I spent the last couple of weeks reading books about reading and thought I'd post some short reviews.
First up: ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound - 4/5
It's the most entertaining of the bunch, but the least useful in practical terms. It's written quasi-aphoristically, in a very informal style. Almost blog-like. Small paragraphs, big statements. Loads of CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis, etc. The focus of the book is on poetry.
Pound is a highly opinionated elitist and isn't afraid to show it. In his opinion unless you learn Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Provencal, and Chinese you might as well not bother reading poetry at all because you won't get it ("You cannot learn to write by reading English."). He loves Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, troubadour poetry, early translations from the Latin (Chaucer, Gavin Douglas, Arthur Golding), Chaucer. Dislikes nearly all English poetry since then, especially its "un-European" aspects.
>Chaucer wrote while England was still a part of Europe [...] In Shakespeare’s time England is already narrowing. Shakespeare as supreme lyric technician is indebted to the Italian song-books, but they are already an EXOTIC. Chaucer uses French art, the art of Provence, the verse art come from the troubadours. In his world there had lived both Guillaume de Poictiers and Scotus Erigena. But Chaucer was not a foreigner. It was HIS civilization.
At the same time he clearly loves poetry, and tries to transmit this love.
>Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
His method of reading and learning about poetry eschews abstractions, de-emphasizing form and technique:
>In English when we define things we move toward the general, abstract, etc. In pictograph languages the symbol is the thing. The latter is how poetry should be studied. This is a scientific approach: don't bother with definition games, LOOK AT THE THING!
>Homer did not start by thinking which of the sixty-four permitted formulae was to be used in his next verse.
And what should we look at? In Pound's opinion you should closely study a small number of great works:
>And it is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many.
He's a big proponent of musicality in poetry (this is where the troubadour stuff comes in) and spends a lot of time discussing setting poetry to music (or music to poetry).
>Dante says: ‘A canzone is a composition of words set to music.’
>I don’t know any better point to start from.
>Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
The three ways poetry conveys meaning:
>you charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this.
On ulterior motives:
>Partisans of particular ideas may value writers who agree with them more than writers who do not, they may, and often do, value bad writers of their own party or religion more than good writers of another party or church. [...] Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm.
Some general stuff:
>Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.
>The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance.
>The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention.
>France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes.
>Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
>More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.
Finally, the second section of the book is filled with practical examples of readings (though I didn't find them particularly illuminating or helpful), with various "exercises" that are sort of aimed at a classroom setting (such as: write a parody of a bad poem, and have other students guess what it is parodying).
How to Read Literature, Terry Eagleton - 3.5/5
I liked this one, it does a lot of "teaching by example" by providing the reader with a wide range of literary analysis. Somewhat dry style, filled with annoyingly bad jokes. The focus is on novels, and pays almost no attention to the classics, poetry, anything published after ~1950, etc. Eagleton really likes to juxtapose the "realist" novel against the "modernist" novel and constantly brings it up (realist novels do THIS, but modernist novels do THAT) -- it's not always successful. The advice of this book is to focus on technique and form while de-emphasizing "content", and that's the type of readings he presents us with.
Eagleton loves Dickens and spends a lot of time on him, especially Great Expectations.
The book suffers from a lack of structure. It's divided into 5 chapters: Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, Value. The first two chapters are fairly coherent, but the other three are a clusterfuck. It jumps all over the place, from one example to another, with only the faintest connection to the chapter and between the texts/readings. The book needed a better editor, someone who could impose a stronger structure on it.
>Openings
Starts out analyzing opening sentences/paragraphs. A Passage to India, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, The Canterbury Tales, Moby Dick, Waiting for Godot, The Third Policeman, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
>Character
Provides some general discussion of characters in literature: how they are constructed, various archetypes, etc. Some questions to ask when thinking about characters:
>Is a particular literary figure presented simply as a type or emblem, or is she subtly psychologised?
>Is she grasped from the inside or treated from other characters’ standpoints?
>Is she seen as coherent or self- contradictory, static or evolving, firmly etched or fuzzy at the edges?
>Are characters viewed in the round or stripped to functions of the plot?
>Are they defined through their actions and relationships, or do they loom up as disembodied consciousnesses?
>Do we feel them as vivid physical presences or essentially verbal ones, as readily knowable or as full of elusive depths?
Some of the realist vs modernist stuff:
>The realist novel tends to grasp individual lives in terms of histories, communities, kinship and institutions. Personal history has a coherent evolution.
