SUBSCRIBE NOW WELCOME BACK. Do you want to continue reading where you left off? New Republic subscribers can pick up where they left off no matter which device they were previously using. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Go Home Bad Expectations

BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 14, 2010

Bad Expectations

BY HILLARY KELLY

On December 2, as Oprah Winfrey stood on the stage of her TV show, tightly clutching her newest Book Club selection to her chest so that no one could see its title, she proclaimed in her singular, scale-climbing voice, “Dickeeeens for the hooolidaaaays!” Oprah declared that she has “always wanted to read Dickens over the holidays,” and “now [she] can.” Never mind that she could have read Dickens whenever she wanted, seeing as his books have been popular for more than a century. Never mind that Oprah hadn’t chosen A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, or any of Dickens’s other Christmas tales. Never mind that neither Great Expectations nor A Tale of Two Cities, the books she did choose, have anything to do with the holidays. Our shepherd has spoken, and we must blindly follow.

Billed as “A Date with Dickens,” Oprah’s sentimentalized pitch for consuming the author’s work—it’s “cup of hot chocolate” reading—is sure to inspire a frightening number of purchases. Just as they have for the past 14 years, cadres of women around the globe will flock to bookstores to nab covers with a small circular “O” sticker on the top right corner. Oprah has proven that she can catapult a contemporary author from obscurity to fame; but, more interestingly, she’s shown she can also revivify the great novels. Dubbed the “Oprah Effect,” Winfrey’s seal of approval and magnanimous praise has bolstered the sales of dozens of novels and, in turn, annoyed bitter English teachers everywhere. After all, Oprah is doing the impossible—she is convincing the masses to purchase and read classics. 

In recent years, Oprah’s contemporary choices have wavered wildly, between new classics and “one-dimensional” heart-wrenchers (as Jonathan Franzen so aptly put it back in 2001). The Road (also a Pulitzer-Prize winner) introduced the world to the menacingly minimal prose of Cormac McCarthy, but Fall on Your Knees (Anne-Marie MacDonald) left me wishing for … wait, I hardly even remember finishing that one. The most galling of Oprah’s selections, however, aren’t the terrible new ones; they are magna opera of literary history. Indeed, Winfrey has seen fit to dip into the annals of literary history, pull out ringers like Anna Karenina and As I Lay Dying, and tell us why she, Oprah, thinks we should read them.

Her current choices, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. Surely both belong to the realm of classics and should, no must be read—and Oprah’s fans will inevitably dive in, not only because Winfrey has told them to but also out of a desire to assuage old guilt about required reading in high school that was left untouched. But what can Oprah really bring to the table with these books? Oprah has said that, together, the novels will “double your reading pleasure.” But is that even true? And do the novels even complement each other? Can you connect Miss Havisham’s treatment of time to Carton’s misuse of his “youthful promise”? Well, don’t ask Oprah herself, as she “shamefully” admits she has “never read Dickens.”

 

Now imagine this scenario somewhat differently. Your 16 year old announces that her English class will be reading Great Expectations. Fabulous, you think. A real piece of literature, a break from the Twilight nonsense and the watering down of education. “What will you discuss?” you ask your child. “Oh, we don’t know yet,” she says. “My teacher has never read it before. In fact, she’s never read any Dickens. She just thought it would be fun to read this with a cup of tea in hand!” My guess is that you would be annoyed. 

And yet, Oprah does just that, only it’s worse: She has asked millions of people to follow her into some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century—prose she knows nothing about. Put simply, a TV host whose maxim is to “live your best life” is not an adequate guide through the complicated syntax of Dickens, not because she lacks the intelligence—she is quite clearly a woman of savvy—but because her readings of the texts are so one-dimensional. 

Oprah’s approach to her Book Club is all about herself. Her recent announcement contained not a word of reasoning or insightfulness about Dickens’s work; instead, she explained her reason for picking two of his novels by shouting, in a lame attempt at literary humor, “Cause it’s the best of times!” Just as she deems her “favorite things” worthy of an annual consumer-fest, she happily pushes to her audience of millions whatever books she herself wants to read.

Making the situation all the more appalling, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities could not be more different. Focusing on wildly different themes and set in two distinct historical periods, scholars do not even regard the books as being of the same caliber—Great Expectations is often considered the far superior work.Reading them in conjunction imparts no nutritional value. This whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

Even more confusingly, Oprah’s comments about Dickens making for cozy reading in front of a winter fire misinterprets the large-scale social realism of his work. It stands to reason that her sentimentalized view of Dickens might stem from A Christmas Carol—probably his most family-friendly read and one of his most frequently recounted tales. But her quaint view of Victoriana, as she’s expressed it, belies an ignorance of Dickens’s authorial intentions. Indeed, both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations are dark and disturbing, with elaborate ventures into the seedy underbelly of London and the bloody streets of Paris. How can we trust a literary guide who, ignorant of the terrain ahead, promises us it will be light and easy?

 

Since its inception in 1996, the Book Club has carved its niche among readers by telling them that the novel is a chance to learn more about themselves. It’s not about literature or writing; it’s about looking into a mirror and deciding what type of person you are, and how you can be better. While a generally wrongheaded view of novels, this notion is all the more frustrating when the club delves into the true classics, with their vast knottiness, glorious language, breathtaking characters, and multi-faceted, mind-twisting prose. None of that matters in Oprah’s view of books, since reading is yet another exercise in self-gratification. “If you have read him, what do you think Dickens might have to share and teach those of us who live in this digital age?” the Book Club’s producer, Jill, asks on Oprah’s website. This is the Eat, Pray, Love school of reading. 

Indeed, Oprah’s readers have been left in the dark. They must now scramble about to decipher Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms—and the sad truth is that, with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon. Instead, they can only mimic their high-school selves with calls of, “It’s too hard!” Or, else, they can put aside any notions of reading to become a better reader and instead immerse themselves in the nonsense of “discovering their true selves” in novels. 

A glance at the discussion boards on Oprah’s website confirms my worst fears. “I have read all the print-outs and character materials and the first two pages,” said one reader, referring to supplementary reading guides produced by the Book Club. “The first two pages are laden with political snips and I am trying to grasp what it is saying. I was able to look up cock-lane and figure that out, but where do I go to figure out the innuendos?” And the response: “SparkNotes provides an excellent summary of the context of the book as well as chapter summaries and analysis.”

Despite Oprah’s joyous yelling and shepherding, despite her character guides and suggestions of cups of hot cocoa, despite the gorgeously crafted Penguin edition of two Dickens novels and the soon-to-come chats on Winfrey’s couch about how readers can find themselves in these books, the battle has been fought and the victor already decided: Oprah 1, Literature, 0. 

Hillary Kelly is assistant editor of THE BOOK.

Click here to subscribe to TNR and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Show all 123 comments

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

123 comments

"Indeed, Oprah’s readers have been left in the dark. They must now scramble about to decipher Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms—and the sad truth is that, with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon. Instead, they can only mimic their high-school selves with calls of, “It’s too hard!” Or, else, they can put aside any notions of reading to become a better reader and instead immerse themselves in the nonsense of “discovering their true selves” in novels. A glance at the discussion boards on Oprah’s website confirms my worst fears. “I have read all the print-outs and character materials and the first two pages,” said one reader, referring to supplementary reading guides produced by the Book Club. “The first two pages are laden with political snips and I am trying to grasp what it is saying. I was able to look up cock-lane and figure that out, but where do I go to figure out the innuendos?” And the response: “SparkNotes provides an excellent summary of the context of the book as well as chapter summaries and analysis.”" You are talking about adults, aren't you? Am I supposed to feel sorry for her "readers?"

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 12:39am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

First we had panem et circenses now we have libri et circenses.

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 12:39am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Well pretty soon we'll all be living in Dickens' London so we won't have to read the books.

- Sophia

December 14, 2010 at 12:59am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Wow. "Cadres of women from around the globe" will discover that Dickens can be tough sledding. I imagine that more than a few, however, will muddle through on their own and actually get something more out of it than a cup of hot cocoa. And it's really this, I suspect, that you find so "appalling."

- leon999

December 14, 2010 at 6:57am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

""Cadres of women from around the globe" will discover that Dickens can be tough sledding. " From wiki: "Many of his novels, with their recurrent concern for social reform, first appeared in magazines in serialised form, a popular format at the time. Unlike other authors who completed entire novels before serialisation, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next instalment.[2] The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.[3]" Clearly Dickens' contemporaries did not find his novels "tough sledding". Why should our contemporary readers be any less intelligent or literate? I can't quite figure our what Ms. Kelly's beef is. To me it seems she has a special regard for Dickens (maybe she wrote her Masters' thesis about his novels?) and dislikes seeing the novels she cherishes so being vulgarized by popular demand from the great unwashed masses. She ought to be consoled with the thought that out of the millions of new Dickens' readers there will be at least a few thousands, if not more, who WILL get the complexity and relevance of the novels.

- noga1

December 14, 2010 at 7:35am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'm with leon999 on this. My seventh grade class took a field trip to a local senior high school for the purpose of availing the St. Louis Symphony Orchestras performance of Beethoven's Fifth. I wasn't expecting much never having been exposed to full classical performance. The jibber jabber in the bleachers was complimented by the meandering warm ups of the musicians who seemed to be having some difficulty finding a common ground. Then a completely unexpected full throated four note statement of unapologetic purposed unison split the air and I was a changed being.

- jacko

December 14, 2010 at 8:16am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'm with Noga1 as well. I had delayed my previous posting due to busy things. Had I been aware of our agreement pre post it would have reflected as much.

- jacko

December 14, 2010 at 8:22am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"sure to inspire a frightening number of purchases" ... "a TV host ... is not an adequate guide through the complicated syntax of Dickens" ... "with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon." If Ms. Kelly's diatribe here is in even the slightest degree not the offensively antidemocratic elitism that it appears to be, then we would have a moral duty to close all bookstores and libraries lest civilization itself collapse under the weight of the proletariat's "frightening" self-directed reading of the classics. Good god, but this reads like the kind of aristocratic claptrap that passes for cultural criticism at National Review. For one thing, back when "the canon" actually meant something and most people had read big chunks of it, most of them did so well beyond the bounds of directed study. Abraham Lincoln developed a keen understanding of Shakespeare, Burns, and Scott not in his second year at Princeton, because he didn't attend college, but as an adolescent at home after dropping out of elementary school. This was the typical pattern of literacy and encounter with the classics when they really were widely read and understood. It is the rise of aristocratic academic attitudes like Ms. Kelly's, not Oprahian cultural populism, that has led our civilization down the cul-de-sac of canon illiteracy. Secondly, on a practical level, this is how book clubs work. You pick a book, most members having not read it, and then the group reads it for the first time at the same time. Discussion is usually led by the members who have read the book before - which is exactly what happens on Oprah, where she typically brings in expert guests on discussion day - but the conversation is among first-time readers of the work. Third, it reflects an authoritarian mindset of the deepest foundation to assume, as does Ms. Kelly, that the limitations of a book club's leader must define the limits of all participants' encounters with the text. If this were even plausible, then each succeeding generation would necessarily understand less than the one before, as every student would always understand less clearly than his teacher, until after some generations all understanding was lost. And yet this is not so; in fact students frequently transcend the limitations of their leaders in learning. This is why graduate study is conducted mainly in seminars, and at the most fundamental level this is why democracy as a form of government is morally defensible. This is where Oprah's self-actualization schtick is actually a virtue: unlike most other dominant media figures, Oprah encourages her audience to feel good about forming and defending their own opinions about a subject rather than simply parroting the conclusions handed down by the leader/host. The solitary criticism of any value here is on the choice of two novels. But this has nothing to do with Dickens being especially hard reading or the sacred purity of the canon or the vulgarity of Oprah. It's simply about format and respect for the reader and the text. Except in rare cases, book clubs just don't work for multiple long texts. A book club works with one text, which can be savored and struggled with if need be and still allow the reader to complete and thoughtfully contemplate it within the limits of still living one's hectic life of work and family obligations. The whole point is to make it possible to engage literature without dropping out of one's life to attend graduate school full time.

