thing I can imagine is that Crusoe maybe had some kind of contemporary cultural significance that is currently lost on me. But be that as it may, I can't say that this at all interferes with the book. Collins' novel is quite fun, slightly slow at parts and not as difficult a mystery as most of Doyle's work, but entertaining nonetheless and an undoubtedly interesting study in Victorian pop-literature.
----
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005.
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