/lit/ - Literature

>>21238068
>>21237832
>>21238904
If you read the book, it’s clear that this is a reflection of the main character’s own shallowness. She’s surrounded by people she (for the most part correctly) sees as obsessed with surface-level stuff, so she becomes like them. An internal longing for deeper emotional connection, and her inability to find it, drives her to pursue the titular “year of rest,” and after spending time totally alone to introspect, she emerges a more complete person, ready to engage sincerely with the outside world.

Her narrative ends with her sober, pondering nature, and feeling kinship with the elderly. She splits up with her yuppie MRS degree friend, who dies in 9/11. She also breaks it off with chad, who mistreated her because he knew she didn’t have the self-respect to walk away earlier. The implication is that though the three were originally similar, the narrator grew where most upper-middle-class New Yorkers stagnate.

The whole book is a repudiation of her initial worldview, much like Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, or American Psycho. Posting an excerpt from the first half as representative is silly.

>>21237155
One of my former professors was a close friend of Culianu, and wrote a book on his death. I was impressed with the both of them until I attended a talk my professor gave on another book of his about microbiology. It had all the characteristics of bad pop-science: mystification, death by anecdote, loose interpretations of facts, and grouping topics by themes rather than theoretical relatedness. I was so saddened by the talk that I dropped our class together, and never spoke to him again. I imagine Culianu makes many of the same mistakes, since this is exactly the sort of topic that would reward selective misreading and/or misrepresentation.

As far as I can tell, everyone teaching the humanities has a hard-on for getting simple things wrong about the sciences. In the same program, I ran into art professors who were mystified by Klein bottles, poets who used the phrase “Mobius strip” but didn’t know what one was, and philosophy professors who misremembered basic facts about Descartes. Oddly enough, the one professor amenable to correction taught gender studies. One of the authors we read misunderstood some simple statistical concepts, and when I wrote a correction as part of a critical paper, the professor pushed it out to the other students, and added it as a footnote to the syllabus the following year. But she didn’t drop the source.

After all this, I’m extremely skeptical about anyone in the humanities. They’re wrong more often than they’re right.