I'd guess it's sort of how Jessica watches a movie, both simply viewing it and simultaneously being conscious of the editing choices. I've been trained to read like that.

But Hec, when someone else says "Oh, I just don't watch movies like that -- I absolutely loved it!" I don't then start hurling around nasty accusations of anti-film-theory-reverse-snobbery. Nobody is saying that critical thinking about art is intrinsically bad. What people (and by people I mean me) are objecting to is your apparent opinion that people not interested in deep litcrit discussions of Moby Dick aren't smart enough for this thread. And no doubt you're going to deny that that's what you meant, but from where I'm sitting, that is what your argument seems to boil down to.

I do think that there's a culture war of sorts going on where the Good Books (n.b. this is not a definitive list, but a qualitative one) are being taught so incompetently and discussed so flippantly that smart people (and I mean you, the Buffistae, among many others) see them as stuffy, boring, and out of reach. Why bother reading them (or so I guess the argument goes) when you have to be a professor to understand them?

I think the point that you're missing is that most people who are accusing said Great Works of not being particularly good books have, in fact, read them. So I don't see a lot of "Why bother? It's too hard!" (or even a lot of "I tried it, but it was over my head"*) going on so much as a lot of "Yeah, I read that. WAY overrated." And I also see an intrinsic assumption that most of us have read a decent amount of Western canon, and have formed opinions on the value (or not) of individual works prior to coming to this thread. So what you're seeing as out-of-hand dissing, I'm seeing as shorthand. And we may both be wrong, but that's where the disconnect comes from, I think.

[*The one notable exception from my own life being Finnegan's Wake, which I have started three times and gotten about ten pages in (which is also about where my father's notes in the margin start to thin out) before my eyes crossed and I had to put it down. I love Joyce enough to keep trying, but it may very well be a lost cause.]

I read books with the analysis part of my brain on standby -- it's there if something leaps out at me demanding to be thought about, but in general, I read for pleasure. Afterwards, though, I'm more than happy to cut it up into tiny pieces and look at it under a microscope. I think it's fun, and it doesn't, generally speaking, make me love the book any less. (Analysing Heinlein makes me sad, but that says more about me as a teenager than him as a writer.) I'm left-brained enough to love analysis of pretty much anything, in any form, though I'll admit, like others, to not really having the vocabulary for it.

Anyway, at this point I'm just rambling.

I just want to point out that in between all the lit-crit talk I've seen a heck of a lot of support for some kind of book club thread. Any reason why we don't pop this proposal into the B'crazy thread and get this party started right?

I liked Madam Bovary because I sympathized with Emma's situation, with her terrible sense of disconnect, with her being utterly trapped in a life she was unsuited for, and I simultaneously wanted to bop her on the head for being such a child.

300 messages later, and I'm still slightly taken aback. What I personally disliked about the tone of hayden, Hec, and Michele's posts was the air of "you people are doing it wrong, sit down and listen while I explain it to you."

Am I capable of participating in literary criticism? I sure hope so, or this whole grad school education is a waste. Do I want to do it all the time? Not really. Do I feel any shame in saying things like "Life is too short for me to read any more Thomas Hardy?" Nope.

I also think that attacking people because you're distressed that they dislike something you like is a little crazy. How did we ever manage to get through 5 seasons of Angel?

Wolfram, I was hoping we could discuss it a bit here before going the proposal route, but I've been unwilling to interrupt the discussion that's been going on to do so. I'm short on time right now, but I'll be back later this morning to throw some of my thoughts out there.

Eh, never mind. Here's the short version.

The first problem, as I see it, is choosing books. The second, related issue is that any book choice is going to leave some people uninterested, and hence uninvolved, for a fairly long period.

So here's my thought - We gather a host of book recommendations of all types - Canon, Ought-to-be-Canon, JustAFunRead, TranscendsGenre, etc.

Then I'd like to see these organized into a sort of revolving, overlapping schedule. So maybe each month, there could be three books on the table. Or maybe a different book each week, with some care taken so that one week is distinctly different from the next. Or some other arrangement that hasn't occurred to me yet. In any case, the idea would be that not everybody is going to try to read each and every book - but there'll be something in the offing for people of different tastes and interests, and you'll know what's coming up over the next few months so as to give time for reading or rereading.

So then each book or set of books would have discussion kick-off times, Monday mornings say, and perhaps a volunteer to get things started with a treatise, a quiz, or whatever the hell they choose.

Something like that, anyway.

Thoughts?

Present something this way to your average teenager, and you're likely to sour them, no?

Especially when you present Merchant of Venice without explaining that it's a comedy.

A good way to create appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies might be to begin with, "Shakespeare wrote the way people talked then. He used a lot of current slang. So if something sounds dirty, he very well may have intended it that way." Problem is, school boards aren't going to take that attitude very well.

The first problem, as I see it, is choosing books. The second, related issue is that any book choice is going to leave some people uninterested, and hence uninvolved, for a fairly long period.