- rhubarbs

December 14, 2010 at 8:32am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Millions of people reading classic books reserved only for those elite few who can truly appreciate them? The horror! Ahem. Your classism is showing.

- dbg0159

December 14, 2010 at 9:00am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Shuckins Rhubarbs. I think that was all rather well propositioned. And so a tip o the cap to you, sir.

- jacko

December 14, 2010 at 10:17am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"They must now scramble about to decipher Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms—and the sad truth is that, with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon." Bullshit. Climb down off your soapbox Hillary. Getting "millions" of adults to read either of these classics will cause many of them to discover that they like Dickens, and find value in it. It won't be the esoteric value we were taught to look for in literature class, because, of course, only the literati are qualified to find that, but value it will be. I loved Dickens from the moment I cracked A Tale of Two Cities in my early teen years. I didn't understand the novel the way I do now - nor could I possibly have done, given all that has changed me in the intervening decades. But I knew the language and the story to be magic, and I did get AN understanding that was useful to me at that time, and that was enough to lead me to other Dickens, and to reread "Cities" (and often listen to it - "Cities" is a great read aloud). Quite frankly, if literature isn't good enough and accessible enough at multiple levels to profit from this kind of promotion, then it's not great literature at all. It's a puzzle for academics and other literati. Which, I guess, is not a bad thing. Those folks tend to need puzzles to keep them going. Me? I'll settle for everyday insights into myself and my surroundings born on the wings of beguiling prose, however commonplace the insights may appear to the initiated.

- IowaBeauty

December 14, 2010 at 10:21am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

This really is an odd bit of dispepsia. I can see saying Oprah is not a great literary critic or scholar, so she doesn't constitute a graduate level seminar for her fans or a televised Paris Review or NYRB. The bit about hot chocolate and the holidays merits a chuckle. Having said that, our author has a one-paragaph blog. Okay, maybe two. Beyond that, it gets weird. There's no theory of reading here to engage the scholarly sorts who might be drawn to puzzling over the possibilities for contemporary mass readership of nineteenth century serialized writing for the masses that has attained the "canon." There's no scathing cultural critique, wedded to clever japes about pop lit. There's just disdain, at length. The devastating quote from the comment section on O seems reasonably intelligent, but we're supposed to be guided by the author in her presumptive disdain for unschooled folks who would dare to read, and discuss, Dickens.

- Walpole

December 14, 2010 at 10:30am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I don't get this at all. Are Oprah's viewers not worthy of reading Dickens? Do you prefer more of "The Lovely Bones" to classic literature for those masses? My gosh, if someone prods masses of readers to take on Dickens – whatever titles for whatever reason – why not celebrate that? Approached seriously, any reader can find an amazing amount of supporting material online to make either book more accessible. No English Major Certification Test necessary.

- emccded

December 14, 2010 at 11:01am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

This article strikes me as deeply wrongheaded. So what if Oprah has a silly, narcissistic view of literature? If she gets her fans in their thousands and millions to go out and buy books, some of them authentically great literature, I say more power to her in this age of illiteracy! And by what right does Ms. Kelly sneeringly dismiss all those book-buying fans as dunderheads who could not possibly understand a "great book" unless it is spoon-fed to them by a Certified Literature Professor? Surely some of them are capable of reading and thinking for themselves, and possibly even having insights that have never occurred to Hillary Kelly! If the Western canon is to have any claim to universality, it must be that it is potentially accessible to everyone--that is the great lesson I took away from my immersion in the University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins-inspired "core curriculum" in the humanities. Or are we to lock the gates of the Temple of Literature to all who do not have a Ph.D. in literary theory? That, surely, would be a far worse catastrophe for the human spirit than Oprah telling people to have a cup of hot chocolate while reading Charles Dickens!

- mgorvine

December 14, 2010 at 11:04am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I am with Sophia. Except that it's one more reason to read the books. Perhaps a few bells will be ringing in those tea partiers' heads?

- Idefix

December 14, 2010 at 11:32am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Most of these comments have a good point. It is not at all true that without "real guidance" we cannot truly appreciate great literature. Many people can discover literature by just, you know, reading. Still, the overarching point that I took from this is that Oprah's damn creepy, which is just as true. You've always wanted to read Dickens for the holidays and now you (and your devoted cultists) can? Because of what change, a change in the stars? A royal whim? Yech.

- janus

December 14, 2010 at 11:49am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Two things: 1. The phrase "popular for more than a century" is a very strange formulation. A century ago was 1910 and yes, without doubt Dickens has been popular for longer. But he became a household name in the late 1830s and that's a stretch before 1910. There is a sense of hurried reviewer-ese here, not to mention a fumbling grasp of literary history. Ben-Hur, popular for more than a century; The Wizard of Oz, popular for more than a century. Dickens? Popular for one-hundred and seventy years. 2. "some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century"? Oh come on. Henry James has some of the more difficult prose. Herman Melville, ok. Thomas Hardy? I'll give you that. But Dickens? Some attuning to his style is needed, but the guy was not a "difficult" writer (either in terms of style or of theme) in any normal sense of the term. And Oprah has, to her credit, showcased a couple of genuinely knotty books in her time.

- ironyroad

December 14, 2010 at 12:03pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Oh and fwiw I is a Certified Literature Professor, to take mgorvine's label above. And I totally agree with Noga and rhubarbs and Iowa and others here.

- ironyroad

December 14, 2010 at 12:07pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

And also -- don't mean to hog the thread -- Sophia for the comment of the week, above at 12:59 am EDT!

- ironyroad

December 14, 2010 at 12:15pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Also, what the heck is wrong with reading Dickens with a glass of hot chocolate? My doctor tells me I can't have hot chocolate any more, or at any rate any hot chocolate worth drinking is off limits, but a comfortable chair and a warm cuppa is exactly how I've always preferred to spend time with a book, including when I was an undergraduate reading the classics in Kelly-approved conditions of enlightened mentorship. Dickens himself saw the self-improving bourgeoise housewife with a little free time and a cup of hot chocolate as an important part of his audience; the Oprah reader is in part whom Dickens was writing for. Such women, the cocoa-sipping readers of his day, formed the backbone of the reform movements Dickens hoped to influence, and indeed in his personal life, these are the women whose intimate company Dickens sought.

- rhubarbs

December 14, 2010 at 12:33pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I can't resist one more dig: I'm a scientist turned engineer. Not your typical reader of the "canon." But guess what books are between the bookends on my mantle: that's right - the complete Dickens, in an edition published circa 1900. I didn't put them there because of ANYTHING I did in school or my professional life - never took an English Lit course in my life - I put them there because they much beloved in our household, and we continue to read them.

- IowaBeauty

December 14, 2010 at 12:50pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I am not horrified that Oprah is recommending Dickens to her audience. It may well be that, aside from Oprah's followers, nobody else is reading Dickens at all, except perhaps a few diligent high school students. Some of the Oprah followers may be baffled by Dickens, but I am sure quite a few will find these books accessible and worthy reading. Neil

- purcellneil

December 14, 2010 at 1:35pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'm a little surprised to see jdyer here as one of the few defenders of Dickens as sacrosanct classic art, since C.D. was a fairly unambiguous antisemite. Everyone knows about Fagin--which is probably why Oprah avoided Oliver Twist--but fewer know about the Smallweeds in Bleak House. You couldn't find a nastier, more stereotypical caricature of usurious Jews who love nothing, absolutely nothing but money. Grandmother Smallweed, who suffers from what today we would call Alzheimer's, is so money-mad that whenever anyone mentions a number in her hearing she translates it into coin and goes off on a crazy riff adding up her fantasy funds until her husband silences her by throwing a pillow at her. Of course Dickens never actually states that the Smallweeds are Jewish, but it is hardly a mystery. The old man, who is essentially a loan shark, is described several times as wearing a black "skull-cap." And we haven't even gotten to Ebeneezer Scrooge...

- AaronW

December 14, 2010 at 1:43pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Did not mean to insult ironyroad or any other literature profs out there (there but for the grace of God might have gone I)... Seriously, of course people who have spent their lives studying literature have insights worth sharing. The point is not to bar the gates to the unwashed masses!

- mgorvine

December 14, 2010 at 1:53pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Not that I would add anything to this discussion but to say that Ms. Kelly does protest too much about Oprah's influence on her readers but I think there is something to be said for getting folks excited about reading classics, that for fuzzy high school memories, were always thought of as difficult. But Dickens is not difficult. He wrote for the general public. I've a 1905 reprint of Dickens' 'A Children's History of England' on my bookshelf. It is not difficult reading. Perhaps Ms. Kelly thinks that the 19th Century language, idioms and slang that Dickens used will prove to be a linguistic barrier to Oprah's readers. Or perhaps it will be a way for those readers to expand their vocabulary and have an appreciation for classic works. If we're talking challenges for the general Oprah reader, I'd suggest Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' or Nabakov's 'Ada or Ardor' or even Umberto Eco's more pedestrian novel 'Foucault's Pendulum' for deep thinking symbolism, literary and linguistic challenges for "everyday" reading. I'm not a fan of Oprah because of her schmaltzy take on reading and the vast number of vapid picks she has chosen over the years but if she gets even 10% of her readers to embrace classics that at least will keep the printing presses rolling for a few more years. And that's a good thing.

- singlspeed

December 14, 2010 at 2:05pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Guys, you're overreacting. Hillary nowhere says or implies that ordinary people shouldn't read Dickens on their own. She says, in fact, that everyone should read these books. She doesn't say that Oprah should not have a book club or recommend classics. Her concern, which is legitimate, is that Oprah's particular way of approaching these books lacks depth, and that her followers will approach them in a similar way. Literature, Hillary says, isn't to be mined for data about how to live your best life. This is true. It's also a missed opportunity. Oprah has the power to get people to read the books, but is she using that power well? Hillary says no, because Oprah, while she inspries an aspiration to read the books, fails to inspire an aspiration to gain serious insight from them, which is the point. I don't know if Oprah really is such a bad leader, because I don't know anything about Oprah's book club. I find her very difficult to take, and so I have not seen her hold forth for more than a minute on any topic whatsoever. But, suppose for the sake of argument that it's true -- that Oprah is worse than no guide, but a bad guide. That's a perfectly legitimate point to make, and there's not a hint of classism or elitism or any other similar nonsense inherent in making it. Just as I'm not one to loudly celebrate reading if what you're reading is crap, I'm not one to loudly celebtrate reading classics if you're mainly checking off a homework assignment and/or engaging on a "one-dimensional," arguably Oprah-esque level. I will disagree with one point. Hillary points to the SparkNotes recommendation as self-evidently embarrassing. I disagree. There's nothing very wrong with SparkNotes or Cliffs Notes or similar "X Book for Idiots" publications. Indeed, if Oprah ran her book club at the Cliffs Notes level -- which is about what you get in high school -- that wouldn't be so bad. It's possible that you might misunderstand the plot or not understand certain words or concepts or historical context and so on, which these notes help with, and the analyses sections generally offer a good and wide-ranging introduction to the themes of the work and the way in which the author explores them. No, you're not delving in as deeply as you can go, but nothing is stopping you from going deeper, and the Cliffs Notes level of understanding serves as a decent foundation for doing so.

- JakeH

December 14, 2010 at 2:08pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

AaronW “I'm a little surprised to see jdyer here as one of the few defenders of Dickens as sacrosanct classic art, since C.D. was a fairly unambiguous antisemite.” Oliver Twist is an antisemitic book but Dickens was not an “unambiguous antisemite.” I also don’t see Smallweeds as a Jewish character, though, Mr Riah in “Our Mutual Friend” is Jewish. He is portrayed positively, though since Dickens knew very little about Jews, (hence the deficiencies of the supposedly “Jewish” Fagin. Fagin isn’t even a Jewish name. I think it is Irish but I’ll defer to Ironyroad on this) the portrayal is quite weak. However, there is another very minor character in Our Mutual… who is a Jewish entrepreneur who employs many British non Jewish workers and who is the target of antisemitic gossip which the narrator makes clear isn’t true. (This aside comment matches some of Dickens’ own comments on Jews in his letters.) As for Fagin when Jewish readers complained to him about the portrayal of the character He tried in subsequent editions to remove the word Jew from the phrase “Jew Fagin” but he couldn’t remove all of them and in any case it wouldn’t have helped mitigate the stereotypical nature of the portrait. Dickens was no antisemite which is more troubling since even someone who is not antisemitic can write a bigoted book. In a racist antisemitic world one has to, as George Eliot, did become self conscious about the racism inherent in society before one can portray Jews or other ethnic minorities positively.

