Let Me Tell You What I Mean is Didion's last book of essays, and it's the first I've read. Come in at the end. Why not? A friend handed it to me in thLet Me Tell You What I Mean is Didion's last book of essays, and it's the first I've read. Come in at the end. Why not? A friend handed it to me in the quiet carriage on a long train ride; I read it on the way down to Sydney and back home again.
It's an odd little collection, it spans 1968 to 2000. There are big gaps. And the jumps in time, the leaping over them, leave it with a feeling of structural disunity on a continuous read. These essays, I think, reward time in between. And there's some irony here, probably, because one of the pieces is about Didion's inability to write short stories - and what other form of writing can be as prone to that feeling of "jumping across" subjects and time but short stories?
This is also a good collection. The light pieces are entertaining yet meticulous. The heavy pieces are sprawling and exploratory. Didion has this way of making essays personal, but not quite about herself. It's a vision thing. Even essays about her own writing, essays where she explores the process and her own insecurities, are as much about art and about struggle as they are about Joan Didion. But with everything she does, she brings herself to it. And she tackles "objectivity" here and comes down on the side of honesty against a faux objectivity that merely hides the personal and the biased behind its veneer.
But what I most like here is Didion seems to understand that all this meditation and criticism and self isn't what makes for good writing. It's not the stuff of writing. It's not even what lingers after her own writing. Sensations. The feelings and images. The movement and shape of a sentence. These are what outlive an essay or a novel or a story....more
A nice starter. Poole opens with distinctions and the present moment and brings in a succinct and critical summary of earlier attempts to grip on or tA nice starter. Poole opens with distinctions and the present moment and brings in a succinct and critical summary of earlier attempts to grip on or theorise the subject. After that, he clears away the simple furnishings of theory and embarks on a kind of conceptual investigation that is open and various: it makes room for the vastness and complexities of classical texts without constraining them.
Even if you're not interested in academic approaches to tragedy, there's a lot to recommend this book. It draws from the plays of the new and ancient past and it meditates and moves on broader concepts. The beginning is deceptive and hard. But once it dips into its histories and texts, it turns to the opposite of dry theory....more
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was Iris Murdoch’s first published book and the first book on Sartre’s work to appear in English. In it, Murdoch studies Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was Iris Murdoch’s first published book and the first book on Sartre’s work to appear in English. In it, Murdoch studies Sartre’s fiction, his philosophy, and his politics. And over the course of the book she offers insights and criticisms that both contextualise and historicise Sartre’s work and key concepts; and these offerings both clarify and hit their mark. Her writing is more substantial than structural and more literary than philosophical, the layout initially appears idiosyncratic and conversational; but as the details of Sartre’s work begin to appear (opening after the later produced introduction, as the monograph does truly, with an energetic discussion of La Nausée) the book finds its force of explication and exegesis.
Initially it might appear strange to assimilate Sartre to romanticism or rationalism or some combination thereof. Sartre, after all, is the go-to existentialist for many and existentialism for many more is a kind of considered and politicised subjectivism or the mature consequences of a fully realised and worked out atheism. And further, Murdoch came to have a complex relationship with existentialism, as can be seen in The Sovereignty of Good (and less so in the misguided recent attempts to assimilate Murdoch’s own work to existentialism). But Murdoch relates the point of the charge to Sartre’s uses of freedom and the will, and particularly with his use of self-aware reflectivity, isolation, and the energetic upshot of his employment of a certain existential paradox.
I’d praise this book for the author’s work on Sartre alone, but for a reader of Murdoch whose interest is primarily or latently in her philosophical and artistic writings, there are further points of interest here that only passingly have to do with Sartre himself. There are early and spectral glimpses of ideas from Murdoch about art, novels, and the poverty of the contemporary picture of the human personality, that we’d see fully embodied in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and essays like On Dryness. There are also key terms and their usages that would develop into later points of interest in Murdoch scholarship and novel criticisms of Sartre from other writers, such as her uses of ‘flux’ to describe the acute experiences of contingency in La Nausée.
So, while I’d recommend the book to anyone looking to situate Sartre, my own selfish interest here is in how it situates Murdoch. I think it succeeds at both....more
In this volume, Coral Ann Howells reads the short stories of Alice Munro with a glance to a critical backdrop that is lucidly Irigarayan and feminine;In this volume, Coral Ann Howells reads the short stories of Alice Munro with a glance to a critical backdrop that is lucidly Irigarayan and feminine; one that emphasises the female body and knowledge, and 'open secrets'; and is also influenced by Derrida and, moreso, by the writers of the American South, such as one of Munro's own favourites, Eudora Welty, with whom Munro shares a literary heritage and ancestry.
In the opening chapter, Howells offers a critical context for the readings that will follow, drawing on thematic devices of houses and maps and other worlds. And then she reads selected stories from Munro's collections; beginning with stories from Dance of the Happy Shades (Munro's first collection) and proceeding through and up to, the then current collection, Open Secrets, while also looking forward ironically and with a recognition of the openness of Munro's narratives, to The Love of a Good Woman that would proceed it.
In the final chapter, she offers an extremely helpful overview of critical work on Munro; including both standard examples of Munro scholarship and more esoteric works, she also provides explanatory introductions to, and summations of, these works to aid the reader.
