Tag Archives: Edward Said

Literary Studies 1920 – 1970 – An Aspirational Reading List

Posted on by
7

‘Anglophone literary studies between about 1920 and 1970 are to be understood, I think, as one of the twentieth-century’s most significant and original intellectual accomplishments.’ Simon During’s argument is worth reading for anyone interested, as I am, in this most formative period of literary criticism. During lists the ‘path-breaking and exciting’ works, which establish an aspirational reading list, many which I’ve yet to read.

  1. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1921)
  2. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
  3. J. Middleton Murry, Problems of Style (1922)
  4. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
  5. T.S. Eliot, Homage to John Dryden (1924)
  6. I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (1926)
  7. John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927)
  8. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927)
  9. T.S. Eliot, For Launcelot Andrewes (1928)
  10. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
  11. George Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930)
  12. F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930)
  13. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1931)
  14. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932)
  15. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
  16. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (1935)
  17. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime (1935)
  18. Richard Blackmur, The Double Agent (1935)
  19. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935)
  20. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936)
  21. Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays (1936)
  22. L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937)
  23. John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (1938)
  24. Yvor Winter, Maule’s Curse (1938)
  25. Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1938)
  26. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (1939)
  27. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939)
  28. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)
  29. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941)
  30. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942)
  31. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)
  32. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (1947)
  33. Rosamond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947)
  34. F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)
  35. T.S. Eliot, Notes towards a definition of Culture (1948)
  36. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (1948)
  37. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, The Theory of Literature (1949)
  38. Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949)
  39. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
  40. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (1951)
  41. Reuben Brower, Fields of Light (1951)
  42. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1951)
  43. R.S. Crane, Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (1952)
  44. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction (1952)
  45. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (1952)
  46. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
  47. Dorothy van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (1953)
  48. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (1953)
  49. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (1953)
  50. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: technology and the pastoral ideal (1954)
  51. W.J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (1955)
  52. Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955)
  53. R.W. B. Lewis, American Adam (1955)
  54. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957)
  55. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)
  56. Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (1957)
  57. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
  58. Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (1957)
  59. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (1957)
  60. Yvor Winter, The Function of Criticism (1957)
  61. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)
  62. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (1958)
  63. Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (1959)
  64. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959)
  65. Vincent Buckley, Poetry and Morality (1959)
  66. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)
  67. Graham Hough, Image and Experience (1960)
  68. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
  69. S.J. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961)
  70. Fredric Jameson, Sartre: the Origins of a Style (1961)
  71. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett; a critical study (1961)
  72. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961)
  73. William Empson, Milton’s God (1961)
  74. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (1962)
  75. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (1962)
  76. Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (1962)
  77. Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, In Defense of Reading (1962)
  78. Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision (1962)
  79. D.W. Harding, Experience into Words (1963)
  80. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (1963)
  81. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (1963)
  82. Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (1963)
  83. Harry Levin, Gates of Horn (1963)
  84. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964)
  85. C.K. Stead, The New Poetic (1964)
  86. Angus Fletcher, Allegory (1964)
  87. Barbara Hardy, The Appropriate Form (1964)
  88. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965)
  89. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder (1965)
  90. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (1966)
  91. Richard Poirer, A World Elsewhere (1966)
  92. Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
  93. George Steiner, Language and Silence (1967)
  94. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967)
  95. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1967)
  96. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (1968)
  97. Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters (1968)
  98. Mark Schorer, The World we Imagine (1968)
  99. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968)
  100. Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings (1969)
  101. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970)
  102. Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Grove (1970)

A Well-stocked Head and a Better Stocked Library

Posted on by
16

Reading writers like Mathias Enard and Tomasi di Lampedusa is not only greatly entertaining but also cajoles me to read only the best books. Both writers wear their massive erudition lightly. Gilbert Highet, the Scottish-American classicist used the terrific phrase (to which I aspire, true to autodidactic form): “a well-stocked head and a better stocked library”.

I started this year with the intent of reading widely, dipping into the ocean of contemporary literature. For every Mathias Enard, I abandoned another dozen frightful books, none of which wasted my time but served to further teach me what to avoid. My literary taste remains omnivorous but I shall default to the late D. G. Myers advice: “Read no book before it is ten years old (in order not to be influenced by the buzz”. I shall of course occasionally, whimsically ignore that advice in the hope of discovering more writers like Mathias Enard and Rachel Cusk. Very, very occasionally the hyperbole is justified.

The best books are inexhaustible and capable of transforming, for a time, how we perceive the world. My reading life is ruled by serendipity, one book leading to another. Enard, for instance, prompts me to reread Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Edward Said and Claudio Magris, also to explore the work of Isabelle Eberhardt, Ernst Bloch, Georg Trakl, Sadegh Hedayat, Faris al-Shidyaq and Leopold Weiss.

For the time being though I’m taking a detour, one I take regularly, back to older books, to the hymns of Homer via Peter McDonald, and to a recent edition of Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition: Greek & Roman Influences on Western Literature. This might then be a gateway to Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, translated also by Gilbert Highet.

