/lit/ - Literature

Everything Pauline Kael wrote.

i like reading nabokov be hilariously dismissive of other authors in interviews

>>4784368
God any links? Any particularly hilarious examples.

>>4784406
Nabokov was an attention whore. He even bashes Don Quijote, come on.

>>4784420
Who cares, so long as it's funny.

>>4784428
I can tell already you're going to be another in a long line of moronic tripfags.

>>4784423
It's not. Reading an oldman babbling like that is sad, if anything.

Part 1

OP's book is amazing. Here is some of my favorites:

>Shakespeare’s Imagery, by Caroline Spurgeon;
>Shakespeare’s Language, by Frank Kermode;
>Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, by George T. Wright;
>The Development of Shakespeare’s imagery, by Wolfgang Clemen;
>The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays, by F.E. halliday;
>Shakespeare’s Uses of The Arts of Language, by Sister Mirian Joseph;
>The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays, by B. Ifor Evans
>Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, by Helen Vendler(actually all her corpus is really great)


To me there are two main species of literary critics: a) those who try to interpret what the author meant with his text and b) those who analyze the literary techniques used by the author (metaphors and similes creation, versification, metrification, the structuring of dialogue, punctuation, uses and transformation of source material, descriptions, creation of stream of consciousness: style in general).

In my opinion the critics of category (a) (which are by far the most abundant and the most famous - Harold Bloom, for example, is one of them) are generally (but not always, of course) useless and sometimes even pretentious: you (the reader) have every reason to want to make your own understanding: who are these gentlemen to have the authority to say what the author wanted to convey through his text? If they can discover the meaning of an author’s text, we also can (although I might admit that some critics of this kind are very helpful in offering candles of eyesight in some works that are truly dark forests of meaning – like Joyce Ulysses, for example).

As for the critics of category (b), I must say that they are special people: they spend their whole lives doing a strenuous job than earns them no money fortunes and no fame, just for the sake of the love they have for the artists who they are analyzing. The reading of such critics should be constant for young writers: there is nothing that favors more the formation of a young author than the analysis of the bowels of the works of the masters (that and also reading and writing a lot and constantly, of course). Unfortunately critics of category (b) are few and little known (even among serious readers). They are, however, the greatest treasures as young aspiring-writer can discover. If you have made literature one of your main activities and spend your free time trying to create your own works, there is nothing better to learn than a technical treatise about some of your favorite author’s work. If you can actually ‘see’ the way your heroes do what they do, if you can see the technics behind their great achievements, the rewards to your own work will be great. In that sense technical criticism is one of the best friends of writers.

>>4784456

part 2

About Harold Bloom there is part of a book introduction that I would like to share with you. It is from this book: “Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature”, a guide written by many essayists, but collected by Joseph Epstein, a very witty man, who also wrote the lines from the introduction that I am about to quote:

“The occurrence of genius may be a mystery, but that is no good reason to get mystical about it. Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of the day, is very generous in assigning literary genius. “I can identify for myself certain writers of palpable genius now among us”, he writes in the introduction to Genius, a book composed with his on essays on writers for whom he claims genius: “the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the English poet Geoffrey Hill, and at least a half-dozen North and Latin American novelists and poets (whom I forebear naming).” But he is considerably less generous in dispensing lucidity on what constitutes literary genius. Genius, he instructs, is “clearly both of and above the age”. He adds: “Fierce originality is one crucial component of literary genius, but this originality itself is always canonical, in that it recognizes and come to terms with precursors”. Genius also turns out to be “the god within”, and genius, “by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them”. He brings in Emerson and Gnosticism, neither of them great flags signifying clarity ahead, and concludes by stating that his rough but effectual test for the literary genius is: “Does she or he augment our consciousness…has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?”.

What widens one consciousness and intensifies one’s awareness, may, of course, not widen and intensify another’s consciousness. Or it may not do so the same consciousness at different times at the life of that consciousness, which is way some writers who swept us away at the age of twenty seem not worth rereading at forty. Nor is professor Bloom very helpful on the crucial matter of how literary genius operates, which is, inevitably, through style.

>>4784458

part 3 (end)

"Style, it needs to be understood, is never ornamentation or a matter of choice of vocabulary or amusing linguistics of mannerisms. Style, in serious writing, is a way of seeing, and literary genius, who see things in vastly different way than the rest of us, usually require a very different style. As Edward Gibbon wrote on style (quote by David Womerseley in his essay): “The style of an author should be the image of his mind”. Thorough this distinctive style something like a distinctive philosophy is expressed, thorough usually not directly: Which is where criticism and plain intelligent reading enter. Henri Bergson holds that understanding a work or body of art “consist essentially in developing in thought what artists want to suggest emotionally.” The style of the literary artist is what allows him powerfully to suggest what he sees.”

This excerpt is wonderful firstly because it shows, with simplicity, one of the main flaws of Harold Bloom’s criticism: he never says nothing about style, he never analyzes and dissects the viscera of an author’s great work; in other words: he never studies the metrical technics; the metaphor construction; the rhyming abilities; the stressing syllables choices; the simile construction; the tools for creating characters; and all the other secrets that really integrate the flesh and blood of a writer’s work. The only thing that Bloom does is stating, with no prove or evidence (but only assertion), that author A is better than author B, that author C is more important than author D. He’s prose is a soup of strange philosophic names glued together (Scholl or resentment + agnosticism + cabala, and etc.), and he is perpetually forgetting the work of a writer to rant about feminists and minorities invading universities and the classical canon (and although I really think that political correctness is an enemy of great culture, I can’t see any point in spending large sections of books wasting time with such losers – history will take care of mediocrity, there is no need to get your hands dirty by fighting them time after time after time). He is a man that has read a lot, but that learned little about literature.

>>4784420
>He even bashes Don Quijote, come on.

That's odd, considering Lolita draws some of its central ideas from the Quixote.

>>4784429
He has a point, actually.

bump

>>4784456
Would you reccomend Mirian Joseph's book on the trivium?

>>4785280

Yes, it is also very good. For someone with interest in poetry and, above all, in writing poetry, The Trivium can hardly be more recommendable.

>>4784354
Can't read her ever since I read Renata Adler's takedown of Kael.