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 2:17pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Jake, criticizing Oprah for being shallow is like criticizing the sun for being bright.

- AaronW

December 14, 2010 at 2:30pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ironyroad: “"some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century"? Oh come on. Henry James has some of the more difficult prose. Herman Melville, ok. Thomas Hardy?...” You forgot to mention Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus.” I have met people who told me that they found even the prose of Kurt Vonnegut difficult. I consider the mass reading at best an empty spectacle and at worst a kind of mass coercion. (Do we want “teacherly societies?”) Reading novels is one of the most private things one can do. I know that in Dickens’ time people read his and other popular novels aloud. However this was done mostly among family members. Dickens did read from his novels aloud to excited and appreciative audiences but many of them had already read the novels by themselves. Besides the 19c was the golden age of print and novel reading was a popular forms of entertainment just as movies were in the first half of the 20th C. Today the novel has to compete with many different screens from TV’s to computers as Philip Roth recently said. The novel is not a means of mass entertainment anymore and the queen of the small screen isn’t going to change that. I wonder how many people will go for the movie version of Dickens’ novel instead of reading the book?

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 2:31pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jdyer, okay I'll accept that the work can be antisemitic without the author being so. And one way to read Dickens is as a master of stereotypes. He populates his novels with characters many of which represent whole classes of people in Victorian London, exhibiting "typical" occupations, moral outlooks, patterns of speech, etc. However, I still think that though their creator certainly left himself plausible deniability, the Smallweeds are probably Jewish. Maybe someone can educate us: were "skull-caps" worn in mid-nineteenth century England by people other than Jews?

- AaronW

December 14, 2010 at 2:43pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"Maybe someone can educate us: were "skull-caps" worn in mid-nineteenth century England by people other than Jews?" You mean other than the Pope? In England and probably elsewhere because of the cold people wore hats to bad some oth this were called skull caps. A skull cap does not a Jew made. It's not uncomment for readers to say that some character is Jewish even thought the author did not intend it. Case in point, Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Even the wikipedia article says that he is "Jewish." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 2:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

JD, the name Fagin is definitely close to a couple of Irish-sounding names such as Phelan or O'Hagan, but I'm not sure what that means. Certainly Alec Guinness played Fagin in the David Lean movie (1950?) as a grotesque caricature of the "East End Jew." Jake, you write "Literature, Hillary says, isn't to be mined for data about how to live your best life. This is true." I'm not sure it's true. Aesthetics and moral pedagogy have not always been as far apart as in the modern era. For as long as organized narrative has existed, there has always been a strong element of moral teaching in the myth, the fable, the allegory, the didactic tale, and so on. And novels are especially set up to be a kind of "ethical laboratory" in which readers are brought to feel the pressures of choice and consequence. The idea that all readers just sit back and admire the form and the style is, I think, a little off-target.

- ironyroad

December 14, 2010 at 3:34pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad JD, "JD, the name Fagin is definitely close to a couple of Irish-sounding names such as Phelan or O'Hagan, but I'm not sure what that means. Certainly Alec Guinness played Fagin in the David Lean movie (1950?) as a grotesque caricature of the "East End Jew."" I was just wondering about the name. Here is what I found online, which may or may not be accurate: "Last name: Fagan" "This interesting surname is of Irish origin, but the source is uncertain. The Gaelic form is "O' Faodhagain", but a personal name Faodghagan is not known, and it may be a Gaelicized version of a surname of Norman origin" Read more: http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Fagan#ixzz187bJlPwz

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 3:54pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"The old man, who is essentially a loan shark, is described several times as wearing a black "skull-cap." " That doesn't prove. At least in the BBC period dramas, some older wealthy characters wear skullcap at home, with four corners, if I recall. Anyway, the pope and his entourage often are seen wearing skullcaps. Considering what Oliver's life was like before he fell in with Fagin's crowd, Fagin can be seen as the first adult who actually took him in and can him food and shelter and some semblance of what it was like to have others care for you. People for some reason focus on the Jew for loathing while other characters are in far bigger league when it comes to crime and brutality. Somehow the others are just random villains but the Jew, ah, there is the Jew who can't help being a Jew.

- noga1

December 14, 2010 at 3:55pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Irony, just because a novel isn't a self-improvement book doesn't mean that it's just an exercise in style. Hopefully, it will help bring you to a fuller understanding of reality. That certainly has a moral dimension, and the book may have a more specific moral viewpoint, but that's not insipid self-improvement, which is what I was referring to with the "live your best life" stuff.

- JakeH

December 14, 2010 at 3:59pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Speaking as one who teaches literature, I agree with Kelly that Oprah's ignorance about the books she is "recommending" is leading her to set up a great many readers for frustration when they realize it's not the frothy, feel-good, self-improving read they expected. But on the other hand, using trendiness to bring people to literature can't be all bad. I agree with JakeH about SparkNotes vel sim.; if the problem is that Oprah is not a helpful guide, we shouldn't begrudge readers turning to helpful guides. Students cheat themselves when they use such guides to replace reading; adults reading mainly for pleasure and using them to help doesn't really bother me.

- frippo

December 14, 2010 at 4:38pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I've taught in a college English Deparment for the past thirty-five years, and I can tell you that there is indeed a "horribly misguided view" of "literature as a whole" that is being advanced in this country--not by Oprah, but by far too many college professors, who reduce the great works to ridiculous literary theories, theories that distort and misrepresent what is actually on the page, simply to advance some misguided agenda on the part of the theorist. As for Oprah, if she happens not to have yet read Dickens, this is no crime. In fact, it is refreshing to have her acknowldge her own ignorance, rather than to do what so many college professors are doing, via their silly literary theories, as well as their own inflated view of themselves, which is lent validation and authority by the simple fact that they have been hired by a college, they are teaching in a classroom. Oprah is on television. She is not in a classroom. She is not a teacher or a critic or a particularly perceptive reader. She has not declared herself a literary expert, and no one has presented her as such. Consequently, the damage she may do, I would argue, is minimal when compared to the damage done on a daily basis, over the course of many years, by far too many college professors, who fixate on bad literary theories, instead of what is actually on the page. Finally, if millions are being directed (via Oprah) toward serious literature, how is this not a good thing, both for those readers who may discover something within the pages of a serious novel, and for the publishers of serious novels (not to mention, the living authors to whose work she directs her large audience)?

- BenNevis

December 14, 2010 at 5:59pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

The spectacle of supposed intellectuals having fits about Oprah Book Club always gets me giggling.

- subterran

December 14, 2010 at 6:20pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'd probably have something of the same reaction if I actually forced myself to watch Oprah, but still, this response is way too harsh. Some measure of self-discovery or increased self-awareness has always been a large part of the benefit of reading -- it's not all about learning how words work. And if Oprah's viewers challenge themselves to get acquainted with Dickens's language, so much the better, even if they're not entirely successful.

- sburke

December 14, 2010 at 6:29pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Some people here may be interested in this: "The Value of Higher Education Made Literal" By STANLEY FISH http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-value-of-higher-education-made-literal/?hp

- jdyer

December 14, 2010 at 7:12pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenNevis, give it a rest! There is no equation whereby Hillary Kelly's rather weird and disdainful attitude to Oprah and her Book Club choice needs to be balanced out by a ludicrous attack on what would appear to be your own colleagues. One can endorse the choice of Dickens' novels by Oprah and indeed share the criticism expressed by most people on this thread while at the same time recognizing that the study of literature at the college or university level can legitimately involve more complex issues of language, history, and indeed theoretical/philosophical considerations too. It's not a zero-sum game. I teach in a very mixed English department with colleagues in various fields with various intellectual approaches, but I don't believe that anyone "distorts or misrepresents what is actually on the page, simply to advance some misguided agenda on the part of the theorist." This is silly in fact -- it's just 1990s culture war polemic and has been thankfully put to rest.

- ironyroad

December 14, 2010 at 9:03pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad-- Yes, of course I agree that the study of literature at the college or university level can (and should) involve, as you put it, more complex issues than someone like Oprah might address on TV. And if no lit theorist at your college distorts or misrepresents what's on the page, then I'm very happy to hear it. But believe me, brother, you have no idea of the bullshit I have witnessed in lectures, or have had reported to me by students. One brief anecdote: after a class I had a student asked to see me afterwards. He was one of the best students in the class. He already had an undergrad degree, and was well on his way toward a second such degree, and he told me he had never encountered anything like what he had just experienced in my class. I thought perhaps he had disagreed with something I'd said or found it too analytic, but no, he said, he loved the class. It took several minutes to figure out what he was saying. It was this: in all the English classes he had taken in the pursuit of two separate BA degrees, this student had never once encountered the practice, or even the term, close reading. Indeed, he asked me to repeat the term, so that he could write it down. He asked me to recommend a literary critic who practiced close reading. In other words, in all of his many classes at two different colleges, not one teacher had ever tied analysis directly to the text.

- BenNevis

December 15, 2010 at 6:21am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

" It was this: in all the English classes he had taken in the pursuit of two separate BA degrees, this student had never once encountered the practice, or even the term, close reading. Indeed, he asked me to repeat the term, so that he could write it down. He asked me to recommend a literary critic who practiced close reading." I could well believe that. Without going into detail I had similar experiences with students. Sadly this is true now in non-literature departments also. It's usually the very best students who complain about the mis-education they were and are receiving.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 10:38am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Well, not having taken any courses on English, French or Persian literature, only three basic courses on sciences and two on history, after reading this article, I looked at my bookshelf and realised that the last thirty-five years of reading and collecting books have been a waste. Total waste. Evidently, without the necessary guidance of the appropriate professors in proper academic settings, buying and reading the thousand or so books outside my field of studies was a mistake. And, well, doubly pointless, as I did most of that reading sipping hot chocolate or cappuccino ... Oh, and why stop there? All the classical movies - and I am not a movie expert!!! - or adaptations of the classics - why, I probably misunderstood those as well. Poor deluded, silly Umberto Eco. When he wrote, "Why we read the classics", he should have added, "Don't try at home without adult/professorial supervision." Bloom's "The Western Canon" should have come with a warning on the cover, a preface and a coda, "Only for those studying the Western Canon at a bona fide university, and not for the rest of you yahoos who are not taking one of my courses." Shakespeare? Fakespeare, I say. For one thing, without Bloom telling me Hamlet is a great play and Falstaff is funny and Lady Macbeth is a gorgon, I of course could never have guessed. Besides, that complex, convoluted language ... all that fie-ing and sighing and asiding and exeunting ... you know that Montana high school that translated Romeo and Juliet into Modern English prose - they had it right. "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." is really impossible to understand - it requires true guidance to turn it into, "Be quiet, it's morning, and I think I'm in love with Juliet." and thus make it comprehensible to us non-English lit majors. Now ... I thought of donating my books to the local library - but aren't libraries mostly used by, gasp, common folk who, shudder, are not guided in their reading by, blush, certified professors? What to do but despair?

- icarusr

December 15, 2010 at 10:44am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenN -- yes I agree that is particularly shocking, and the ironic thing is that the New Critics, who essentially locked down close reading as the basic approach to formal literary study (especially for poetry), were themselves regarded in the early days with some suspicion as "theorists." I must say, though, that I did my doctorate not so long ago (despite my appearance of advanced age) at a major university and close reading was a perfectly well-known and universally (but not exclusively) embraced tool, and was certainly seen as indispensible for nurturing undergrads' skill and confidence in reading and exploring texts. So I'm somewhat surprised.

