La situazione è più tragica di quel che si pensa. "Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association.
(The M.L.A. is the professional association for teachers of literature
and language.) The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in
decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and
less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate,
and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track
job. Motivated by “concern about the future of humanistic study,” the
M.L.A. asked a committee of eight scholars to go on a listening tour,
talking to professors, administrators, students, and “employers outside
the academy” about how the system might be fixed. Professors are always
complaining about “committee work”; judging by the report this one
produced, this was the least fun committee imaginable". Joshua Roth, newyorker.
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing è il titolo di un romanzo di Eimear McBride (Faber & Faber), una giovane scrittrice inglese che ha vinto il Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. E' un libro angosciante e scritto con una prosa molto sperimentale. Non amo questo tipo di libri, ma stranamente sono arrivata fino in fondo, trascinata dal ritmo della lingua più che dalla storia. Non so se è un libro che consiglierei, certamente sarebbe una sfida per un traduttore. Una delle frasi fa: "Have this yours mine his hers whose that and what's the matter don't you care at all?". nyt.
Michael S. Roth, presidente di Wesleyan University, ha scritto un libro interessante e non banale sulle humanities e la loro importanza, Beyond the University (Yale UP), sottotilo, Why Liberal Education Matters. Ce lo presenta Christopher B. Nelson, "The book’s supporting framework, which Roth borrows from the
education scholar Bruce Kimball, is the idea that two distinct
traditions of liberal education have “uneasily co-existed” in America.
The first is a philosophical tradition emphasizing preparation for
inquiry; its aim is freeing the mind to investigate the truth about
things physical, intellectual and spiritual. The second is a rhetorical
tradition emphasizing initiation into a common culture through the study
of canonical works; its aim is learning to participate in the culture,
to appreciate its monuments and to create new monuments inspired by the
old. Roth characterizes the philosophical thread as “skeptical” and the
rhetorical thread as “reverential.”
The central argument is that liberal education is some combination of
these two traditions that aims at serving the needs of the “whole
person.” washingtonpost.
L'Harvard Gazette intervista Stephen Greenblatt, professore di inglese a Harvard.
Q: Tell me about your boyhood. What might have put you on your path to being a scholar?
A: One constant theme in my whole life is a
fascination, somewhat compulsive fascination, with the power of stories.
Anyone who works on the kinds of things I do must, I imagine, have
something of the same compulsion. For me, as for most everyone else, the
sense that stories are powerful and important has its origin at home,
that is, locally and intimately. In different ways both my mother and
father were storytellers — my mother quietly and rather shyly; my father
in a much more florid, performative way. When we walked to his law
office in Boston, it was very difficult to get up or down State Street
in a reasonable amount of time because he would constantly run into
people and they would immediately begin to trade stories — this being
Boston in the 1950s they were largely ethnic stories, often with punch
lines I did not understand.
I grew up with the rhythms of these stories in my ears, and on my
mother’s side more intimate stories, made up specially for me, and in
which I figured as a character. If I were to ask myself, why have I
thought my whole life that stories are an enormously powerful way of
conveying things that are most important to a human being, it must be
this peculiar inculcation in the family and home. harvardgazette.
"Ailourophilia" è il titolo di un raccontino di Muriel Spark inserito in The Informed Air (New Directions), una raccolta di saggi dell'autrice appena uscito. Parla dell'amore per i gatti e inizia così, "If I were not a Christian I would worship the Cat. The ancient Egyptians
did so with much success. But at least it seems evident to me that the
domestic cat is the aristocrat of the animal kingdom, occupying a place
of quality in the Great Chain of Being second only to our aspiring,
agitated and ever-evolving selves". bookforum.
Il New York Times chiede a scrittori di indicare quali scrittori invidiano. Ecco come risponde Daniel Mendelsohn, "For all these reasons, the writer whose life and career seem to me most
enviable is Sophocles, whose “Oedipus” — considered by many (not least,
Aristotle) to be the greatest of all Greek tragedies and written, it’s
worth pointing out, when the author was nearly 70 — ends with that dire
warning about too-hasty appraisals of people’s lives. He himself had no
cause for alarm. In his private life, he was almost uncannily blessed;
in his art, even more so". nyt.
Su The Atlantic è uscito un elenco dei 100 migliori articoli di fantastic journalism dello scorso anno. Tipo "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" di Ariel Levy: "People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was
pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d
go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the
idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself." theatlantic.
“Yooper,” one of the 150 new words appearing in Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary and the company's free online database appears on
page 1454 of the printed edition of the dictionary in New York. The term
refers to native or longtime residents of the Michigan’s Lake Superior
region known for a distinctive manner of speaking and its Scandinavian
roots. Many of the other new words and terms stem from digital life and
social media; spoiler alert; hashtag; selfie and tweep, while others are
food driven, including pho and turducken, a boneless chicken stuffed
with a boneless duck stuffed with a boneless turkey.
Sull'Huffington Post è uscita una mappa divertente sulle rivalità e gli odi dei grandi scrittori. "Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop both disliked J.D. Salinger’s novels.
“I don’t like Salinger, not at all,” McCarthy sniffed. “That last thing
isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It
suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s
so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated.
Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I
simply can’t stand it.” Norman Mailer disliked Salinger too, but also
McCarthy . . . and Kerouac, and Gore Vidal; while Vidal had it in for
Hemingway, who had it in for Faulkner, who had it in for Twain". huffingtonpost.
"Reading books about how to be happy can be a depressing business. Part
of this is because one can’t help imagining the sad souls who buy them,
hoping to turn around a troubled life for $27.99 or less. Indeed, the
how-to manuals are only part of a broad, obsessive and flourishing
effort to pursue happiness more directly and systematically than ever
before. Courses in “positive psychology” attract thousands of students
at elite universities; there is even a Journal of Happiness Studies,
which has touted among many startling revelations the discovery that
“Positivity was associated [through survey research] with norms about
ideal life satisfaction such that countries and individuals who highly
valued positive emotions were more likely to display positivity.” It
doesn’t take a social scientist to see that a blizzard of how-to books
on “positivity” suggests its lack in everyday life. Behind the facade of
smiley-faced optimism, American culture seems awash in a pervasive
sadness, or at least a restless longing for a sense of fulfillment that
remains just out of reach". Seguono i titoli di vari libri sulla felicità che sembrano confutare che il "positive thinking" aiuti. Jackson Lears su thenation.