Any book of critical work on a writer whose work is varied and rich is bound to be more scholarly than breathing, I think. Howells does well to make connections here and there through careful reading of text and subtext, but there was something just not there for me. To use Howells's (and Munro's) house metaphor to get at my point: Munro's stories are about the life within a house, but Howells's writings, while getting at something important in the structure and architecture of Munro's stories, seem to live in the walls of the house without making it into the living space. Maybe it's that there's just nothing like Munro's direct address (if Munro's address can be called "direct" at all). Or maybe I just want criticism that gets closer to her....more
This is a lovely and concise introduction to classic Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. It ranges over creation, major and minor stories from the varioThis is a lovely and concise introduction to classic Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. It ranges over creation, major and minor stories from the various pantheons, and those lineages that come down to us from classical tragedy. While a study this broad can typically be faulted for glossing over detail, Hamilton stays often to shine up the tales and narrate and shape them.
There's a historian's respect for the way tales are preserved and received here; the author faults and praises the writers of the period for their ways as keepers of words. Ovid, that favourite of Shakespeare, receives the worst of the criticism. Having studied Virgil in more detail than I have Homer, I was inclined to find fault with her lack of enthusiasm there, but Hamilton has her own good reasons for favouring the Greeks and she does them a special justice.
The book ends with a short and glowing study of the Norse myths and a thankfulness in the authorial voice that these stories have remained to us, alive, brought along the winding path of time....more
Early in this volume, and without the round drip of ironic bitter, Bate finds from full compositions the familiar ingredient that the broadly flavourfEarly in this volume, and without the round drip of ironic bitter, Bate finds from full compositions the familiar ingredient that the broadly flavourful, Paradise Lost, has in common with the sweet, Winnie The Pooh. By attending in a way particularly sympathetic to difference and variety, he manages a roam over the English palate with stops here and there for short tastes. He finds these commonalities again and again, each time in fresh places marked sensibly and indelibly by their own histories, and makes wider comparisons outside of literature and finally about Englishness itself.
On first being drawn into an expansive world of a new author I generally have for a portal that author's best known, best loved and/or first book. In On first being drawn into an expansive world of a new author I generally have for a portal that author's best known, best loved and/or first book. In some cases, and owing to particular circumstances, I might start off on a minor work, willfully transport myself for lack of adequate device, and one-by-one build up my traveling by dimensions; however, by rule of habit a book of literary criticism by an author of fiction is a late point of encampment on a typical excursion. As much as I own to such a convention, I would also make a point to convene on bucking conventions based off of an inner or a social duty.
So, with Eudora Welty I took a different path by first beginning her On Writing and part way through it diverging into her little abode of symbolism, A Worn Path. Having diverged, the trip ahead is planned. I have an idea of what to expect, so many landmarks will not come as surprising as they would or might to an unadvised traveler, but as much must come with this prior expectation the happy fortune to have them exceeded.
Prior to On Writing, I knew of Eudora Welty as a prize-winning author, whose Southern embodiment and human landscape is visible in the rural work of Alice Munro, but it was a nice discovery that found Welty also preceding Munro in temperament and attention as well as she does in subject and the importance of place.
A writer has perhaps picked this up cursorily for practical tips on writing, but an education at that level is not to be located here. That said, there are lessons to be taken carefully and particularly that, I think, are more important - lessons for which Welty is ideal as a teacher. Her writing contains every kind of vibrancy and colour, so that a traveler who takes her up as their guidebook must inevitably and swiftly become seasoned....more
Paglia's little book of feminine wisdom and study ought to please a cursory or perusing reader equally. Her attention hits every detail of the backgroPaglia's little book of feminine wisdom and study ought to please a cursory or perusing reader equally. Her attention hits every detail of the background and fore; she places shapes on the screen into peculiarly fitting places and reads all small deeds as purposive. Sharp praise layers onto swift prose: the effect is an avocado verity....more
If, as their detractors would have it, horror films offer satisfaction of sadistic desires then they offer as much to the masochistic ones or more. PuIf, as their detractors would have it, horror films offer satisfaction of sadistic desires then they offer as much to the masochistic ones or more. Put pithily as it is, this is a crucial point from Clover that tears apart a prevailing view of horror. You are thereafter in possession of a fine thread and, though this book can at a cursory glance seem a haystack, it’s a worthwhile task to search for the needle: Clover does the sewing and leaves you with a tidy stitch.
Though they will be familiar to the experienced horror audience by now, the author takes us through the tropes and traditions of horror films and from the commonalities of a broad survey we emerge with three separate subgenres that will be relevant to her treatment of gender: the slasher film, the possession film, and the rape-revenge film. Whilst Clover’s treatment of possession films is thoughtful and of rape-revenge films daring and refreshing, it’s her rescuing of the slasher film from the jaws of critics that is the heroic act here -or rather how she throws the film into the predicament of its own “final girl” and allows it to fend for itself. The devoted horror buff will probably enjoy Clover’s initial analysis of horror films for its own sake, but reaching past this there is something more significant on offer.
For Clover, the horror audience is uniquely gender-neutral. Indeed, she commends it as a virtue of the horror approach that it reaches through gender brazenly and, though a point of no little contention, plucks out and holds in bare palms what later “serious” films will only attempt to do with thick gloves. Horror films manage to have a largely male audience identify with a female survivor; the viewer goes with her into the bad place, cheers on her escape and empathises with her suffering.
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Of course, it’s been quite a few years since Clover wrote this book and horror has undergone some interesting changes in the between time. The decline of slasher films, which the author laments here, would see a dramatic increase in the years following: Scream and its iconic self-awareness would be nearly as influential as Halloween was all those years ago, horror remakes would become a veritable class of their own (even Scream 4 is in on this), and documentary-styled shockers would bring a frightening clarity of realism to an otherwise mythic form....more
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