- ironyroad

December 15, 2010 at 3:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

There is close reading and then there is close reading. Deconstructionist like to do what they call "close readings" but their method and aim is very different from that of Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt et al. The New Critics were looking for ambiguity and irony, the deconstructionists like Derrida, Samuel Weber, Gache, Culler, etc. in its early stages at least used closed reading as an entry into their aim of unraveling the text. (I don’t agree with their theoretic but at least they made an effort to read and understand texts.) Later decons., like Spivak and Judith Butler have introduced and often reduced the texts to its political underpinnings (read—message). They have also turned literary criticism into a political weapon and in the process degraded the study of literature.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 5:17pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"I must say, though, that I did my doctorate..." It's not about you, Irony.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 5:18pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad was only explaining that he himself, as someone who did his doctorate not so long ago, or recently enough, so as to qualify as a witness (of sorts) to an experience very different from what BenN recounted. What did you think he meant that called for such asperity?

- noga1

December 15, 2010 at 5:36pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'm no fan of the whole Cult of Oprah phenomenon, but seriously, the woman's exposed her followers to soooooo much crap over the years; why complain when she uses her powers for Good? Also, pretentious prattling about her (or anyone's) "one-dimensional reading of the text" makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

- santoast

December 15, 2010 at 5:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

JD, I don't disagree, broadly, with your comment on the deconstructionist vs. postcolonial schools of literary study (Spivak being a big but notably unreadable fish in the latter pond). Butler I wouldn't really consider a literary critic/scholar at all. I took a couple of seminars with Sam Weber, and found them to be a very rewarding, if demanding, experience. And indeed, you are right that it's not about me, but Noga also is correct that I was only offering myself as a witness of sorts from a fairly recent (1997-2002) grad school experience.

- ironyroad

December 15, 2010 at 6:39pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jdyer & ironyroad-- Yes, irony, it is shocking that an undergrad could go through two different BA programs at two different schools and never once encounter the practice of close reading. As for the deconstructionists, I agree with jackson: I'm not a fan of their approach (I find it all rather tedious), but, yes, "at least they made an effort to read and understand texts." And, yes, the postcolonialists are worse, in that, as jdyer put it, they have "turned literary criticism into a political weapon and in the process degraded the study of literature." Simply put, though, these theorists trouble me because they don't appear to love the thing they supposedly study: literature. They appear to resent it, or, at best, to be indifferent to it. The great works appear to have given them nothing at all (other than ammunition in a war they are ceaselessly waging). And this I find rather sad, especially as an approach being offered to students.

- BenNevis

December 15, 2010 at 7:20pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"What did you think he meant that called for such asperity?" What asperity? Irony can answer for himself.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 7:21pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenNevis “Simply put, though, these theorists trouble me because they don't appear to love the thing they supposedly study: literature….” Yes, and they also embarrassed by it since many don’t think that it commands much respect. What they don’t appreciate is that by showering contempt upon it they are merely confirming what people outside of literature think: that literature is not serious. I doubt that many professors today see their subject as an BenNevis “Simply put, though, these theorists trouble me because they don't appear to love the thing they supposedly study: literature….” Yes, and they also embarrassed by it since many don’t think that it commands much respect. What they don’t appreciate is that by showering contempt upon it they are merely confirming what people outside of literature think: that literature is not serious. I doubt that many professors of literature would see their subject today as “equipment for living,” as did Kenneth Burke.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 7:33pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Is everybody posting comments and not reading others? [Something like poems in a poetry magazine?) I will join the fray (as an escaped former English major) by posting some quotes by Nabakov. "Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood." "All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer...The three facets of the great writer — magic, story, lesson — are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought...Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."

- skahn

December 15, 2010 at 7:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jackson-- Yes, we appear to agree completely. For me, literature is a necessity--"equipment for living," yes, but also the very thing itself: living. In that we are often more fully alive when we are reading (or writing). And can also find ourselves more fully inhabiting the world beyond the book, once we raise our eyes from the page.

- BenNevis

December 15, 2010 at 7:48pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I was at a fairly large weekend gathering a few months ago, which included along with lots of nonentities like me some big names in the academic lit-crit world, probably also a few who would be the betes-noires of those who imagine, rightly or wrongly, that it's all gone to hell in a handbasket. One thing was very obvious there -- the issue of how to balance the love of, or belief in the values of, literature with the academic-analytical task was in the forefront of everyone's mind and came up in discussion again and again. Nobody dismissed it as worthless or secondary. Nobody showered contempt on anything. Everyone recognized what's at stake in the classroom. I would just say, however, that it's impossible to detach the literary text from other aspects of life and history. An example close to my own heart: anyone who believes that you can read, let alone understand, William Butler Yeats's poetry without at least some grasp of the political and cultural map of Irish nationalism is depriving themselves of one aspect of Yeats's poetic achievement (or at least they are giving themselves a narrower path to walk than they need to). Likewise, Kafka and the strange position of Jews in Prague, Bohemia, and the wider Austro-Hungarian empire. Likewise Walt Whitman and the sense of a wounded nation in the surge of the Civil War. Likewise Milton and that other civil war. And likewise Salman Rushdie and post-imperial India and Pakistan in Midnight's Children, Seamas Heaney and the Northern Ireland conflict, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the political experiments of Brook Farm and the Transcendentalists. Close reading is crucial, as is a commitment to the value of a literary text. But there are other important things too. One doesn't solve the problem of one kind of agenda by imposing another kind.

- ironyroad

December 15, 2010 at 9:08pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

| ironyroad "I took a couple of seminars with Sam Weber, and found them to be a very rewarding, if demanding, experience." I saw him in action, he is a very smart reader. Too bad he got sucked into the Derridean cult. "And indeed, you are right that it's not about me, but Noga also is correct that I was only offering myself as a witness of sorts from a fairly recent (1997-2002) grad school experience." Again, what were you a witness of? All you can testify too is one person's experience. other posters too had their experienceaand so did I. Our collective experience don't add up to much. I prefer data. Take a look at the PMLA and other journals and you will se prevalence of ideological crtiticism of one sort or another. You are aware, I assume, of the split in the MLA when a group of scholars started their own their association, Association of Literary Scolars and Critics. The artilces published in their magazine "Literary Imagination" are more demanding (in a good way) but also centered on literary texts? http://www.bu.edu/literary/ Here is a link to their journal: http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 10:04pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I don't disagree with much of what you said above, Irony. I don't have time now but will respond later.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 10:07pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Right. But my experience wasn't that long ago, and I had the feeling there was a touch of 1990s culture wars mythology in our conversation here. I do think there was a lot of theory-groupie hypnosis around but nobody (and this is my point) that I knew among grad students or faculty would have dismissed the value of close reading. It was one of the most important things that one could teach students.

- ironyroad

December 15, 2010 at 10:30pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

From an article by Martin Amis: "In David Lodge's novel Changing Places, a tweedy little British academic goes to teach at Euphoric State University, on the West Coast, while a big brash American academic goes to teach at a rain-sodden redbrick called Rummidge. The American, Morris Zapp, wearily begins his seminar: "What are you bursting to discuss this morning ?" "Jane Austen," mumbled the boy with the beard.... "Oh yeah. What was the topic ?" "I've done it on Jane Austen's moral awareness" "That doesn't sound like my style." "I couldn't understand the title you gave me, Professor Zapp." "Eros and Agape in the later novels, wasn't it ? What was the problem ? " The student hung his head. The immediate joke here is the contrast in critical styles: the British still locked in the ethical battlefields patrolled by F.R. Leavis, the Americans soaring off into the architectonics of myth and structure. But Lodge's deeper point is that Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors - all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself. "

- noga1

December 15, 2010 at 10:54pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “Right. But my experience wasn't that long ago, and I had the feeling there was a touch of 1990s culture wars mythology in our conversation here. I do think there was a lot of theory-groupie hypnosis around but nobody (and this is my point) that I knew among grad students or faculty would have dismissed the value of close reading. It was one of the most important things that one could teach students.” OK, but personal experience (what other kind is there) is still singular. People say a lot of things but I am more interested in what they do in the classroom and what they publish. Also close reading has taken on, like so many terms, different meanings. I would be interest to know what each participant thought the term meant.

- jdyer

December 15, 2010 at 11:14pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Boy, things must be going really well in the world today for Oprah's book club to be attacked in this august publication as though it mattered even the slightest bit of a damn. Of course we know only the truly cultured and expensively educated should be allowed to read multisyllabic books like A Tale of Two Cities. The little people are not like us and should not pretend to be.

- mlottman

December 15, 2010 at 11:40pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “One thing was very obvious there -- the issue of how to balance the love of, or belief in the values of, literature with the academic-analytical task was in the forefront of everyone's mind and came up in discussion again and again. Nobody dismissed it as worthless or secondary. Nobody showered contempt on anything. Everyone recognized what's at stake in the classroom.” “Everyone, nobody,” Must have been a pretty docile bunch, Irony. “I would just say, however, that it's impossible to detach the literary text from other aspects of life and history. An example close to my own heart: anyone who believes that you can read, let alone understand, William Butler Yeats's poetry without at least some grasp of the political and cultural map of Irish nationalism is depriving themselves of one aspect of Yeats's poetic achievement (or at least they are giving themselves a narrower path to walk than they need to).” Well, I agree with this. In good reading of a text, you employ dialectical back and forth between text and its socio-historical period. At different stages of one’s reading one targets different aspects of the text. “Likewise, Kafka and the strange position of Jews in Prague, Bohemia, and the wider Austro-Hungarian empire. Likewise Walt Whitman and the sense of a wounded nation in the surge of the Civil War. Likewise Milton and that other civil war. And likewise Salman Rushdie and post-imperial India and Pakistan in Midnight's Children, Seamas Heaney and the Northern Ireland conflict, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the political experiments of Brook Farm and the Transcendentalists.” Of course, but again you can’t say everything all at once, hence you select aspects of the book to teach in one course and later on as the students take more advanced courses you go more into detail. But in freshman courses you want to get students to read the entire book. When you teach short stories that’s not much of a problem, but with say Don Quixote or War and Peace it’s a huge problem getting students to finish the whole novel. Only after they have read the whole novel does it make sense to introduce socio historical material. Otherwise one isn’t teaching but trying to indoctrinate students. Students even freshman are not naïve, they know when one is trying to teach and when a professor is trying to lay down the law of some novel or poem. The political experiments of Brook Farm and the Transcendentalists are interesting when reading “The Blithedale Romance” but first the reader has to come to appreciate the novel itself before he tackles the background. There are no formulas for reading or teaching methinks. Teaching is an art as well as a discipline.

- jdyer

December 16, 2010 at 12:05am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

mlottman, you sound like you just came from a Tea Party meeting. Did you spike your tea with some drambuie, perhaps a little more than some?

- jdyer

December 16, 2010 at 12:08am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Lord, no, JD. Not a docile meeting at all. Since when does "nobody expressed contempt" equal "docile"? I agree that there is a question of pacing and the tactical aspects of teaching, and when to introduce the historical or political or biographical context. However, it's not an exact science and I think there's a big difference between telling students how to think about something before they really start reading it and sketching out a couple of important determining elements that might help them just see more clearly what it is they are dealing with. BTW there is indeed the ASLC as a counter-force to MLA (the American Literature Association is one also), which is fine, although MLA still has the job market. But the most surprising things pop up now and then, e.g. an excellent essay on Melville's Moby Dick in the current issue of PMLA that's both traditional (about editing) and novel (about meaning of edits that nobody seems to have noticed) -- whoda thunk it? Moby Dick. At the end of the day it's my personal belief that all this theory and ideological criticism etc over the last 30 years or so, no matter what one might think of it and no matter how one might disagree with it intensely and even reject it wholesale as bs, has actually done a lot of good. It has made us more alert, less self-satisfied, more willing to think from new angles, less snooty about minor writers and popular subgenres, more willing to think about language and its philosophical dimensions, less tweedy, more conscious of the ambiguities of the humanities, less presumptous about our particular cultural values, more understanding of difficulty, and less able to sink back with a sigh of relief into "the tradition."

