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...

A Petihta is a particular form of an ancient Jewish homily. It consists of a launching verse, usually from the Prophets or Writings, and a target verse from the Torah. According to many commentators, the more distinct and apparently unrelated the two verses are the better. Already knowing the end of the homily (the target verse), the pleasure for the audience/reader is to see how the interpreter, through exegetical virtuosity, will get from one to the other--the more disparate the verses then demonstrates a much higher level of interpretive ability and may make a further point: all scripture contains an underlying unity. Consider then this description of modern practices of interpretation: What are commonly seen as "schools" of literary criticism or theoretical "approaches" to literature are, from the point of view of hermeneutics, dispositions to give particular kinds of answers to the question of what a work is ultimately "about": "the class s...

I have been perusing Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory , and he makes an observation that I have also suspected for a while: ...theory has reinvigorated the traditional literary canon, opening the door to more ways of reading the "great works" of English and American literature. Never has so much been written about Shakespeare; he is studied from every angle conceivable, interpreted in feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and deconstructive vocabularies. Wordsworth has been transformed by literary theory from a poet of nature to a key figure of modernity. What have suffered neglect are "minor" works that were regularly studied when literary study was organized to "cover" historical periods and genres. Shakespeare is more widely read and vigorously interpreted than ever, but Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, and Ben Jonson--Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists who used to surround him--are little read today. (p. 64; emphas...

Ok...I love Umberto Eco. He has fantastic verve in his verbage. He can present some extraordinarily complex ideas in beautiful language that is, at the same time, succinct. He has this to say about some rather loquacious critics: ...those who are so orgasmic in words are in fact very unlibertine in reality, and abhor alterity, since in every one of their critical embraces they are simply making love to themselves. ("On Style" in On Literature , 173). I'll remember that one, Umberto, when reviews of my work start rolling in! ;)

Wrath—one of the most famous first words in all of world literature. The word sets the pace, the tone, the content of the Iliad , shaping the plot of all there is to come. Wrath—Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and the birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. (Iliad, 1.1-8; trans. Robert Fagles with some changes) The first word is menis . It is not just “anger” as the magisterial translation of Richmond Lattimore has rendered it. It is sustained anger, almost godlike in its intensity and singularity. Thus, Robert Fagles’ “rage” more clearly fits the bill. Yet I prefer the terminology of “wrath.” It reminds me of the wrath of God, which it ap...

So, I have been continuing to read Umberto Eco's On Literature, and he has a nice, very short, essay on Dante Alighieri's Paradiso , called "A Reading of the Paridiso ." He argues that it has been misread and underestimated, in fact devalued, in the nineteenth century and this devaluation continued throughout the twentieth, with the Inferno and, to some extent, the Purgatorio gaining the most attention. In contrast, Eco argues that the Paradiso is the finest of all three canticas. He primarily sets it in the context of the medieval preference for bold, bright color to express themselves in daily life, refined by Dante in the Paradiso . But, what caught my attention is the Paradiso as amazingly modern, and, in fact, futuristic: "Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can ...

I started reading Umberto Eco's On Literature today, and found some interesting snippets in his opening essay entitled, "On Some Functions of Literature." He discusses many issues, such as the formative influence of literature on language (like Dante's on Italian, Luther's on German, Homer's on Greek, etc.). The combination of different literatures and languages, in turn, shapes individual and communal identities. He discusses freedom and fidelity of interpretation. He has this to say about the relationship between the text and interpreter: "The world of literature is a universe in which it is possible to establish whether a reader has a sense of reality or is the victim of his own hallucinations." He also discusses how certain things are established in literature and cannot be changed because they have entered collective knowledge or can be directly looked up (like the identity of Superman as Clark Kent--Eco loves this example, interestingly en...

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...