>The modernist novel quite often presents us with a single, solitary consciousness. Identity is pitched into crisis. They press the complexity of the characters until it overflows (e.g. Woolf)
Then he goes on to some deeper analysis of a couple of characters, particularly Sue from Jude the Obscure.
>Narrative
This is where the structure starts becoming muddled.
Starts off talking about narrators, the various types, how entangled the author is with the narrator, etc.
>If characters them-selves are reluctant to commit murder, the narrative itself may always step in and oblige.
There's a discussion of political/social implications of happy endings, and how they're often ironic. Then some "plot vs narrative" bits.
Realism vs modernism:
>Realism: straightforward plots, beginning-middle-end, there is logic and order to the universe, etc.
>Modernism: all that shit falls apart. WWI? No clear causality, collection of independent mini-narratives, etc. => all narratives must be ironic and keep their limitations in mind. Contra "progress".
>Interpretation
Literary works carry their context within them, which makes interpretation challenging. Fictionality is one reason why literary works tend to be more ambiguous than non-literary ones - good use of the lack of context can be used to generate creative ambiguity!
A realist novel presents (the illusion of) characters and events which seem to exist independently of itself.
Form, genre, etc. mediate content - should interpret in light of them. But ignoring them can make for fun readings.
>One should not make a fetish of personal experience.
>In the ancient Jewish practice of midrash or scriptural interpretation, it was sometimes deemed acceptable to assign new, strikingly improbable meanings to the Bible.
Then there's a long analysis of Great Expectations that spans everything the book has discussed so far. At the end of the chapter he moves into a (thankfully short) fairly bad analysis of Harry Potter...a misguided attempt to appeal to millenials?
>Value
Originality: not necessarily great, and in some ages it was viewed with a lot of suspicion. Then the Romantics came and their individualism, etc. was packaged with a reverence for originality. Pomo sheds originality again, instead going for something like creative recycling.
Are all great works timeless/universal? Opinions differ. Probably.
>A literary classic, some critics consider, is not so much a work whose value is changeless as one that is able to generate new meanings over time.
Is it well executed, judging by standards of excellence?
Complexity: not sufficient for greatness, not always good.
Some more examples, this time of a more general analytical nature + an evaluation of "literary worth".
>If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose - 4/5
My favorite of the bunch. Prose is a writer and teaches writing courses. She has a similar approach to Eagleton (mostly teaching by practical examples of close reading), but with superior execution. Her view is that the best way to learn how to write is by reading good books and taking on their techniques through close reading and osmosis.
Two aspects make it stand out a bit. First, a lot of the advice is given from the perspective of writing, in the style of "look how well [author] does this thing, it's a good technique and you should use it". Second, there are various personal anecdotes interspersed throughout, I thought they worked well. She has a Bloomian attitude:
>THE only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written.
>I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.
It's fairly well structured, especially when compared to Eagleton. There first chapter covers words, the next sentences, then paragraphs, and so on. The barrage of examples within each chapter can someone be a bit much, but over all I thought it worked well.
>Words
A ton of practical examples; words not mentioned are often the most important part; not everything needs to be acted out; pyrotechnics vs appearing calculated: both are tough!; pay particular attention to deployments of words that are technically wrong, but perfect in context; some writers _require_ word-for-word close reading (Faulkner, Joyce, Pinecone); pay attention to tone and its implications.
>Sentences
Again lots of analysis: Samuel Johnson, Woolf, Hemingway, etc.; What makes a good sentence? Hard to say. Economy, lucidity, surprise, RHYTHM, cadence, beauty? Prose doesn't have any good answers, probably because there aren't any; Positive learning: read good books, imitate. Grammar books, workshops, etc. tend to be about what not to do; read your work aloud.
>It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. These are works you can turn to whenever you feel that your own style is getting a little slack or lazy or vague.
>Paragraphs
As always, loads of practical examples; focus on the structure of sentences in a paragraph. Pay attention to shifts in POV, or shifts in focus between paragraphs. One-sentence paragraphs can be lively, energetic, call attention to themselves, etc. but can also be overused. Good example: beginning of Pride and Prejudice.
>Paragraphs are a form of emphasis. What appears at the start and end of the paragraph has greater weight than what appears in the middle.
Isaac Babel on the paragraph:
>The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect.
>Narration
Who is listening? On what occasion is the story being told, and why? Is the protagonist projecting this heartfelt confession out into the ozone, and, if so, what is the proper tone to assume when the ozone is one’s audience?
In general, narration reveals very much about the narrator.
The most credible witness is the one with the smallest emotional investment.
