Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once [Norton], her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Zoë Heller, The New Yorker

inoltre, un lungo articolo/chiacchierata su e con Ian McEwan, che parla dell'attacco a Salman Rushdie e del suo nuovo libro, Lessons (Vintage).

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Should revenge ever be a part of justice?

I think revenge may also be a way of dealing with grief.[...] Perhaps their strength of feeling was linked to a kind of survivor’s guilt, a sense they would be letting the victim down if they did not try to ensure the murderer suffered as much as possible. I suspect such feelings will only have made their bereavement worse – as the adage goes, hating someone else is like taking poison yourself and waiting for them to die. But as a response to trauma, it is not inevitable. For every vengeful family member of a homicide victim, another will choose not to be, feeling that retribution and hatred won’t do anything to replace their loss or assuage their pain. It seems a complex matter of conditioning, choice, and sometimes religious belief that sends individuals in either direction; I count myself fortunate that I’ve not had to stand at that junction myself, and don’t wish to judge anyone who has. Gwen Adshead, The Guardian

un articolo molto interessante, con una bibliografia altrettanto interessante.  Inoltre, dieci libri non mainstream su Israele:

What constitutes a literature of Israel? Is it the holy triumvirate of Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and David Grossman? I don’t really think so. Is it the poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik? Maybe. Or could it be the marginal pamphlets and pocket books of long-forgotten Zionist romance and pulp Hebrew detectives, where David Tidhar – no relation – reigned supreme? Is it the westerns, horror novels and softcore porn by such delightfully named authors as “Mike Longshott” and “Kim Rockman”, that one can still find on dusty shelves or in the Jaffa flea market from time to time? Lavie Tidhar, The Guardian

segnalo infine un articolo sul nostro Italo Svevo, "The Italian Proust," l'autore è Nathaniel Rich, ed è uscito sul The New York Review

The Draw of the Sea

It was a tragedy that sent novelist Wyl Menmuir to the “demi-island” of Cornwall, with its long and sinuous shoreline. In 2011, his first child was stillborn and he went with his wife down to the wild north coast of the county to escape. It was winter, and cold, and yet he walked into the ocean. “And for a few moments the grief wasn’t silenced so much as confronted by a wall of deafening white noise muting its constant scream. The sea’s great indifference was a comfort in a way I can’t easily explain and it continues to play its part.” Alex Preston, The Guardian

Syllabus: Myth in the Hebrew Bible

Myth in the Hebrew Bible is a complex and controversial topic, depending on how one defines myth and sometimes on one’s religious orientation. In everyday usage today, myth carries a meaning of something untrue, a fable, a fiction, or an illusion. That usage has a long history, traceable back to certain Greek philosophers. Anthropologists and historians of religion, however, use the term “myth” with a quite different meaning. For them myth refers to a traditional story, usually associated with the time of origins (e.g., creation or some important institution) that has paradigmatic significance for the society in which the story is operative. In this latter meaning, myth is characteristic of every traditional society; some would argue that myth continues to be operative even in modern, scientific society, camouflaged under other terms, including science itself (e.g., the big bang theory). Persons who hold that the Bible has been infallibly revealed by God and those who consider myth as something untrue may well find it offensive to posit that myth is present in the Bible. By contrast, those who see myth as one of the ways that a traditional society expresses it most profound truths may find inspiration in seeing biblical narratives as myth. Oxford Bibliographies

Syllabus: Women and Gender in the Bible and the Ancient World

This course will study in depth some of the narratives of female characters of the Bible, reading closely and considering a variety of perspectives, including historical, literary, theological and ideological approaches. Students will have the opportunity to engage in close reading of selected texts from different divisions of the Bible’ relate biblical texts to a variety of religious and secular contexts; discuss feminism and gender theory and their applications in biblical scholarship; becomes familiar with a range of theoretical interpretative approaches to texts. The course will explore intersections of gender, sex, race, ethnicity and class across the stories of women in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. University of Glasgow, Humanities

Syllabi. Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament

Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), or ‘Old Testament,’ played a formative role in the development of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This course provides an overview of the diverse genres of literature contained within the Hebrew Bible as well as an introduction to its modern critical study. Representative passages drawn from the mythological, imaginative, prophetic, and cultic strata of the Bible are examined in some detail, with emphasis laid upon acquiring a nuanced understanding of the significance of these passages within their historical and literary contexts. UNC Charlotte, Religious Studies

Syllabi. Defining the Moral Body: Sex, Race, and Gender in Religion

What is the ideal, moral body in a given culture? How does it perform? What does it look like? How does it survive in a pluralistic, global religious society? Are there multiple and/or shifting ideals? In this course, we will consider the ways religious discourses and practices have been used to assign meanings to the body and its activities. Through an exploration of varied religious contexts across historical time, we will interrogate how specific religious cultures have defined the boundaries of moral bodies via regulations concerning "appropriate" sexual, gendered, and racial performance. By examining the relationship between religious vocabularies--such as immorality, primitivism, and divine imperative--the racialization and gendering of bodies in the modern era, social taboos, and more, we will access broader questions regarding how religious discourses dictate and regulate the moral body. Stanford University, Religious Studies

quest'estate farò una ricerca di syllabi interessanti su valori/miti/narrazioni fondativi della nostra cultura.  Ogni suggerimento è benvenuto!

Emmanuel Carrère e TS Eliot

 ... non hanno nulla in comune, ma sono il soggetto di due articoli interessanti, che mettono in luce i lati inquietanti dei due scrittori. Di Emmanuele Carrère parla Ian Parker sul New Yorker. Ecco l'incipit dell'articolo:

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. 

di TS Eliot parla Erica Wagner su The New Statesmen:

Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s second marriage transformed his life.

si allude alla nuova biografia di Eliot, Robert Crawford, Eliot: After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape).

Words

vorrei segnalare una serie di interviste a docenti e critici letterari sul proprio mestiere. Sono uscite su   The Point Magazine a cura di Jessica Swoboda. Qui è l'introduzione all'intervista a Terry Eagleton, professore di letteratura a Oxford, Manchester e Lancaster.

Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.

Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April. 

sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books