Antiquitopia

I just read an interesting interview with Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton.  It covers a multitude of topics of interest, and several elements caught my eye in a general way concerning politics, religion, and culture (by the way, his discussion of the failed modern surrogates of religion is quite interesting).  But one that caught my attention in a specific way that has quite practical implications: How do you feel about current literary criticism? You were an episode in the history of literary criticism yourself, in a sort of transition phase from Leavisism to the present day… I’ve got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I would have been taught at Cambridge—close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness—all of whic...

I have been spending my two snow days finishing up the seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time . It all only took me a few months short of two years to read. And it is finished. Here is a snippet I read today in the last volume, Time Regained : In reality every reader is, while he is reading, a reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. (trans. Mayor, Kilmartin, and Enright)

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old; What interested scholars most, What competitions ran When Plato was a certainty, And Sophocles a man; When Sappho was a living girl, And Beatrice wore The gown that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before, He traverses familiar, As one should come to town And tell you all your dreams were true: He lived where dreams were born. His presence is enchantment, You beg him not to go; Old volumes shake their vellum heads And tantalize, just so. ~Emily Dickinson

I just started reading Judah Goldin's Song at the Sea , and he gives some advice to student readers of his text regarding his tendencies of biblical quotations: A suggestion to students. Whenever a biblical verse is quoted, and all the more when only part of the verse is quoted, the biblical text should be consulted, for the context (verses before and after) will prove more revealing than any commentator's paraphrase. (Goldin, Song at the Sea , xii) I think this is true for ancient and modern commentators and interpreters alike.

Reading out loud, something taken for granted in antiquity, something part of sociality just a couple hundred years ago, is becoming a dying art : May 16, 2009 EDITORIAL OBSERVER Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past. Consider audio books. An enormous number of Americans read by listening these days — listening aloud, I call it. The technology for doing so is diverse and widespread, and so are the places people listen to audio books. But from the perspective of a reader in, say, the early 19th century, about the time of Jane Austen, there is something peculiar about it, even lonely. In those days, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit. Books were still relatively scarce and expensive, and the routine electronic diversions we take for granted were, of course, nonexistent. If you had grown up listening to adults reading to each other regular...

In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of "decorum"), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. (Susan Sontag, "On Style") How often are we careful enough in our art of reading to read silences in the text?

As I continue to dawdle through Walter Benjamin's essays, I am often struck at some details. In fact, as Benjamin reads, he writes. He reads for details, the obscure, buried detail the perspective from which brings new light upon the rest of the writing, or the world. To read this way, to see this way--which for Benjamin is the same, since he was one of the foremost proponents, if not the catalyst, for reading the world as a text--one must dawdle. Not necessarily with a great deal of concentration, although that is sometimes required, but more like someone walking, browsing without urgency. It is not skimming, for that suggests that one is in a hurry. Just as Benjamin read the world as a text, he strolls through texts. It is only appropriate that one of his footnotes best captures this attitude: A pedestrian knew how to display his nonchalance provocatively on certain occasions. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs ...

I have been reading through more literary criticism as of late for teaching my class next year, Literature of the Humanities, and, while in an independent bookstore in St. Louis, I found a book of posthumously published essays by Italo Calvino, who wrote one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities . This book of essays is called, Why Read the Classics?, after its opening essay. I thought such a book would be very relevant for a class that is loaded with classic authors from Homer to Virginia Woolf. In this opening essay, he speaks of both "classics" and "your own classics," noting that classics are works that will shift over time, both in which works will be included as classics and in terms that our understanding of them will shift, not just as centuries pass, but even from our youth to our old-age. Classics are those works that we may read when young, forming us in some ways, and then revisit when older, never exhausting what it has to say to us. Each rereadi...

The book, The English Patient , is interesting for someone in my position if, for nothing else, its emphatically explicit interrelationships Herodotus' Histories . While reading through it, in a section about Rudyard Kipling, one reads a lesson on reading, or the art of reading, a lesson I need to recall from time to time and hopefully will convey to my students next year: "Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise." Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient , 94. May your own readings dwell on the pauses, fully inhabiting t...