Style builds credibility - artificiality distances us from the narrative and increases skepticism, every-day believable language brings us closer.
>Dostoyevsky was painfully familiar with problems of narration, with challenging and even wrong decisions about how a story is to be told. The notebooks in which he sketched out his ideas for Crime and Punishment not only document the many projected plot turns that never appear in the finished book and the early conceptions of characters who have utterly different personalities in the completed novel, but also chart his struggle to find the best way to tell his story. Sections of these early drafts of the novel are written in the first person, as a diary, as confession, as memory, and as a combination of journal and drama. But ultimately he realized that, given the problems caused by the fact that his hero was to be semi-delirious for significant portions of the narrative, he could maintain the same intensity and immediacy, while avoiding the technical limitations of the first person, by sticking to a close third-person narration that, at critical junctures, merges with the consciousness of the protagonist.
>Strategic changes in narrator/POV can be very strong, don't slavishly stick to one. But don't overdo it either.
>First-person narratives are as variable as the number of characters who can sustain a narrative in the first person—which is to say, an endless variety. And through the skillful deployment of language, writers can not only establish the personality of that narrator within a few sentences or paragraphs, but, more important, in the case of a novel, persuade us that we want to be in that person’s company for several hundred pages.
>Omniscient merely means all-knowing, but does not suggest that this all-seeing eye is impartial, objective, or free from prejudices and opinions—which, again, are conveyed through word choice, rhythm, sentence length, diction, and so forth—about whatever that eye is observing.
>Character
Look out for contradictions, dualities, etc. in the nature of characters.
What do the characters know? What do they not know? What do they know but do not understand?
Look at Austen for good examples of establishing characters through dialogue. Two birds with one stone!
Pay attention to which characters are interacting and why.
>Dialogue
Dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.
Don't look only at information being delivered, but what goal the speaker is trying to achieve, what impression they leave, and what they are NOT saying.
Typical dialogue: one talks, the other listens and replies. But inattention, repetition, etc. are all possible and can bring out a lifelike effect.
Look out for parallels in dialogues between different people in the same work. Look out for people's actions/body language/etc during dialogue: it can often be highly revealing of the things they are not saying.
Pay attention to the POV of the dialogue, if there is one.
>Details
Too many small details reveal the liar. One perfectly placed, off-hand detail tends to be the most convincing.
We remember in detail, we recognize in detail, we identify, we re-create.
>Gesture
Mediocre writing abounds with physical clichés and stock gestures.
>Unless what the character does is unexpected or unusual, or truly important to the narrative, the reader will assume that response without having to be told. On hearing that his business partner has just committed a murder, a man might be quite upset, and we can intuit that without needing to hear about the speed of his heartbeat or the dampness of his palms. On the other hand, if he’s glad that his partner has been caught, or if he himself is the murderer, and he smiles…well, that’s a different story.
>Learning from Chekhov
Prose's favorite author is Chekhov, and there's a chapter at the end dedicated to him. She relates how she would teach her creative writing class various rules, then find Chekhov breaking those rules but making it work exceptionally well. Some examples:
Avoid characters with similar/same names: the opposite is done in "The Two Volodyas".
Limit shifts of POV: the opposite is done in "Gusev".
Make it clear who or what the story is about: the opposite is done in "In the Ravine".
Avoid surprise endings that come out of nowhere: "Volodya".
etc.
One downside is that the book focuses almost exclusively on short stories and novels, there's nothing on poetry in here.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C Foster - 1/5
Do you know those toys for babies where they have to put the right shape into the right hole? This is that toy in book form. Very useful to the undergraduate who wants to get a good grade on his essay in English Lit 101, but actively hurtful otherwise.
Foster encourages a mindless, formulaic approach to reading. Most of it deals with spotting references, symbols, allusions, etc. But what are we to do with them after we spot them? How do they illuminate the text, what is their role in the conversation between the thing we're reading and what is being referenced? Foster never bothers to tell us.
He provides a seemingly endless list of formulas (food scenes mean THIS, a character dying of heart disease means THAT, tuberculosis means... etc.), but we are never privy to the underlying principles that generated these rules.
To give an example, here's a checklist to help us decide whether a character is a "Christ figure" or not:
>YOU MIGHT BE A CHRIST FIGURE IF YOU ARE…
>(CHECK ANY THAT APPLY):
>__ thirty-three years old
>__ unmarried, preferably celibate
>__ wounded or marked in the hands, feet, or side (crown of thorns extra credit)
>__ sacrificing yourself in some way for others (your life is best, and your sacrifice doesn’t have to be willing)
>__ in some sort of wilderness, tempted there, accosted by the devil
The author's favorite writers appear to be D. H. Lawrence and Toni Morrison.
