What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

Lumps of Cram

[...] the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature in English or with the culture of Englishness? Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

recensione a:  Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford UP)

Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction. Neil Bartlett, The Guardian

ci piace ricordarlo in questa foto, davanti ai suoi libri 

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics

Dante’s divine autofiction

Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy, written in the opening decades of the 14th century) is already a heavily and explicitly political text, in which the poet at times exhibits a positively Trumpian relish in imagining the defeat and torment of his enemies. But its long-term reception is about a great deal more than politics. Rowan Williams, The New Statesman

che Dante continui a essere letto e discusso non solo dai dantisti ci fa molto piacere. L'articolo di Williams parla del recentemente uscito: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, di Joseph Luzzi (Princeton University Press)

Literature in translation

Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. 

With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish. Alexandra Alter, NYTimes

Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn

Long Island returns Eilis, now in her 40s, to Ireland in the 1970s and the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago. While most of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the small town in County Wexford where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set, it opens in Long Island. It is here that Eilis has settled with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a knock at the door changes everything. [...] ‘Long Island is the first novel I’ve written in which no one dies’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Long Island is published by Picador.

Diaries of Franz Kafka

This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries: an account of a trip to the theatre might be followed by a story draft, a gnomic half-sentence, the description of a prostitute, time spent watching a ski-jumping competition, relationship problems, dreams of a writing career in Berlin, a list of mistakes made by Napoleon in the Russian campaign, thoughts on the size of a fellow train traveller’s trouser bulge. The muddled presentation of all these elements, contextualised by thorough notes, gives the sense of Kafka not just as “the representative genius of the modern age”, as Benjamin describes him, but also a youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration, venting his frustrations and following his interests. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us. Chris Power, The Guardian

Diaries by Franz Kafka is published by Penguin Classics

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis

[...] Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis, of its richly compacted human stories and their sharp details: Noah, drunk and naked in his tent, his state witnessed by his son Ham, although not by his two other sons, who walk into his tent backward to avoid the filial shame; or Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright and winning his father’s blessing (“Do you have only one blessing, my father?” Esau cries on discovering what’s happened. “Bless me, too, my father!”); or the long story of Joseph and his envious brothers ... James Wood, The New Yorker

il nuovo libro di Marilynne Robinson si intitola Reading Genesis ed è uscito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Days of The Jackal

How Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business. Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end? Alex Blasdel, The Guardian

 

e per continuare a esplorare il lato commerciale della letteratura, da leggere è quest'altro articolo sui premi letterari:  "What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award", Alexander Manshel & Melanie Walsh, Public Books

Louise Glück by Colm Tóibín

Louise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

In her own poems, she worked with silence, breaking it, creating more space for it, leaving gaps, writing lines that would hold as much implication as they could. Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote

The other day, I was looking for a quote in Proust, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT. Here’s how it went.

EB: Is there a passage in In Search of Lost Time when Proust talks about how love affairs repeat themselves, and says that when you’re writing about a love affair in the past, you’re often drawing inspiration from a different love affair in the present?

CHATGPT: Yes ... Elif Batuman, The Guardian

Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

Forbidden Notebook

Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” New Yorker

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Astra House).

The Miraculous Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers.  Judith Shulevitz. The Atlantic 

del nuovo libro di Rushdie Judith Shulevitz dice che è "enchanting" e anche che è un trionfo. Mi sembra una bellissima notizia, dopo tutto quel che Rushdie ha passato. Su un piano più frivolo, eccovi la storia dei tote bags e di come un'umile borsa di tela sia diventata uno status symbol:

In the 1880s, a newspaper owner named Jasper Meek was looking out the window of his print shop in Coshocton, Ohio, when he saw a young girl drop her school books. As the story now goes, the sight inspired him to fashion a burlap bag in which people could carry books. But Meek also had an entrepreneurial mind, and he figured out a way to maximize his profit: he’d charge local businesses to print their names on the bags, which then served as tiny billboards as they were carried across town. Maija Kappler, The Walrus

The Written World and the Unwritten World

 

Can there be much material left in Italo Calvino’s desk drawers? Since the death of the puckish Italian polymath in 1985, no fewer than six collections of his nonfiction have appeared in English, gathered into the autobiographical (The Road to San Giovanni, Hermit in Paris) or the literary-critical (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Why Read the Classics?).

So with this seventh collection, The Written World and the Unwritten World, covering a scattering of Calvino’s literary writings from 1952 to 1985 and translated by Ann Goldstein, we might expect scraps from the table. Sure enough, there’s some slight stuff here – a page on character names, say – but the surprise is that we get so much of substance. John Self, The Guardian

The Written World and the Unwritten World è pubblicato da Penguin.

Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education