- ironyroad

December 16, 2010 at 2:43am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"However, it's not an exact science " I suppose this is why this discussion has gotten to the point it has, because when we are not dealing with simply verifiable facts but rather with ideas and methodologies, we tend to defend our choices all the more vehemently. It's a source of wonder to me how rigid literature critics and academics can be when they insist that their preferred view of things is the only correct view. To me it suggests a sense of insecurity and frankly an obstacle to any better understanding of literature. I assume people want to be in the humanities exactly because they offer the opportunity for flexible thinking and creative interpretation. But I guess sometimes people want to be in humanities so that they can just tell others how to read something the right way. They delude themselves that, like Mr. Casaubon, they can have the "key to all mythologies".

- noga1

December 16, 2010 at 6:02am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Speaking of books: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/12/society-of-book-smellers.html Perhaps smelling a book is a reasonable alternative to reading it.

- noga1

December 16, 2010 at 7:15am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Noga, if you get a chance, check out Charles W. Chesnutt's short story "Baxter's Procrustes." It's a satirical tale of one of those reasonable alternatives.

- ironyroad

December 16, 2010 at 12:15pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"In our first disgust at Baxter's duplicity, most of us cut our copies of the Procrustes, some of us mailed them to Baxter with cutting notes, and others threw them into the fire. " As I reached this sentence towards the uplifting conclusion of the story I was assailed by a nagging question: does a book empty of words still deserve the veneration we give books so that burning it would constitute the usual outrage to our civilized sensibilities? That by its very shape of a book it deserves an inalienable right to exist?

- noga1

December 16, 2010 at 2:54pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Good question. It's a nagging story, as lots of Chesnutt's are. Among other things, Baxter's little joke has driven these men, who purport to value the book above all else, to throw their copies out or burn them. It was close to the last short story that Chesnutt wrote, I believe. He tried another novel a few years later but then gave up his literary career.

- ironyroad

December 16, 2010 at 3:19pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"Baxter's little joke has driven these men, who purport to value the book above all else, to throw their copies out or burn them." They may have lost their faith in books but in the value of books. For some reason I keep thinking about the Purloined Letter, when the value of the letter to the reader keeps climbing up even when its contents radically change.

- noga1

December 16, 2010 at 3:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Isn't this a 'teachable moment'? I'm not sure I wanted to learn what it has so far taught. Shouldn't Hillary want to teach Jill, the book club producer, and Oprah's readers that, granted with some labor, Dickens can be read by everybody, and enjoyed - not "at one level or another" but for one reason or another? Really, for lots of reasons in any combination or permutation? Reading at different "levels" sounds so... kind of... medieval. (I think of all the reasons I carried Dickens, or else those 'slim volumes of verse,' around Washington Square in 1960; so did you. They worked, mostly. Of course, we never did THAT in graduate school. You read for one reason - uh, at one level - on a Saturday morning in the Village when the girls pretty much wore just Fred Braun sandals, knowing exactly what they were doing - pig that I was/am to even notice. Your level in graduate school is high enough to say it in French or German, with elbow patches, or whatever is worn now; your reason was somehow designed to get a recommendation good enough to get you a job so you could assure others you lived the Life of the Mind. You all remember. What! You didn't go to graduate school?) Hillary might offer to lead some informal, emotionally genuine and didactically authentic, discussions right on Oprah's website, where folks could email in their questions and concerns. Then Hillary could also make her fears known. Seems good for everybody. I'd even include 'rhubarbs', who makes excellent points. Jill could have her champion. A cup of hot chocolate - an ale might be better - and a bit of honesty, and now everybody's championing one thing or another. Sounds like the Mermaid Tavern - no better place to be. Shouldn't Jill and Oprah want to do more than "lead a discussion"? Hillary's fear is not so farfetched, no?, that 'leading a discussion' about Dickens needs more than "this I like, this likes me not." But you can say the same about leading a discussion about your Aunt Matilda under certain circumstances - like, figuring out why she left more to one nephew than another. But, Jill - if you read this - isn't this a chance for a reflective reading that does more than follow the plot? Doesn't Oprah want her readers to be citizens of the Culture, not merely their country or even the world? What an opportunity. Dickens did tell a great story, especially at a time when folks weren't ashamed to cry while reading. So, isn't that part of the mediated solution?

- davidblock

December 16, 2010 at 3:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

They may have lost their faith in books but NOT in the value of books.

- noga1

December 16, 2010 at 3:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Sophia has a good point, but at least we won't be involved in endless litigation, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce style. The Supreme Court of today will have our cases ended in summary proceedings, unless we're George Bush worried about the injury of having the votes counted.

- Walpole

December 16, 2010 at 7:43pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jdyer & ironyroad-- irony: You write: "I would just say, however, that it's impossible to detach the literary text from other aspects of life and history. . . .anyone who believes that you can read, let alone understand, William Butler Yeats's poetry without at least some grasp of the political and cultural map of Irish nationalism is depriving themselves of one aspect of Yeats's poetic achievement (or at least they are giving themselves a narrower path to walk than they need to). . . . Close reading is crucial, as is a commitment to the value of a literary text. But there are other important things too. One doesn't solve the problem of one kind of agenda by imposing another kind." I think it's rather obvious (or should be obvious) that all three of us agree on this. (I agree with jackson's points on the matter, as posted above at 12:05am, 12/16.) My anecdote on close reading was in no way meant to impose, as you put it, irony, another "kind of agenda," or to suggest that CR was the only way to discuss a text, but, rather, to suggest that its absence from the classroom in two different colleges was shocking. Which is the word you yourself used to describe the situation. Shocking. irony also writes: "At the end of the day it's my personal belief that all this theory and ideological criticism etc over the last 30 years or so, no matter what one might think of it and no matter how one might disagree with it intensely and even reject it wholesale as bs, has actually done a lot of good." Sorry, irony, this is where we disagree. Bullshit isn't fertilizer. It's toxic, the way that lies and self-delusion are toxic. And the theories of the postcolonialists (and others of their ilk) are bullshit. The harm these theories have done to student after student after student in countless lit courses over the past couple of decades is immeasurable, immeasurably sad. And the fact that so many of these lit theorists don't love the thing they teach--don't love literature, have taken no pleasure or solace or illumination from it, have taken nothing at all (other than ammunition in a war they are ceaselessly waging)--this, too, is quite sad.

- BenNevis

December 16, 2010 at 8:59pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

This is a nasty, mean-spirited, elitist article. I'm glad Oprah is recommending the two Dickens' novels, and I understand that her choices and cheer-leading don't mesh with Ms. Kelly's more traditional academic approach. I trust Oprah knows her audience. I'm sorry Ms. Kelly doesn't know hers that well.

- rjosborne

December 16, 2010 at 9:09pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ok, BenN, so let's stipulate that a lack of close reading skills and the awareness of same should be regulation equipment for students in literature majors (not just English). I did indeed use the word shocking and if you and JD see it that way too we can just move on. I did also offer some reasons for why I thought the theory "revolution" had brought some good things ashore, but you didn't address them. I assume you don't buy them, anyway. However, two questions occur to me: one is, do you have an example of a particular postcolonial text or critical judgment that bugs you more than others? You have used a lot of abstract labels but an example would make clear exactly what you mean. The second is, do you think you are a good objective judge of what "love" is vis-a-vis literature for everyone, not just yourself, or is it possible that you have a somewhat subjective vision of that feeling?

- ironyroad

December 17, 2010 at 12:10pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad-- Yes, I think the three of us (you, me, jdyer) agree, regarding close reading and a few other things (such as the value of the broader historical context). And, yes, I agree that we can move on. As for your point that these ridiculous theories have "actually done a lot of good," you seem to be suggesting that they have made "us" more alert. If by us, you mean lit profs, well, perhaps there are some teachers out there who needed to be exposed to bullshit in order to reestablish their bond with literature. But, frankly, I don't really care about these teachers and their lapses into indifference or their need for a good kick in the ass. I care about students. I care about what students are taught. And I find it inexcusable, on any level, that such crap--irrational, delusional, toxic crap--has been pushed in countless students' faces, decade after decade, without any regard for the great gift that could have been offered them, the great, vulgar, beautiful, inspiriting gift of literature. As for whether or not a particular lit teacher loves a text, it's rather obvious when said teacher attacks said text as merely a symptom of some larger historical process. This is not a subjective judgement on my part, irony. These teachers to whom I have been referring don't hide their disdain for the great works. They're actually quite frank about how they detest the culture which supposedly produced said works, and how those works embody, not an individual author's poetry or insight or humanity, but the cancerous world view of the time and place which these teachers find abhorrent. To them, a great work of literature is indistinguishable from a political tract or an ad or a personal letter--each serves as but an illustration of the same monotonous theory they're trying to sell us. As for examples, I once heard a professor give a lecture on Chaucer, and during the entire hour, the focus was not on GC, but on the professor himself and, as he termed it, "MY Chaucer." The point being that as a gay man (devoted to Queer Theory) he had to figure out how to reintepret Chaucer in a way that would allow him to teach it. As if the professor were more important than the author who has survived for hundreds and hundreds of years. As if the world might have even the vaguest idea of who this professor is hundreds of years from now. Another instance: a professor who circulated a chapter from her book on Shakespeare, the title of which (the title of the chapter): "Read My Labia, U.S. Out of Saudi Arabia." The point here, again and again, is that the text is of little consequence. The point is that the lit theorist's point is the ONLY point, regardless of the text, regardless of the facts, regardless of the evidence. The point is that countless students have been taught these ridiculous theories, without any concern for the text, without any concern for literature itself.

- BenNevis

December 17, 2010 at 2:01pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

We were talking about love and literature at some point, so I hope it's not totally inappropriate if I hijack this thread very briefly. I'm saddened today by news of the death of Professor Barbara Packer, my former dissertation advisor at UCLA, who passed away yesterday after a year-long struggle with cancer. A distinguished scholar of Emerson and Transcendentalism, an inspiring teacher, a generous and witty mentor, and a woman of the highest integrity in the profession and outside. I feel a great loss.

- ironyroad

December 17, 2010 at 2:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenN, you are misrepresenting what I said about being made "more alert," and as you are clearly in roughly the same profession as I am, I don't believe you don't realize that. I agree that the "Read my Labia" remark is notably silly (although I'm curious about the argument) and seems to embody a kind of contempt for the topic, but I'd suggest that that's a deliberately extreme example you're advancing, rather like the people on the TNR boards who claimed (in one case, recently) without batting an eyelid that the mainstream Democratic Party position was to have left Saddam Hussein in power while indicting George Bush as a war criminal. The gay Chaucer thing I find potentially more interesting, as reading is a radically subjective act in one sense, but my more extended response would depend on a little more background e.g. what level the students in the audience were at. All in all, I think (a) that it's fair to ask students to think about the fact that English fiction in particular grew to maturity in the age of empire, and (b) that the basic principle of postcolonial criticism, that it makes a difference where you are positioned in relation to the British literary tradition and the cultural power of the great works, is legitimate in my view -- as is the where of Franz Kafka to the German language and the cultural hierachies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

- ironyroad

December 18, 2010 at 2:43pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad-- Sorry if you thought I misrepresented your "more alert" comment, but it did seem to be the essence of what you were saying, in that you do say that the bullshit theories made us "less self-satisfied, more willing to think from new angles," "more conscious," "less presumptous," "more understanding," and "less able to sink back with a sigh of relief into 'the tradition.'" I think the shorthand phrase "more alert" (your term, not mine) does indeed represent the whole (albeit less poetically than you might have liked). As for your point about historical context, I think all three of us (you, me, jdyer) had already agreed that this is relevant. However, to suggest, as you do, that the postcolonialists are merely noting the relevance of said historical context is not quite accurate. While you and I and jackson were saying that HC is simply one way in which one might discuss a text, the postcolonialists are saying that it is the ONLY way in which to discuss a text. They are saying in fact that the text itself is of little consequence, except as an illustration of the larger historical context. Big difference. As for your comments on Saddam and Bush, I'm not quite sure how they figure in this particular discussion, but just for the record, I argued (under a different name) on countless threads on this site--going back to the fall of 2002--AGAINST the Bush adventure in Iraq, AGAINST the doctrine of preemptive war, AGAINST the GOP lie machine. (If I remember correctly, you and I exchanged posts on more than one ocassion, and I believe that on this subject, we largely agreed.) Also, for the record, I do believe that Bush should have been tried as a war criminal. As for the "gay Chaucer thing," as you put it, if it sparks your interest, fine. But my point is that it's beyond ridiculous to presume (as the speaker did) that a largely unaccomplished lit prof's "reinterpretation" of Chaucer is more important than the work of Chaucer itself, work that has survived, century after century after century. And it is this emphasis--on the lit prof's theories, not on the text--that is brought into the classroom. As for the "Read My Labia" remark, yes, it is, as you say, "notably silly." But it is not, as you assume, a "deliberately extreme example." The woman who wrote those words was very influential in the Dept (indeed, devotees of her theories now run the Dept), and the woman herself is now in a position of serious power with respect to the entire university system.