A budding reader coming into contact with this book might be turned off from reading forever, thinking that mindless trainspotting with books is all there's to it. Avoid at all costs.
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J Adler - 2.5/5
Very basic, it feels aimed at kids just entering high school. For someone at that age it's not bad. It mostly concerns reading non-fiction, featuring only little (and mediocre) advice on fiction. One positive is that it tries to offer specific advice for epic poetry, lyric poetry, plays, etc. This extends into non-fiction, with sections dedicated to reading philosophy, history, etc.
It's written in that typical American textbook style that uses 10 pages to say something that should be expressed in a single paragraph. Tends to follow a list-based approach, with a series of actions you ought to take when reading. This is the most general such list, though there are more specific ones with up to 15 points:
>There are four main questions you must ask about any book.
>1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE?
>2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL, AND HOW?
>3. Is THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART?
>4. WHAT OF IT?
Overall I was a bit disappointed, none of the books approached reading as a creative enterprise. They aimed to generate competent but unoriginal readings. One of the small deviations from this was Eagleton suggesting that you might want to ignore genre when reading genre literature, for a "fun reading".
I'd still recommend the Prose book even to seasoned readers, there are plenty of good nuggets in there to justify it.
>>7421129
Thanks for devoting the time for your posts, I'll check Prose out. I've been going through the ABC earlier in the week and found it very useful, especially his pictograph theory. Love Ezra and can't stress him enough.
>>7421099
>Francine Prose
>Prose
For real?
Thanks OP. That was pretty interesting.
>>7421207
At least she wasn't named Hooker.
>>7421248
Yeah, really a good thread
Now we just have to try and discuss stuff
>>7421275
Speaking about books, have you read Infinite Jest? I haven't.
>>7421115
I also found this book to complete trash. I understand that he was writing for apathetic high-school children, and that influenced his intentions, but this was abysmal. What's the point of getting kids into "big boi" literature if you're going to reduce the meaning into easily identifiable but platitudinous interpretations?
>>7421129
What do you mean by reading as a creative enterprise? Do you mean in the same sense Toni Morrison, or are you going for the idea of re-contextualization and "judge for yourself" and deconstruction of authorial authority a la Kierkegaard?
>>7421322
Meaning isn't some complex indefinable 2deep4u shit. Symbols usually mean the obvious. Sorry you were tricked into thinking otherwise.
>>7421322
The latter. I'm a big fan of Borges as a reader. As Mr. Pontine put it:
>Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act.
For example, from Pierre Menard:
>Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?
This isn't just a joke, deliberate anachronism is a fantastic technique. Here's a great example: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/fiction-literature/generous-minds It's a review of Samuel Johnson as if he was a contemporary blogger. It's not only humorous, there's substance to it.
>These Johnson posts claim to date from the early 1750s, a typical blogger’s conceit and misdirection, but the content is too modern and innovative to sustain that illusion for long.
He uses deliberate anachronism to accuse the text of deliberate anachronism! Who is this "typical blogger" pretending to be an 18th century author? *wink wink*
In any case, he uses this conceit not only to highlight Johnson's contemporary relevance/timelesness, but to show how we misperceive the history of science (especially in the social sciences). How great ideas are ignored if they're not presented in the right way or place; the reviewer complains that Johnson doesn't cite Frank, his point being of course that Frank doesn't cite Johnson. How little the internet and cultural shifts have changed human interactions (flame wars). And so on..
Of course this is only one technique out of many. The aforementioned reading a genre book as if it's not a genre book (or vice versa) is another. You can read from a perspective not originally intended (Austen is great for this), which can lead to stuff like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Another great Borges technique is the deliberate mis-placement of "authorial authority", as he does in an essay on the Divine Comedy. The list goes on...
I'm also a big fan of Strauss as a reader, though that isn't about recontextualization. It's not so much creative reading as it is reading that forces you to be creative. Looking for esoteric "bits" forces you to read very well and very critically, while the "pedagogical motive" of esotericism is basically to force the reader to craft an argument themselves. This is also part of why I like aphoristic writers, they give you the destination but the road is up to you.
>posts with substance
Is this bizarro-/lit/?
>>7421085
I think ABC's most important section is the one on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Villon, personally
Bumpe
Thanks OP.
I disagree about Prose though. It all just seemed like common sense if you are passionate about reading/writing
>>7421680
I don't know, but I like it!