Mathias Enard’s Compass

Posted on by
12

James Joyce wrote of “an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia”, exhibiting characteristic Joycean contempt for a reader of limited duration of attention. In this sense, Mathias Enard’s Compass, while eminently accessible, is likely to be best appreciated by those with insomniac intensities, and an equivalent propensity to pursue homologous trains of thought. Franz Ritter, the insomniac musicologist whose consciousness is our sole companion in Compass, as all insomniacs is accustomed to wholly phenomenal interpretation which, as Terry Eagleton wrote, “refuses to be duped by the habitual experience of things, searching instead for the invisible mechanisms which gives birth to them”.

While Compass is greater than its themes, it is essentially a novel of digressions, during which Franz learns that the pursuit of love may demand acts of abnegation. Schubert, Magris, Balzac, Beethoven, Proust, and Mendelssohn are only the lighter cavalry. Enard writes, “Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent.” Without becoming moralistic, Compass is a political novel that gently analyses Said’s characterisation of Orientalism, not just as a secondary expression of the wonders and apparent evils of the East, but as a form of imperialistic domination that concerns itself with the control of real people and real geographical territories. Enard, like Said, writes to oppose power structures, but unlike, say, Foucault, is at heart hopeful that through discourse such structures can be confronted and dismantled.

In a world that has become afraid of intelligence, Compass – slowly, I imagine, and carefully translated by Charlotte Mandell – is a deeply intelligent novel, a book that I could vanish into forever. In Barcelona, Robert Hughes quotes the Catalan writer Josep Ferrater Mora, “The man with seny [an untranslatable term meaning something like common sense, perhaps also wisdom and intelligence] renounces neither salvation nor experience, and is always trying to set up a fruitful integration between both opposed, warring extremes.” Mathias Enard, on the strength of Compass, but also Zone and Street of Thieves is indisputably a man with seny.

First We Write, Then We Fail

Posted on by
Reply

Plato Watching Socrates Read. From Prognostica Socratis Basilei by Matthew Parris

  1. “Any serious student of serious realities will shrink from making truth the helpless object of men’s ill-will by committing it to writing.” Plato, Seventh Letter
  2. “Until writing, most kinds of thoughts we are used to thinking today simply could not be thought”. Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology
  3. “Writing is in no way an instrument for communication, it is not an open route through which there passes only the intention to speak.” Barthes, Writing Degree Zero
  4. “Why write? One important reason is that unless we do there are mental acts we cannot perform, thoughts we cannot think, inquiries we cannot engage in.” Richard Young and Patricia Sullivan, Why Write?
  5. “You write so that the life you have around you, and outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life which is not much fun, but annoying and full of worries, exposed to others, can melt into the little rectangle before you and of which you are the master. But this absorption of swarming life into the immobile swarming of letters never happens.” Foucault, Interview with Claude Bonnefoy
  6. “Every bit of writing is imagined as mass which occupies space. It is the duty of writing, therefore, to admit no other, to keep all other writing out.” Edward Said, Beginnings
  7. “Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create.” Derrida, Writing and Difference
  8. “Endings then, are faked, as are all other parts of a narrative structure that impose metaphor on the metonymic sequence.” Frank Kermode, “Sensing Endings“
  9. “. . . I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence, I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fail.” Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Privileges of Fiction (Kundera)

Posted on by
1

The space defined by Milan Kundera’s The Curtain is one that privileges the novel to an extraordinary degree, attributing it to a position distinct from not only other forms of art, but also as a reflection on existence that informs philosophical thought. As Kundera says, “… for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes.”

By using novels to reflect on human existence as opposed to portraying reality, novelists dissect new existential categories and refashion our perception of those we are familiar with. Kundera writes, “Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyses in Being and Time – considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy – had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the European novel.”

Kundera, like Edward Said – in turn influenced by Adorno’s essay on Beethoven – is also much preoccupied by ‘late style’:

What interests me in this piece [a text of Cioran’s] is the amazement of the man who cannot find any link between his present “self” and the past one, who is stupefied before the enigma of his identity. But, you’ll say, is that amazement sincere? Certainly it is! How in the world could I ever have taken seriously that philosophical (or religious, artistic, political) trend? or else (more banally): How could I have fallen in love with such a silly woman (stupid man)? Well, whereas for most people, your life goes by fast and its mistakes evaporate without leaving much trace, Cioran’s turned to stone; one cannot laugh off a ridiculous sweetheart and fascism with the same condescending smile.

[Any blog that continues for long enough knows this amazement when one stupidly decides to reread old posts written by another “self”.]

The force and richness of Kundera’s perceptions in this book and in Testaments Betrayed, which I read previously, puts him in good company with Nabokov and Brodsky. That all three were bilingual exile writers who reworked their own texts and worried endlessly about translation perhaps also made them ideal readers, enacting Derrida’s argument that writing is itself an act of translation.