Most book clubs read a book a month, yes? If we rotated genres, then hopefully people wouldn't be out of circulation for more than a month at a time, which I don't think is unreasonable -- it's not like it'd be the only thread here. (Also, people should feel comfortable saying "Hey, guys, the last three books we've read have left me completely cold. Can we read a _____ this month?")

reposted from (of all places) Music:

Incidentally (and waaay off topic, but inspired by your tagline) Based on reading it, wanting to understand the web of references, and noticing that it's out of copyright, I was thinking about starting an Ulysses wiki, to annotate the book (factually, not like "this is Joyce using metaphor) communally. Interested?

That's an open question, BTW.

I was thinking about starting an Ulysses wiki, to annotate the book (factually, not like "this is Joyce using metaphor) communally. Interested?

As stated before, not a Joyce or Ulysses fan, but interested. I'm a fact and history geek.

I'm in a book group that's been meeting fairly regularly since 1994. I don't know if our setup would be useful online, but if anyone's interested, here's how we work it.

1) Each person in the group can suggest a book. The suggestions are written down on a list and three are chosen for the next three months. (That lets people work stuff around their schedules, without nailing down, say, a whole year.)

2) The books on the list have to have been read by at least one person in the group. ("Well, I hear it's really good," has only brought us sorrow the few times we tried it.)

3) The book needs to be available in the library and/or in paperback, because most of us can't drop $30 on a hardcover book each month.

4) The type of book -- non-fiction, sf, canonically blessed classic, mystery, young adult fic, etc. -- varies, so everyone gets a chance to try something new or, alternately, only has to try the sort of book they hate once in a while.

5) When the meeting day arrives, everyone can talk about all aspects of the book. Like it? Hate it? Whatever, so long as you respect other's opinions. And when that day arrives, if we haven't read the book we assume that we'll be spoiled, 'cause the whole point of the group is to talk about the book.

There are other rules related to the type of book group I'm in (feminist, strongly inclined toward female writers and/or protagonists) that wouldn't be relevant. But items 1-5 have worked well for us. I have no idea if I'd participate in a book group thread if we do have one, but I thought I'd throw the above out. If useful, great, if not, yay scrollbar.

For those who are wondering, our next three books are, Money to Burn, by K. Munger, Emma by J. Austen, and The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

Note to world: hating a "great work" is a sign that hater actually read it. World has my permission to hang up by their toenails any and all who dismiss a work unread; but those who dismiss a work in the fulness of information -- those are people expressing an opinion. An opinion that may be 100% wrongheaded and in disagreement with me, but legitimate response nonetheless.

On the identification front, I find that having an emotional connection to a book is what makes it alive, for me. It's why books matter, don't you think? Not Reader-Mary-Sue ID, but This Struggle Is Still Relevant ID. (For example, I'm told that Austen books are wildly popular in India, because they dramatize the very current problem, in India, of marrying for your family's sake, or for love, or both.) People see parts of themselves in the characters and in what actions and mistakes the characters make, and say Yes, I know you in all your messiness. Isn't that valuable? Isn't that a way of seeing into other people's lives?

On some thought, I think my version of "identification" is identifying with a problem, and not just with a character. I don't cry for Laura Bounderby in Hard Times because I love her; I cry for her because she has a long dark teatime of the soul, and doesn't know what to do, and strikes out in lonely, frightened blindness and finds her father's heart. That sudden, mournful rapprochement -- it was the culmination of Dickens's thesis about "scientific" instruction being cruel and empty.

Most of the critical thinking people have talked about wanting is the kind that springs from that visceral place; it just goes beyond the love of the work itself to wanting to eat the author's spicy brain

Which JZ said much more succinctly, and with the phrase "spicy brains".

My main reaction to that was "OK, I guess you could read it that way. Or maybe that's just the color of walls in a building that age."

I think a good example of this is the scene in Innocence, where Buffy is looking for Angel, and goes to his house and finds him shirtless and he rips her emotions to shreds. Now, I don't know Joss personally. But listening to his commentary, he is 100% right that that emotional scene happening with one of the characters half-naked, in a private space, has a hugely different impact from having it take place outside with all in woolly coats. I don't know that it says something about him personally, but it does say Here are the choices I made, as author, and here is the outcome of those choices.

So a lot of modern litcrit is subjective, then? Many of the pronouncements I've seen have tended heavily toward objective, received truth.

The tone is a product of how criticism is "supposed to be written" -- i.e. that you're proving something, presenting a coherent case to the jury of your peers. (They don't have to buy it.) But I don't think litcrit is all subjective, so much as ... like looking at inkblots and saying why you think they're all scary evil bugs or dancing clowns or whatever. There's a certain element of "that's how it looks to me", but it ultimately has to be grounded in evidence from the text. That evidence can be totally contradictory, or ambiguous, or even unintentional on the author's part, but if you can point to a line that backs up your interpretation, you've found something valid. (Just not the only thing valid in that text.)

I'll agree with those who find the "you're being unintellectual" camp kind of didactic and insulting. I do think of myself as an intellectual, and I loathe being tarred with as indiscriminate a brush as I'm being accused of using on literature. If one is going to call me on being reductive or dismissive or crude, it sort of behooves one to not use the same tactics in one's objection!