#lit criticism

[izzyanasyrma]

Some Thoughts on The Shining

I’ve never been a big fan of Stephen King. I’d read The Green Mile and a few of his short stories but the only thing that ever “wowed” me was a contribution be made to American Vampire. It wasn’t that I thought he was bad, exactly, but I’d grown up watching a lot of adaptations of his work to become familiar enough with his quirks to know that I wasn’t interested in getting them straight from the…

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[codependentwins]

'The goal of an aesthetic education is to attempt to gain as broad and complicated a sense of pleasure as possible—a sense of pleasure that isn’t merely indulgence, that encompasses the difficult and astringent—and then to cultivate a sensibility such that this pleasure offers us meaningful knowledge. This is what painters were doing, back in the day, when an apprenticeship in visual art meant long hours in museums copying great works, or when learning to compose meant writing out, note by note, the scores of Bach, and it’s what I’m trying to do, I guess, when considering, clause by clause, a sentence that seems to me great. It isn’t an effort at surface imitation but an attempt to tune, at a deeper-than-conscious level, one’s sensibility to the highest aesthetic virtues, to beauty and bravery and truth.'

from On a Sentence by Raven Leilani

by Garth Greenwell in The Sewanee Review

[alektheloris]

I'm reading a critical essay by Tammy Dietz about Twilight and she basically just shits on it and explains why Bella's character is so troublesome and how the story promotes the subordination of women. I love this lady, like damn one of the best articles I've read in a long time.

[picadorbookroom]

The Russians and the French essentially set the terms of the modernist novel as it flourished in Britain and America between 1920 and 1945. You can trace the excitement of encounter in Virginia Woolf's essays, especially those written in the teens and the twenties of the century, as she discovered the new translations of the Russians into English by Constance Garnett. 

From How Fiction Works, by James Wood. Picador, page 164.

[Images: Virginia Woolf; Tolstoy and Chekhov]

[helloamericans]

Ernest Hemingway's Mario Brothers

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with literary criticism in the next 20 years.

For example, sometimes a critic will look at the texts that might have influenced an author's work. The critic will look at the books the author owned, or the books the author wrote about and make an argument that these books influenced the author's work. 

For instance, in a letter written to Thomas Chivers (whose name some of you might recognize today as the inspiration for the name of the website "The Chive") in 1844, Edgar Allan Poe remarks that he doesn't dislike Transcendentalists  but only the "pretenders and sophists among them." Taking that, I could theorize that one of his short stories, say, The Fall of the House of Usher, is a reaction to Transcendentalism. Then I could comb through the journalistic articles he wrote and the criticism and see if he ever elaborated on what he felt was "authentic" Transcendentalism and build an essay off of that.

So in the future when critics write about the next Rita Dove or Phillip K. Dick, will they argue that Rita Dick's work was influenced by the parallels between the fear of technology in the hands of terrorists in the 21st century and the use of technology by the theocratic alien race The Covenant in the video game series Halo (for those of you unfamiliar, in Halo the Covenant is trying to activate a machine that they believe will send their whole species off to a wondrous afterlife called The Great Journey; in actuality, activating the machine will eradicate all intelligent life in the Universe. I'll leave you to draw your own parallels between that and the rise of suicide bombers) after finding the author's Xbox Live account and seeing that they played through all the Halo games, hell, even Halo Wars and ODST? Or will they argue that Phillip Dove was focused on the myth of the ideal American small town, citing Dove's having owned all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls and having watched The Last Picture Show on Netflix?