Reading Jane Austen is a required taste. In college, I read all the words in a handful of Austen novels without really getting what the book was about.
We 21st century readers suffer from a cultural knowledge gap when encountering the 19th century upper class world in which Austen's character reside.
My goal in reading her work today is to find the funny stuff. Believe it or not, Austen's work is comic. The novels fall into the comedy of manners genre. As opposed to tragedy in which the protagonist must rise to some epic goal, only to be foiled by fate or the gods, resulting in his/her bloody end, a 19th century comedy always ends in marriage.
The person most sensible, smart, attractive and underappreciated is generally prevented from getting married until she (almost always a she) overcomes every last conceivable object in between her and the ideal partner.
In Austen's work, that character is a stand in for Austen and thus for you the reader as well (the majority of whom were educated middle class women who aspired to the upper class world described in the novels).
Re-read one of the author's first descriptions of Sir Walter's middle daughter: she has "an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way."
I have highlighted several similar passages in each of the seven chapters that I have read so far. Keeping track of the comedy--Anne's great, which any smart person should see, so therefore her dad and sister can't see it--will help you power through this archaic world where the characters don't do much except go hunting, have tea, and complain about the behavior of other people.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Art as book review
How cool is cool?
How's about five book reviews in interactive media? Forget the words; we have modern art!
In this selection, you get a short narrative, a video and a work of art for each book reviewed. Check it out because we'll definitely do something like this in class.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Mixing Book Reviews with Social Commentary and Philosophy
Today's posts include one from my favorite movie reviewer of all time--A.O. Scott--who the NYTimes grabbed to review a book on the concept of immaturity in America. Scott writes things that are so funny and incisive that it often requires a double-take to realize that's he has eviscerated his subject. For instance, I still remember back in 2007 when he wrote that the movie version of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" triumphed by taking longer to watch than it took him to read the book. That's some delightful sarcasm there, in case you are wondering. Here's Scott's take on "Why Grow Up" by Susan Neiman.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/books/review/why-grow-up-by-susan-neiman.html
I've also linked to an interview with Candace Bushnell, whose work you may be familiar with, although I'm not a fan. The reason I include it is that she reveals the fascinating world of books in which her mind has been swimming since she was growing up. She talks about how she found a Groucho Marx biography in the high school library and she could have hidden away in that corner of the library reading it forever. I love that!
Also, here's a review about how your parents could do a better job (note more verbal irony): there's some ammo for future dinner table discussions. The book is "How to Raise an Adult" by Julie Lythcott-Haims.
My email address is howellj@dy-regional.k12.ma.us
The purpose of these postings is to give you an entree into the world of the intellectual. Send me your entries or commentaries as soon as you can--one or two per week is the right pace--because we're trying to cultivate habits of mind that will take your scholarly game to the next level.
Feel free to choose other book reviews of comparable merit if you wish.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
To Ulysses and Beyond
June 14, 2015
For those who want to get a jump on the summer assignment, you could pull off many editions just by reading today's NYTimes Book Review, which has every thing in it from a review of a book about the lives of great authors to a review about a book on Stalin's Daughter.
My selection today is a two for one book review: two reviews by authors from today of a book that is extremely difficult to read but considered one of the most important works in the English language--James Joyce's Ulysses.
At the time of its publication by the Irish author, it was considered obscene and the U.S. Postal service actually burned copies of the book. Much of the innovation in Joyce's work is considered normal in today's novels; reading the reviews will help clue you in on what those innovations are.
The book is considered canonical, which is a word you ought to look up, so when you get to grad school you may have to read it. For our purposes, the novel Ulysses points to the relevance of Ms. O'Connor's assignment to look up all those Greek, Roman and Biblical stories because the entire novel pretends to be a modern day (or 1920's) version of The Odyssey.
"How Would Ulysses be Received Today?"
