A quick note on the neuroscience of reading

I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:
If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather [...]

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A delectable morsel of Proust

From “Sainte-Beuve and Balzac”:
Besides, I must point out that Balzac [ . . . ] conferred privileges on dukes that Saint-Simon, for all his high opinion of dukedoms, would have been quite dumbfounded to see bestowed on them. “The Duke gave Mme. Camusot one of those swift glances by which the lords of the land [...]

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What do Rushdie’s slums look like?

A colleague kindly pointed out that my attack on Rushdie’s realist critique of Slumdog Millionaire came across as praise of Slumdog rather than critique of Rushdie.
Here, then, is a critique of both, with a special Sunday bonus critique of the New Yorker.
One of the more remarkable scenes in Slumdog Millionaire is the visit of a [...]

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Sourcing a blurb

In a conversation with a friend about Lolita, an interesting problem arose. This is the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the book:

In the upper left corner is the blurb “The only convincing love story of our Century” —Vanity Fair. You can imagine why this characterization could be a problem. I have never [...]

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Midnight’s Slumdogs

There are a number of fair critiques one could level against Slumdog Millionaire, but Salman Rushdie chooses to attack its unrealistic plot?
Lecture at Emory, 2009, as reported by the Guardian:
“The movie piles impossibility on impossibility,” he said in a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, raising questions over how the characters end up at the [...]

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Journal Club #3: Hülya Adak, Jale Parla, and Nergis Ertürk on Turkish and world literature

Katy, Dana, and Ryan’s thought-provoking responses to last Friday’s post (Finding the Countercanon, below) sent me back to the cluster of essays on Turkey and world literature at the beginning of January’s issue of PMLA (123.1). These articles are, frustratingly, behind a paywall, but the titles below link to abstracts.
When we look to English-language readings [...]

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A war of words at the bottom of the alphabet

In the last few years, the Virginia Quarterly Review has become the poster child for a successful reimagining of literary periodicals. Ted Genoways, VQR’s brilliant young editor, applied the aesthetic flexibility of zines (comics, sarcasm) to a venerable lit periodical, and began funding serious international reporting and photojournalism in a way you rarely see outside [...]

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Finding the countercanon

Sometime this summer I’ll pose for an Author Shot to replace that trippy anonicon, but for now I have to ask you to take my word for it that I’m a white man. With a beard, if that matters.
Perhaps because of my privileged upbringing (private school) and context (exurban midwest), or perhaps because of a [...]

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What is expertise?

I’ve been appreciating the riffs on David Remnick’s 100 Essential Jazz Albums at Why not blog? and Yellow Dog—though my public library probably isn’t so happy about the influx of transfers—but these lists have thrown me into something of a crisis about expertise.
Donna and J. Rice—to say nothing of David Remnick—gain authority for their claims [...]

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In praise of bad reading

A parenthetical debate about close reading appeared on a couple high-profile blogs this weekend. First, Sisyphus:
(I have banned the phrase “close reading” from my vocabulary, as none of us are really matching patterns to find the keystone of irony or whatever was in the New Critical method. It’s become a pet peeve of mine that [...]

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