Just as I thought it would, Wikipedia will fork. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, will start a version of Wikipedia, called The Citizendium Project. This version, which he announced in March 2005 here will start its life as a mirror of Wikipedia’s current content, but will then allow ‘experts’ to modify the original content of Wikipedia. In some way, I like to consider Jahsonic as a forked version of Wikipedia too.
Wikipedia has this.
Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill
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Search terms used: Christine Brooke-Rose, Scholes, Todorov
Before proceeding too much further, however, it should be noted that horror and fantasy do have qualities in common. They both require that readers engage, according to W.R. Irwin in The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976), in a conspiracy that agrees to suspend the rules of everyday (8-9). Readers must invest strong psychological belief in the literary worlds that are presented. Gary K. Wolfe, in his essay “The Encounter with Fantasy” (in Schlobin ed.), correctly points out that this is more than the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Samuel Coleridge first observed and so many scholars have slavishly followed since (including J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories”). —FANTASY VERSUS HORROR In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature via http://wpl.lib.in.us/roger/F-VS-H.html
See also: fantastic literature
In Defence of Realism (1998 ) – Raymond Tallis
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Book by an unfavourable critic of postmodernism:
In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary “effect.” He trenchantly shows not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.
“A bracing counterblast to the post-modernizing gibberish of contemporary literary theory.” — The Spectator
See also: realism in literature
Fabulation & Metafiction (1979) – Robert Scholes
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Robert E. Scholes is an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.
He graduated from Yale University. Since 1970 he has been Professor at Brown University.
With Eric S. Rabkin he published in 1977 the book Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, which considerably influenced the science fiction studies. In it, they attempt to explain the literary history of the genre, but also the sciences such as physics and astronomy. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scholes [Oct 2006]
Robert Scholes also wrote the foreword to Todorov’s The Fantastic (1970).
Some hold that Scholes coined the term metafiction in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979):
“Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself,” but it also “tends toward brevity because it attempts … to assault or transcend the laws of fiction”
Others claim that the term was coined by William H. Gass:
The term “metafiction” has remained enigmatic and vague since it was coined in 1970 by William H. Gass in an essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”. Commenting on American fiction of the 1960s, Gass pointed out that a new term was needed for the emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism still dominant in post-WW II American literature. —http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=715 [Oct 2006]
Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities, but most writers of metafiction are thoroughly aware of all these possibilities and are likely to have experimented with all of them…. [Consider] four works of metafiction by four American writers: John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme’s City Life, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, and W. H. …–Bookrags
In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. They violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly successful—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabulation [Oct 2006]
I’ve been thinking about the concept of national stereotypes for some time now. Partly the reason for this is that I am interested in all sorts of generalizations. The nearest philosophical concept to national, racial or ethnic stereotypes is the German term volksgeist (a concept first put forward by German folklorist and romanticist Johann Gottfried Herder) which is similar to Zeitgeist. The premise is simple: is there any truth in German gründlichkeit and pünktlichkeit, are the French good lovers or do they more frequently make love than the rest of Europe, do Italians really have better aesthetic judgement, are Belgians averse to authority, are the Dutch blunt and permissive? A recent survey tells the contrary:
Generalizations about cultures or nationalities can be a source of identity, pride … and bad jokes. (…) If national stereotypes aren’t rooted in real experiences, then where do they come from?
One possibility is that they reflect national values, which may emerge from historical events. For example, many historians have argued that the spirit of American individualism has its origins in the experiences of the pioneers in the Old West. —http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9598717/ [Oct 2005]
If you put a gun to my head — not that you would — and asked me whom I’d consider the greatest writer of the 20th century — not that asking my opinion is worth risking a police encounter — I’d say, ‘That’s easy, put the gun down. Maurice Blanchot.’ He’s both my favorite fiction writer and my favorite writer of what’s alternately dubbed philosophy or language theory. His ‘Death Sentence’ is either my favorite novel of all time, or it’s tied for favorite with Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom.’ To me, Blanchot is to the written text as Bresson is to the captured image, which is to say not so much the greatest at his chosen medium — obviously a ridiculous proposition — as he is an artist as singular, ruthless, pure, and infested with belief in the abilities of language as anyone who has ever tried their hand at writing. —Dennis Cooper
Some details about Dennis Cooper’s weekend:
I went to that American Writers Festival I mentioned, intending to hit a lot of the events. But I went to see the Peter Sotos (interviewed by Bruce Benderson) event and wound up just hanging out with them and Laurence Viallet of Editions Desordres and crew, which was great. Bruce is an old friend, but I’d never spent time with Peter before, and he’s a really nice guy. I also got to meet and talk to Gaspar Noe, who knows Peter, which was a thrill because, as you know, I’m a huge admirer of his films. —Dennis Cooper
From all this it would appear that Dennis Cooper is a thorough francophile.
Via The Reading Experience comes a list of some of the best works of fiction since 1990 hosted at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading.
Scott remarks:
this is not a response to The New York Times list. This idea has been circulating in my head since last November, and I first began collaborating with people on it back in March, long before I knew of the existence of the NYT list. I do, however, think that the two lists make for interesting juxtapositions and I encourage comparisons.
The list includes:
JM Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, W.S. Sebald, Jose Saramago, Michael Ondaatje, Richard Power, Colson Whitehea, Norman Rus, Cynthia Ozic, William Gas, Kazuo Ishigur, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Danzy Senna, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen, Michel Houellebecq, William Gaddis, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Banana Yoshimoto, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Russo, A.S.Byatt, David Markson, John Berger, Mary Gaitskill and Haruki Murakami.
Digression: 1000 movies by NYT, the same, at Amazon.
Everyone knows that a good canon debate doesn’t get interesting until you reach the realm of the top 100. But by listing the top 1,000 movies, as the editors of The New York Times have done with this fat, readable collection of reviews, you get to skip all that huffing and puffing about quality and head straight for the fun. –Lyall Bush for Amazon
See also: lists
Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard YouTube footage. I hadn’t imagined that he had a witty personality. –via This Space.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – (1974) – D.G. Compton
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Image sourced here.
Bertrand Tavernier based his 1980 film Deathwatch on this 1974 novel. In the film Romy Schneider plays a dying woman whose last days are watched on national television via a camera implanted in the brain of a journalist Harvey Keitel.
David Guy Compton (1930 – ) is a British author. He often writes science fiction set in the near future. He published his first science fiction novel, The Quality of Mercy, in 1965. He has not become hugely popular, but did achieve some recognition after co-writing a SF novel, Ragnarok, with Dr. John Gribbin.
He has written murder mysteries as Guy Compton (the first in 1962) and even a few romance novels as Frances Lynch.
In Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), Romy Schneider plays the dying heroine with the doubly punning surname Catherine Mortenhoe, whose death is being recorded on national TV in an ongoing soap opera of morbid video verité. — Garrett Stewart via Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (2000)
A review:
I’ve read two novels by British writer D. G. Compton: Synthajoy (1968) and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; also published as The Unsleeping Eye). Both novels deal with ethical problems raised by the use of technology to eavesdrop on human emotions. Both emphasize the human rather than the scientific side of the story, and they experiment with the subjective viewpoint of the narrator in a way reminiscent of Philip K. Dick. However, Compton’s writing style is more refined than Dick’s, which also makes it harder to overlook the implausibility of the technical innovations posited in each novel. –Glenn Frantz via http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/roboman/www/sigma/review/conmort.html [Oct 2006]
See also: reality TV – Deathwatch – 1974 – television – voyeurism
YouTube features a six minute documentary by COA News on the concept of network neutrality.