For those who want to get a jump on the summer assignment, you could pull off many editions just by reading today's NYTimes Book Review, which has every thing in it from a review of a book about the lives of great authors to a review about a book on Stalin's Daughter.
My selection today is a two for one book review: two reviews by authors from today of a book that is extremely difficult to read but considered one of the most important works in the English language--James Joyce's Ulysses.
At the time of its publication by the Irish author, it was considered obscene and the U.S. Postal service actually burned copies of the book. Much of the innovation in Joyce's work is considered normal in today's novels; reading the reviews will help clue you in on what those innovations are.
The book is considered canonical, which is a word you ought to look up, so when you get to grad school you may have to read it. For our purposes, the novel Ulysses points to the relevance of Ms. O'Connor's assignment to look up all those Greek, Roman and Biblical stories because the entire novel pretends to be a modern day (or 1920's) version of The Odyssey.
"How Would Ulysses be Received Today?"
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
NYT book review assignment for AP English 12
Howell will post four NewYork Times Book Reviews each week. If you can't find his posts, then just google New York Times Book Review and select two for yourself.
Read and write about 2 and email your responses to howellj@dy-regional.k12.ma.us
We are attempting to develop your habits of mind: you need to habitually think and write like a literary critic to play the game necessary for success in AP English 12. Therefore, send 2 responses a week to Mr. Howell until you have accumulated at least 8 responses.
Please comment on examples of extraordinary diction, exceptional syntax, and sweeping insight before identifying the reviewer's thesis. Finish it off with a statement on whether you agree or disagree with the reviewer.
Your responses should mimic the following sample format.
LOVING DAY
By Mat Johnson
287 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $26.
reviewed June 1, 2015 in the New York Times Book Review by Baz Dreisinger, an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
By Mat Johnson
287 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $26.
reviewed June 1, 2015 in the New York Times Book Review by Baz Dreisinger, an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
EXTRAORDINARY DICTION: "Liminal"--"liminal" means on the edge, “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (dictionary.com). It's a literary term often referring to characters who are not squarely in one particular culture, and their outside status allows them special insight as narrators about the world on whose edge they live. Huck Finn, The Invisible Man, and even Scout Finch are liminal characters to their worlds.
"He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither — call him a man divided against himself. “I am a racial optical illusion,” he say." (Dreisinger)
EXCEPTIONAL SYNTAX: "It’s a semi-autobiographical one — he has called the book “my coming out as a mulatto” — that can at times feel belabored, but the novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris — yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise." (Dreisinger)
The reviewer has massive ground to cover to fully characterize Johnson's novel, and she freely alludes to genres and authors, setting off her specific allusions with internal dashes--those sidelines separating sentences within sentences--a consistent sign of elevated writing.
SWEEPING INSIGHT: “In one respect the decaying house is a metaphor for urban America, for the ghettos of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago: phantoms of the palatial African-American meccas they once were. The house is also America itself, as relentlessly haunted by the obdurate, divisive specter of race as Warren is. Race, after all, is ghostlike: a dubious entity invested with immense power by believers.” Dreisinger pursues a lofty connecting point between the novel’s setting and the massive problem of urban decay, crime, and family pathologies.
REVIEWER'S THESIS: "But really “Loving Day” is playing with that tired trope; Warren is tragic, yes, but not because he is a “mulatto” — he’s tragic because he, like mostly everyone else in the novel, is haunted by ghosts of painful pasts and broken families: ex-partners, dead parents, rotted loves."
AGREE/DISAGREE: Dreisinger uses the dismissive modifier-"tired"- to puncture the well-filled tire of this review, finishing it off with a deflationary hiss. "Trope" in this sense means "commonly recurring literary or rhetorical device" (wikipedia), so the reviewer implies that she's read work like Johnson's all too often, been exposed to Johnson's liminal world all-too-often. And yet, the "painful pasts and broken families" populating the author's work clearly need better defining in our fractured and racially contentious society. So go out there and read Johnson's work yourself.
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