- BenNevis

December 18, 2010 at 4:10pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad: You were very fortunate in your academic advisor.

- noga1

December 18, 2010 at 6:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ironyroad “All in all, I think (a) that it's fair to ask students to think about the fact that English fiction in particular grew to maturity in the age of empire, and (b) that the basic principle of postcolonial criticism, that it makes a difference where you are positioned in relation to the British literary tradition and the cultural power of the great works, is legitimate in my view -- as is the where of Franz Kafka to the German language and the cultural hierachies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” You are choosing both easy as well as fortuitous examples. The notion that literature is dependent for its growth on empire is wishful thinking on the part of post-colonial criticism. English literature grew during the renaissance period and was more indebted to continental and ancient literature than to Empire. Is it by accident that Shakespeare wrote only one play about the New World? Most of his plays are set in historic Engaland and with King in Mythic times. Else they are set in ancient Rome and one in ancient the ancient Greece of the Homeric period: Troilus and Cressida. A play that also indebted to Chaucer. One can also ascribe its growth to internal British factors, especially the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants. Empire was only one of the many factors and not even a major one. Defoe used it thematically and it’s thematically almost absent from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (which refers us to the continental wars) and Fielding. In Jane Austen there a single mention of the slave question in Mansfield Park and it’s been used to advance by way of allegory a whole theory about Austen’s stance on that issue which is itself more fiction than fact. In Spain, for example the Golden Age coincided with the encounter with and colonialization of the Americas. Still, the most important impetus to the growth of that literature was the internal conflict within Catholicism between the “old Christians” and the “new Christians.” It makes more sense to ascribe the origin of literature to internal social dynamics than to the project of colonialization or the creation of Empires. In the late 17th and 18th centuries when the Spanish Empire was at its zenith there was a significant falling off of the quality of literature in Spain. Asaking “the where of Franz Kafka to the German language and the cultural hierachies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Well, Deleuze already asked that question and so did hundreds of other contemporary critics. Not that their answers helps us understand Kafka any better.

- jdyer

December 18, 2010 at 8:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

btw: on the issue of colonialism, where do you place a Nabokov? Is he part of Imperial American literature, or is he a victim of the Bolshevik empire?

- jdyer

December 18, 2010 at 8:26pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I vote for rhubarbs. Oprah makes reading books (classics) popular. This is a good thing. Period. Hillary Kelly apparently finds this outrageous for a bunch of reasons she learned in graduate school. This is fine, but if Ms. Kelly wants to make academic arguments she should publish her opinions in academic journals. The rest of us would just like to read fiction and enjoy it.

- stevedwight

December 18, 2010 at 10:29pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Noga: yes, I was. Thanks. BenN and JD: I'm not denying everything you say at all, but I have a couple of things in response, which I'll have to come back and post tomorrow.

- ironyroad

December 19, 2010 at 1:56am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"rather like the people on the TNR boards who claimed (in one case, recently) without batting an eyelid that the mainstream Democratic Party position was to have left Saddam Hussein in power while indicting George Bush as a war criminal" Irony. Context must be given its due. Otherwise exaggeration and distortion are the order of the day.

- jacko

December 19, 2010 at 6:38am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

stevedwight says: "I vote for rhubarbs. Oprah makes reading books (classics) popular. This is a good thing. Period. Hillary Kelly apparently finds this outrageous for a bunch of reasons she learned in graduate school. This is fine," It is not really fine. Most people who are genuinely interested in literature think differently. The idea is to move people to read books. Anything that can contribute to motivating young people, older people, housewives, seniors, by whatever means, to read should be welcome, encouraged, and applauded. Kelly's beef is completely opaque to me. I just don't get it. As if Edward Said's "contrapuntal" reading, for which you need to study and know history and agree with his view of it, is the only honorable way to read a Victorian novel or any novel. The aim is not to enjoy the story, identify with a character, dislike another, relate to the plot, but to attack the text as if the reader is a scout in enemy territory on a reconnaissance mission to obtain information and detect clues about the "real" intent in the novel. Reading a great novel for the first time is indeed like entering a strange country. And the first thing that captures is the story and how we respond to it. If it triggers further interest in the era or culture, that's great. But for most people who read, it remains a story. Kelly seems to object to this result. Reading for an aesthetic fulfillment alone is not enough. It is a very wrongheaded attitude, never mind its intellectual snobbery. I remember the first time I read "Jane Eyre" or "Great Expectations" or "Oliver Twist" or "Ivanhoe", while just a schoolgirl and discussing it with my friends. I would give anything to be able to recapture the magic of that first virginal reading that was done behind a "veil of ignorance". Who even noticed that Fagin was a Jew, or that Rochester was a de-facto macho villain, or that Jane's changing fortune had come from Madeira??

- noga1

December 19, 2010 at 9:01am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

stevedwight says: "I vote for rhubarbs. Oprah makes reading books (classics) popular. This is a good thing. Period. Hillary Kelly apparently finds this outrageous for a bunch of reasons she learned in graduate school. This is fine," I didn't realize that there was a contest here between the "pro and anti Oprah posters." I couldn't care less about Oprah one way or another, but the idea that Oprah or anyone else made Dickens popular is laughable. Dickens has always been popular. Jane Austen general popularity is another matter. She was always popular with a select group of readers (mostly though not exclusively intellectual males) but her general popularity is a recent phenomenon, the result of the feminist movement in academia. Dickens’ books are on most school reading lists. Oprah and her company (since she is not an individual but an institution) play it safe by choosing books that they know people have read, are reading or wish to read. I suspect that many or the people who didn’t get around to reading Dickens in school (and feel guilty about it) will find this an excuse for reading him. There is a reason why popular culture is popular. It is the culture of the majority, of people who disdain individuality or doing anything on their own. I’d like to see Oprah choosing a 19th century writer like Thackeray or Samuel Butler or even Trollope and see how many people will follow her advice.

- jdyer

December 19, 2010 at 6:02pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

At this point, I'm not sure what I can add. I have some disagreements with JD's approach to this, as there are a sprinkling of red herrings and logical non-sequiturs in there. In particular, I don't think I was claiming that English literature was dependent upon empire, rather that it was the one important historical context in which its influence spread across the world. It's reasonable to me at least to look, for example, at the growth (or non-appearance) of the novel in countries and cultures in terms of their relationship to the European and American originators of that literary form, where appropriate. One could call this 'postcolonial' for shorthand or call it something else. I don't believe there is only one, or only a hostile, variant of postcolonial criticism. The Nabokov question is intriguing, but it's difficult to answer as posed because there isn't really an American imperialism in any agreed sense of the term, and the Bolsheviks at that period were generally 'colonial' in the framework of traditional Russian areas of influence. If one was looking at fiction written in, say, the Baltic states after 1990 then maybe the postcolonial perspective might have some relevance. It's also worth saying that not every work of literature is particularly suited to every critical framework. Some rule-of-thumb is needed in this. A postcolonial reading of, say, James's The Bostonians would seem to be somewhat of a waste of effort, whereas a feminist reading could say quite a lot. Whether Deleuze or indeed "hundreds of other critics" have asked the question about the 'where' of Kafka and his work does not invalidate my comment in any way. I didn't suggest I was the only one to bring up the issue. However, I do find JD's conclusion that this doesn't help our understanding of Kafka in any way to be somewhat hyperbolic. For my part, I'm not a polymath and genius like JD, I am helped by other people's thinking and writing about literary texts and their authors. In terms of Noga's invocation of the "first-time" "virgin reading," I agree. It's a magical experience -- I had it with Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Twain's Huck Finn, and remember it with a certain amount of nostalgia and wonder. Perhaps without those experiences, I wouldn't have become a teacher of American literature decades later. However, I should say that I had the experience with those novels when I was doing my BA a long time ago, so the college/academic environment was not antithetical to the "first contact."

- ironyroad

December 19, 2010 at 9:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “At this point, I'm not sure what I can add. I have some disagreements with JD's approach to this, as there are a sprinkling of red herrings and logical non-sequiturs in there. In particular, I don't think I was claiming that English literature was dependent upon empire, rather that it was the one important historical context in which its influence spread across the world.” My goodness, Irony, speaking of non sequiturs. In any case, this is what you said 18/2010 - 2:43pm EDT | ironyroad “…All in all, I think (a) that it's fair to ask students to think about the fact that English fiction in particular grew to maturity in the age of empire, and (b) that the basic principle of postcolonial criticism, that it makes a difference where you are positioned in relation to the British literary tradition and the cultural power of the great works, is legitimate in my view -- as is the where of Franz Kafka to the German language and the cultural hierachies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Forgive me for thinking that English literature grew to maturity in Elizabethan period. Who knew that “it was the one important historical context in which its influence spread across the world.” I take it that any reader, say in Calcutta or Nigeria who decides to read a play be Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens are showing symptoms of being colonial subjects? You keep changing the terms of the debate, Irony. “It's reasonable to me at least to look, for example, at the growth (or non-appearance) of the novel in countries and cultures in terms of their relationship to the European and American originators of that literary form, where appropriate. One could call this 'postcolonial' for shorthand or call it something else.” I don’t know, Irony. These are large claims. Yes, strictly speaking the modern novel appears first in Europe (though some would claim that it appeared independently in Japan). However prose narrative go back to antiquity and were present in many cultures around the globe. (The Bible, Hindu myths, even the Prose Edda, though Iceland belongs to Europe to the pre-novel period of Europe, and many such narratives from pre Columbian America to India and China.) The contemporary Chinese novel wasn’t created by Imperial England or Europe, though I suspect that those novels did influence it. My question then is: how do you differentiate between the novel coming to a non European culture because of Imperialism and the novel taken up by non European culture because its supple form fit the demands of imaginative exploration of contemporary experience. In other words the same or similar cultural changes that drove Europeans to adopt the novel form also led pre industrial societies to adopt as their cultures were changing. Yes, I am very suspicious of the use of the term “imperialism” it’s become a kind of curse word and it doesn’t explain in the arts what those cultural critics who use it think it explains. “I don't believe there is only one, or only a hostile, variant of postcolonial criticism.” Irony, I don’t know what you mean by this. All post-colonial criticism uses a similar paradigm. I’ll leave Nabokov and Kafka for some other time.

