Category Archives: literature

The greatest critics help us understand

The greatest critics help us understand the greatest of poets and novelists; but sometimes the opposite is also true. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 19th-century France wrote marvelous essays on literature, which are perfectly readable today. Yet if you want to get at Sainte-Beuve’s deeper instincts, you should read him in the light cast by his brilliant friend Victor Hugo. Edmund Wilson was Sainte-Beuve’s intellectual heir in the United States — the man who figured out how to write Sainte-Beuve-like essays in American English. Yet Wilson, too, makes a little more sense if you read him in a light cast by Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald — Wilson’s novel-writing friends and contemporaries. –Paul Berman, 2003, The New York Times

Orlando Furioso and the fantastique

Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica (1819) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Orlando Furioso (1877) – Gustave Doré

 

Orlando Furioso (“Mad Orlando” or “The Madness of Orlando” ) is an epic poem written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. It is a “gionta”, a sequel, to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), but it is quite distant from the other work in that it does not preserve the humanistic concepts of knight errantry.

Related: Orlando Furioso

Don Giovanni on Arte TV last night

Yesterday evening I landed on Arte TV (a Franco-German TV network, which aims to promote quality programming related to the world of arts and culture) and today I found out that I was watching Mozart’s Don Giovanni which Arte describes as:

Revisité par René Jacobs et mis en scène par Vincent Boussard, le chef-d’oeuvre de Mozart renvoie singulièrement à notre époque. Un Don Giovanni qui mêle sensualité et violence, humour et tragédie.

The reason I kept on watching (I normally don’t go for opera) is twofold: 1. I have been listening since six months to state-run Belgian art/classical music/jazz radio station Klara so my ears have gotten used to these sounds; 2. the striking appearance of the decors (very reminiscent of the Dr. Caligari film of the 1920s) with the slanted angles and unusual lighting.

Wikipedia has this on Don Giovanni :

Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. It was premiered in Estates Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787.

Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for “seducer“.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a large essay in his book Either/Or in which he – or at least one of his pseudonyms – defends the claim that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the greatest work of art ever made.
The finale in which Don Giovanni refuses to repent has been a captivating philosophical and artistic topic for many writers including George Bernard Shaw, who in Man and Superman, parodied the opera.

The past is a much bigger place than the present

In a recent post at his blog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp observes that the past is a much bigger place than the present, so it follows that most worthwhile books were published not last week but some time in the previous three millennia. –via The Reading Experience

I totally agree with Patrick Kurp and hold that the same is true for art, films etcetera. I used to call the practice of only dealing with the contemporary the dictatorship of the now and have abandoned it somewhere in the early 1990s. Each man is the bibliographer of his own life and instead of a relentless neophilia, one should look for sensibilities which are one’s own and which may be found in the present, but just as much in the past.

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
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Found the excellent German non-fiction book titled Sade / Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild. It is a 2001 book on Sade published by Tobia Bezzola, Michael Pfister, Stefan Zweifel with text by Michel Delon, Ursula Pia Jauch, Tobia Bezzola, Jacques Mayer and Stefan Zweifel.

Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du Prince
One of the many illustrations that grace the book above, image sourced here.

Why is it excellent. Lots of illustrations. I will give the list of all the work I was not familiar with:

See also: Sade – surrealism

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) – Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis came to my attention via Dennis Cooper’s blog on his Blanchot day. In that particular post Lydia Davis describes how she wanted to meet Blanchot regarding her translation of his work and because she was curious about his personality. By that time, Blanchot had become so much of a recluse that he met with nobody, not even close friends who he’d know for years, apparently only exchanging letters. Below is more on Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story.

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) – Lydia Davis
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“The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us.”

More on the first sentence of novels here.

Biography

Lydia Davis (born 1947) is a contemporary American author and translator of French. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son.

She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is Samuel Johnson is Indignant, published by McSweeney’s in 2002. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. In fact some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story.

Davis has also translated Proust, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, and other French writers. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Davis [Oct 2006]

See also: translation – American literature – French literature

Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill

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

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 and Metafiction (1979) – Robert Scholes

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]