- jdyer

December 19, 2010 at 10:04pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"I don’t know what you mean by this. All post-colonial criticism uses a similar paradigm." Not true, JD. Take a look at, for example, Jahan Ramazani's book The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, which is much more about exchange than one-way imposition or forced developments. He also writes with a feel for satire and humor, and nobody could possibly accuse him of hostility, resentment, and all the other things he's required to be suffering from in your and BenNevis's vision of the world.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 12:09am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenN, after a little digging I discovered that the "Read My Labia" thing was a chapter from a 1993 book by Barbara E. Bowen, who appears to be an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Why be so coy? Her work has been published; it can be openly discussed. I am not a Renaissance Drama person, so I'm no judge, but I strongly suspect that a book published 17 years ago by a non-prestigious press, that takes a radical feminist attitude to Troilus and Cressida, is unlikely to be a current flavor of the month in Shakespeare scholarship or teaching on a national or international basis. That said, I haven't read the chapter or the book, so I don't want to claim I know enough to assess it. The one review I read was fairly negative about the book but actually fairly positive about that particular chapter, which was in part a response to a statement from an academic in the UK about a "Shakespearean justification" for supporting the Falklands war. As a general point, my experience of students is that, broadly, they are fairly resistant to ideological claims made by professors.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 12:20am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ironyroad “Not true, JD. Take a look at, for example, Jahan Ramazani's book The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, which is much more about exchange than one-way imposition or forced developments.” One example doesn’t prove that post-colonial criticism isn’t for the most part about the negative effects of colonialism. If Ramazani didn’t use the same paradigm why use post-colonialism in the title. Is it a case of false advertisement? Or is it a case of needing to use a tendentious title in order to get published. If the book is as you describe it above, then it’s no different than any decent study in comparative literature and he might have called it “The Hybrid Muse: reading English poetry in the age of Globalization.” Of course globalization doesn’t sound as sexy as “postcolonial.” Btw: why are some contemporary societies post-colonial referred to as post-colonial while others (such as Ireland) are not included in that club? “He also writes with a feel for satire and humor, and nobody could possibly accuse him of hostility, resentment, and all the other things he's required to be suffering from in your and BenNevis's vision of the world.” Well, most post-colonial studies do involve themselves in the poetics of resentment. One or two exceptions will not change that.

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 12:48am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad "As a general point, my experience of students is that, broadly, they are fairly resistant to ideological claims made by professors." This is one comment we can agree on.

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 12:51am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"Shakespearean justification" for supporting the Falklands war." Sounds intriguing; I wonder how he went about it. Was he thinking of Henry V or of Nick Bottom? Your defense of post-colonial or feminist criticism is odd, Irony. On the one you make it seem as if it is no different from other kinds of literary criticism while on the other you point to some critics who are better than the run of the mill ideological critic. Here is a book published by a well-regarded press and by a Professor who teaches at a prestigious university. http://www.amazon.com/Vested-Interests-Cross-dressing-Cultural-Anxiety/dp/0415919517/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292824911&sr=1-2 “Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety” by Marjorie Garber

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 1:07am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"Shakespearean justification" for supporting the Falklands war." Sounds intriguing; I wonder how he went about it. Was he thinking of Henry V or of Nick Bottom? Your defense of post-colonial or feminist criticism is odd, Irony. On the one you make it seem as if it is no different from other kinds of literary criticism while on the other you point to some critics who are better than the run of the mill ideological critic. Here is a book published by a well-regarded press and by a Professor who teaches at a prestigious university. “Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety” by Marjorie Garber http://www.amazon.com/Vested-Interests-Cross-dressing-Cultural-Anxiety/dp/0415919517/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292824911&sr=1-2

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 1:08am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Gee, I'm sorry I missed getting into the mix here. Maybe next time such issues surface.

- basman

December 20, 2010 at 1:17am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"Your defense of post-colonial or feminist criticism is odd, Irony. On the one you make it seem as if it [sic] is no different from other kinds of literary criticism while on the other you point to some critics who are better than the run of the mill ideological critic." Exactly, JD. The label doesn't mean very much at the end of the day, but the individual critical or scholarly effort does. Some people do their thing (which can be postcolonial, feminist, historicist, philosophical-theoretical, cultural, or, more likely these days, combinations of same) with intelligence and a sense of limitations, others with a kind of ideological myopia. I prefer the former.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 3:05am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jdyer & ironyroad-- I agree with virtually everything jackson has said on the subject of the postcolonial theorists, so I think I'll let his comments stand, in large part, as a response to your own on the subject, irony. I'll add only that the way in which jdyer and I are using the term "postcolonialist" on this thread is in keeping with the way I have seen it used by many, many lit profs, who believe that a great work of literature--or any accomplished text--is of little conequence except as an illustration of historical context, by which they mean an illustration of their own theories. In fact, they deliberately and quite openly set out (as other theorists of their ilk do) to subvert the text, to undermine whatever power it may have, in order to demonstrate that the political reality (as they perceive it) is a more urgent concern--indeed, in their view, it is the only concern. I have been arguing on this thread that said lit profs and their theories do a grave disservice to students, in that, for decades now, said students go through course after course after course without ever having had their attention focused on the text. The focus is on these bullshit theories, instead. I have offered up examples of said theories and their effects, and you have called them "shocking" and "notably silly." Then you turn around and try to pretend that the examples I have offered don't represent some larger whole, but are "deliberately extreme," as you put it. But there is just too much evidence, irony, that the extremists are the norm, at least where these theories are concerned, and at least in the Dept where I teach. As for Barbara Bowen (author of the Shakespeare book, which contains the chapter "Read My Labia: U.S. Out of Saudi Arabia"), she is now (and has been for a number of years) the President of the PSC, which is the union representing all faculty in the entire City University system.

- BenNevis

December 20, 2010 at 8:04am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenNevis “I'll add only that the way in which jdyer and I are using the term "postcolonialist" on this thread is in keeping with the way I have seen it used by many, many lit profs, who believe that a great work of literature--or any accomplished text--is of little conequence except as an illustration of historical context, by which they mean an illustration of their own theories. In fact, they deliberately and quite openly set out (as other theorists of their ilk do) to subvert the text, to undermine whatever power it may have, in order to demonstrate that the political reality (as they perceive it) is a more urgent concern--indeed, in their view, it is the only concern.” BenNevis states overtly what I have been hinting it. Post-colonialism is ideological criticism and its practitioners care more about the “political impact of the text” than they do about its literary value. It has only a tangential relation to literary criticism. I don’t have time to go into its history in Marxist theory, but I will say that “post colonialism” posits a never ending relation of subjections and power between the formerly colonized country and the colonizer that is not unlike that of parent and dependent child. The child can never grow up and separate itself from its dependence but will always insist that the parent take infinite responsibility for its offspring. Finally, many English Professors prefer ideological criticism of one sort or another because they feel that literature doesn’t have the social standing it once had and they prefer not to see themselves as “merely” professors of literature.

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 10:30am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Basman, I have been reading and rereading David Grossman’s text and hopefully in the next few days I’ll post something on Philip Roth thread.

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 10:32am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenN -- you prove my point. Bowen sounds like one of those people whose scholarly work didn't really lead anywhere so once they squeak past the tenure hurdle they go into activism or admin or union organizing or whatever. BFD. JD, I'm often interested in what you have to say about literature and we've had many conversations, as you know, but in this case I find you only interested in maintaining a cliché and insisting that's it's all of reality. In this case, I have to go with my own experience, which is clearly not that of BenN's, or yours.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 2:05pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

...Basman, I have been reading and rereading David Grossman’s text and hopefully in the next few days I’ll post something on Philip Roth thread... My pleasure; your leisure. Too little too late: the main post(er) here was insufferable I thought for the reasons commenters like Rhubarbs made out, but that horse is out of the barn and way down the road by now.

- basman

December 20, 2010 at 4:33pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “JD, I'm often interested in what you have to say about literature and we've had many conversations, as you know, but in this case I find you only interested in maintaining a cliché and insisting that's it's all of reality.” BenN and I have cited specific works of “post –imperialist” criticism, but you refuse to accept them as genuine or representative. That is your choice. It seems to me then that it’s you who maintaining a cliché. You call those practicing that kind of theory non or failed academics: Judith Butler, or Bowen et al. I could have cited many more such examples, another famous example of the politicization of literature is: Marjorie Levinson, "Insight and Oversight: Reading 'Tintern Abbey," Which is described here, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n20/005949ar.html and here http://www.jstor.org/pss/1556292 Irony “BenN -- you prove my point. Bowen sounds like one of those people whose scholarly work didn't really lead anywhere so once they squeak past the tenure hurdle they go into activism or admin or union organizing or whatever.” So in either case you win, right? Irony “In this case, I have to go with my own experience, which is clearly not that of BenN's, or yours.” Butler et al are famous and important critics in academia and you can’t just wish them away. As Prospero says about Caliban an academic should say of these critics: “This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.”

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 4:47pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I’d be very surprised if Oprah and her consultants (I doubt she will be saying anything that wasn’t said to her by her staff) don’t turn the reading of Dickens into another lecture on class, gender, and colonialism (or penal servitude).

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 4:54pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Hi Basman, if you are still around, I just posted my short reading of the Grossman book.

- jdyer

December 20, 2010 at 9:06pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad-- I think I'll let jdyer's comments stand as a response to your most recent post, especially as I agree with him, and especially as there really doesn't seem to be any point in exchanging with you on this subject anymore. You've had your say, I've had mine. Let's agree to leave it at that. __________________________________________ jdyer-- Yes, we agree: postcolonialism is clearly ideological in nature, and, yes, as you suggest above (in a comment posted at 10:30am), the underpinning of that ideology is Marxism. The postcolonialists I know describe themselves as Marxists, and they see their literary theories--they see their teaching--as a form of activism. And are quite open about this. Indeed, as an extension of that activism, they have taken over the P&B of our Dept, and they have also taken over our union. In terms of the Dept, they have brought their ideology to bear on the curriculum, and they hire and promote only other postcolonialists (there are accomplished colleagues of mine, for instance, who haven't adopted the party line, and have been repeatedly refused promotion). I've known these postcolonialists for several decades now (I should also point out that before they were postcolonialists, many of them were multiculturalists), and have had detailed conversations with them, concerning their worldview, their view of literature, and their readings in Marxist criticism. They see themselves as being on a political mission, and literature and teaching as merely the tools available to them in advancing that mission. One of these profs was once a close friend of mine--I had known him before he became a postcolonialist, before he became a multiculturalist, when he had simply loved to write and to read--and so the change in him came as quite a shock. Some time in the late-80s, I remember saying something to the effect that the people I knew in a particular communist country were dying to get out. He couldn't challenge this, as he had never been to that country, and he didn't know my friends. But when I said that this was true of any totalitarian state--that people, in very large numbers, want out--he accused me of being a racist. And he wasn't joking. He said that I was assuming that the people of one communist country were the same as people in any communist country. Not long after this, the citizens of a number of Eastern bloc nations started streaming into the West. And not long after that, the Wall came down. The next time I saw him in the mailroom, he said, "You must be feeling very proud of yourself." It was as if this astonishing historical moment--the crowds on the news, the uproar, the delirium, the dissolution of tyranny after tyranny--it was as if it were all some elaborate trick I had played on him.

- BenNevis

December 20, 2010 at 9:36pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

JD, if the "politicization of literature" is bad, then one would have to condemn many, to my mind, impressive critics and scholars such as Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Alan Wald, Vincent Leitch, and Catherine Davidson, not even to mention Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Julia Kristeva, and Franco Moretti. A few of whom were or are indeed marxists. Ian Watt might even end up on the blacklist too -- all that suspicious analysis of British class relationships and the novel -- don't want that kind of thing interfering with "literature," do we now? There are also many critics who are not marxists or postcolonialists, who are far more respected and influential than the relative nonentity BenN adduces as his example: Helen Vendler, Michael North, David Damrosch, Lawrence Buell, J. Hillis Miller, to name only a few. I'm willing to bet that practically nobody thinks of Judith Butler as a literary scholar. But if she's one in your mind, then that's what counts, right? I made the point -- which you are either unable or unwilling to see -- that it's not the label but the work that matters. Bowen's politicization of literature is, as far as I can judge, hamfisted and strident. Raymond Williams' readings of the politics of the British novel on the other hand? Worth reading and re-reading. And Williams was probably far more of a marxist than Bowen ever could be.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 10:10pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Also, what on earth is wrong with Miall's essay on "Tintern Abbey" which you seem to link to as an example of resentment-filled political advocacy or some such nonsense? It seems to me after a complete, if fairly superficial, reading of the whole thing to be neither resentful nor indeed especially ideological. It does devote some thought to the meaning of the poetic speaker's actual location (and justifiably, as the poem is about location among other things) but if that's "the politicization of literature" then I'm Helen Vendler's pet chihuahua. It's obviously, at the very least, a piece of critical writing that takes its subjects, Wordsworth and his text, very seriously. I'm wondering if you read it before you posted it.

- ironyroad

December 20, 2010 at 10:26pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

BenNevis “I've known these postcolonialists for several decades now (I should also point out that before they were postcolonialists, many of them were multiculturalists), and have had detailed conversations with them, concerning their worldview, their view of literature, and their readings in Marxist criticism. They see themselves as being on a political mission, and literature and teaching as merely the tools available to them in advancing that mission.” This is my view also, Ben Nevis. The anecdote you wrote about the post-Colonialist professor is also something I can relate to. In many case the adoption of an ideological stance is merely a “career move.”

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 12:30am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “Ian Watt might even end up on the blacklist too -- all that suspicious analysis of British class relationships and the novel -- don't want that kind of thing interfering with "literature," do we now?” You are mistaken about Watt. The man cared a great deal about style in literature. This is not the case with most ideological critics. The same is true for “Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Raymond Williams” All of whom made an effort to separate politics from literature. Of the names on the list Williams is the most political, yet even he wrote the magnificent “Country and the City” (at least I think that was the title. I don’t have the book in front of me.) And Irving Howe’ “Politics and the Novel” was more about literature than about politics. Howe’s “A Critics Notebook” is about literature. I don’t need to defend Wilson nor Trilling since even a minimal acquaintance with their thought would dispel the notion that they are more interested in politics than in literature. And Rahv spent his life trying to introduce publish great contemporary European writers in his Partisan Review. You should really read these people before you compare them to the “ideological critics in academia today. On the other hand the other names you mention is mixed lot. You must be joking to place Benjamin and Adorno’s names next to the charlatan Eagleton? Adorno and (the early) Benjamin were superb dialecticians who cared about culture and fought the Marxists in their day because of their consuming passion for Marxist orthodoxy which he hated. Benjamin towards the end of his life became too influenced by Marxist orthodox dogma, but it was probably a phase which he might have grown out of had he not committed suicide. I only know Leitch from a book on deconstruction and Julia Kristeva has become a psychoanalyst. Franco Moretti is a European Marxist critic and is not a post modernist nor a post colonialist. It’s an odd list you concocted there, Irony. Most of the names contradict your view that contemporary literary criticism is no different from that of the 50’s and 60’s.

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 12:50am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “Also, what on earth is wrong with Miall's essay on "Tintern Abbey" which you seem to link to as an example of resentment-filled political advocacy or some such nonsense?” The essay is there because of its implied criticism of Marjorie Levinson.

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 12:52am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

If your idea of Trilling is that the only thing he aimed at was try to separate politics from literature, JD, then there's nothing more to say in that connection. I mean, come on. I don't claim the profession today is that same as in the '50s and '60s. As one might expect, it's not. Some things have been gained, some lost, but all in all a greater spectrum of voices have had their say than would have been the case back then. I never asserted at any point that my criterion was holding politics to be "more important" than literature. As even a cursory reading of my posts would show. I said that an understanding of the historical and political implications of literary texts is useful and pretending that those implications are in a completely different world to some purportedly "pure" aesthetic reception is silly and indeed reduces our grasp of what those works have achieved. I would reiterate that, if I may.

- ironyroad

December 21, 2010 at 1:38am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Also, on Benjamin -- the essay on "The Work of Art in the Age etc etc" is from 1936. It's pretty much a marxist/materialist analysis and rightly or wrongly one of his definitive contributions to modern cultural theory. I don't know that one can say with any justification that he had a fleeting connection with marxism that he was about to jettison. I think he saw, as he wrote himself, that the only true counter-maneuver to the Nazis' aestheticization of politics was the politicization of art. I don't think he would asset to your theory of him, JD.

- ironyroad

December 21, 2010 at 2:01am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ironyroad “If your idea of Trilling is that the only thing he aimed at was try to separate politics from literature, JD, then there's nothing more to say in that connection. I mean, come on. I don't claim the profession today is that same as in the '50s and '60s. As one might expect, it's not. Some things have been gained, some lost, but all in all a greater spectrum of voices have had their say than would have been the case back then.” Here is my hasty response: I am not sure what you are getting at, Irony. What is the connection between Trilling’s practice as a critic of literature and its practice in academia today? Trilling and Howe among others didn’t “try to separate literature from politics.” They practiced a form of criticism which took it for granted that these were two distinct critical domains. The opposite it true today. Most academic critics take it for granted that the ‘private is the public’ and that literature expresses political view willy-nilly. There has been a complete paradigmatic shift in this regard. Trilling’s politics were conservative but his professional concern was literature as an aesthetic endeavor as well as literary history. Take his essay on Huck Finn written in 1948 in it he engages the nature of literary language in American fiction, the place of Twain’s novel in our country, the symbolic meaning of the river in the novel, its influence on modernist prose as seen in Hemmingway and Gertrude Stein. An essay on Huck would pay more attention to the politics of the period, and especially “political readings” of the novel. It might fault Trilling and others for not tackling directly race, class and gender. Language is seen in the context of these concerns and style is perceived as a marker for them. This is exactly what Trilling would object. He might point out that an essay on Huck Finn written today is no different from and essay written on Hemingway or some other writer: in each case aesthetic considerations is subsumed under the “more important” issues dealing with class, gender, and race. What is lost for Trilling in this programmatic reading is the moral agency. For a Trilling the novel deals with brings out or invents the notion of a free moral being. The focusing on aesthetic issues adds to our understanding of free moral agency by the choices made by character and author in the presentation of the subject. Contemporary critics view such concerns with disdain. Two essays in Trilling, one written also in 1948 on ‘The Princess Casamassima,” and the other on Jane Austen wrote in the mid 70’s show his concern for moral agency. From this perspective when you say “Some things have been gained, some lost, but all in all a greater spectrum of voices have had their say than would have been the case back then” seems inadequate in the description of different social practice we call literary criticism over time. There is no greater spectrum of voices: there are more critics of literature being published than ever before yet the range of their concerns is far narrower than it was heretofore. I don’t have time to answer your second post right now, perhaps later in the day. I would also like at some point to tackle the Adorno Banjamin debate since it already adumbrates many of the issues we are dealing with today.

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 9:37am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

JD, This thread looks as if it's going to disappear, but a quick response to two of your comments above: You are right about the range of critical issues now being wider than moral agency and aesthetic choice -- it's not only the race/gender chesnuts but also nationalism, regional cultures, religion, textual/publishing history, narrative and cognition, translation studies, and reception history, among others. And therefore I very strongly dispute your assertion that the "range of concerns is far narrower than it was heretofore." Indeed, your moral agency itself reappeared on the stage in an influential work by Wayne Booth called "An Ethics of Fiction," which kicked off a new debate about the ethical as a parallel concern to the aesthetic. But Benjamin-Adorno when we have a chance would be good.

- ironyroad

December 21, 2010 at 3:26pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Ironyroad “You are right about the range of critical issues now being wider than moral agency and aesthetic choice -- it's not only the race/gender chesnuts but also nationalism, regional cultures, religion, textual/publishing history, narrative and cognition, translation studies, and reception history, among others. And therefore I very strongly dispute your assertion that the "range of concerns is far narrower than it was heretofore." Indeed, your moral agency itself reappeared on the stage in an influential work by Wayne Booth called "An Ethics of Fiction," “ Quick last response: Booth criticism antedates post modernism, multiculturalism, post imperialism, etc. Many if not most of the issues, except for the holy trinity of race, gender and class (which themselves are a distortion of earlier studies in the same areas), were already broached in criticism from the 1920’s on. Translation theory, try Benjamin’s “task of the Translator” (1930’s). Multiculturalism owes most of its theoretics to Buber and Bakhtin. “nationalism” and “regional cultures” in criticism, try Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893) race, milieu, et moment. Regionalism was a favorite of writers and critics of the same period; of writers such as Kate Chopin. Do you really believe that religion or textual/publishing history is new?” “Narrative and cognition try reading Vigotsky and a number of phenomenological critics of the 20’s and 30’. “Reception history?” Wasn’t Ian Watt’s book on the novel concerned with its reception in the 18th c? What is new today is fact that many academics pretend that what they are doing is new because there is so little historical knowledge out there; also because they infuse their studies with deconstructive language and pretend to be saying something new.

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 4:09pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Hey, JD, you're the one who's claiming that postcolonial marxist ideologies on race and gender are the only things that inform literary studies today, not me. It's a myopic and prejudiced assertion, and I was just laying out the spectrum of approaches you could actually find if you weren't so (ideologically) frozen in your perspective. Just as other academic fields of activity such as science, politics, law, history, and so on have at their core many concerns that come down from the past, while at the same time new information and insights inform current work, so literary criticism and scholarship has a long history from the Greeks on down. However, as in other areas of intellectual work, that doesn't mean that everything published today is -- or should be -- a replica of something 50, 100 or 1000 years ago. Most importantly, the perspectives shift, thus for example different generations discover classics but in a different way. Which isn't, in and of itself, anything particularly surprising.

- ironyroad

December 21, 2010 at 7:13pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

ironyroad “Hey, JD, you're the one who's claiming that postcolonial marxist ideologies on race and gender are the only things that inform literary studies today, not me.” It does inform most criticism (not all). Yes it is a myopic view of literature and prejudiced against those teachers of literature like Ben Nevis who don’t subscribe to that doctrine. There is a much narrower spectrum of approaches today than we had say in the mid-sixties. When you claim that the following is new, you are talking nonsense. “You are right about You are right about the range of critical issues now being wider than moral agency and aesthetic choice -- it's not only the race/gender chesnuts but also nationalism, regional cultures, religion, textual/publishing history, narrative and cognition, translation studies, and reception history, among others.” I ignored your untrue assertion that I claimed that “the range of critical issues now being wider than moral agency and aesthetic choice” since I made no such claim. None of the topics you listed are new. What is new as I said above is that these approaches are incorporated into deconstructive critical theory that uses race and gender as a basis of argumentation.

- jdyer

December 21, 2010 at 8:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

You think BenNevis isn't prejudiced, JD? You'll notice I never said anything to condemn his own teaching or his critical approach to literature -- he's the one with the broad-spectrum hostility and lack of willingness to see any point of view except his own. The most negative thing I said was that one narrow-gauge agenda is not the solution for another. Initially, I agreed with some of what he wrote, and a lot of what you wrote. In any case, I didn't claim regionalism, cognitive theory etc were all new, I said they are present (which you seemed to be unaware of), and certainly some of the perspectives are new by the nature of time and the world. Unless you believe that history simply keeps repeating itself without change. I don't appreciate being lectured snootily that my comments, which at the least come honestly from my experience of working as a teacher of literature and indeed as a critic, are "nonsense." If that's the game now, then your opinions are quite as rigid, ideological, and in the end reality-free as those of any postcolonial deconstructionist feminist medusa from conservative mythology.

- ironyroad

December 22, 2010 at 6:15pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

jdyer--- If you take a look at ironyroad's most recent post, you'll see why I stopped exchanging with him. There's no point to it. I simply described to him what I heard and saw. He agreed that what was going on was "shocking" and "notably silly." Then discounted everything I said. And now this. I never attacked the man, and now he attacks me for no reason at all.

- BenNevis

December 22, 2010 at 7:44pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

We have all had our say here, and I doubt will be able to resolve differences at this point. I am also sure we will have a chance to revisit those differences on other occasions.

- jdyer

December 22, 2010 at 8:42pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

SHARE HIGHLIGHT

0 CHARACTERS SELECTED

TWEET THIS

POST TO TUMBLR

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

Close