Anya ,'Touched'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Whereas Walker's subordination of fiction to immediate political concerns is going to read like a very earnest, boring, preachy abolitionist novel from the 1850s.
OK-- I am starting to agree with you. I just tend to have a fondness for things that don't age well-- in what they can tell us about then. The Jungle or Maggie, Girl of the Streets or Daisy Miller come off in the same ay to me but I still think it has a place.
However, Jilli reminds me I want to dig out SWTWC again. It's a shame the movie wasn't better, because the casting was impeccable, IMO.
The movie could have been better if they had decided not to go for cheap scare tactics by changing the Dust Witch into Queen of the Spiders. Gaaaah!
I bet Jilli has already read "Goblin's Market" and all those decadent, juicy, mordant pre-Raphaelite poets.
Luuuuuurve "Goblin's Market". In fact, I saw a kick-ass stage production based on it. However, I will admit that I haven't read a *lot* of poetry; most of my teachers picked not very interesting-to-me poems and then proceeded to do a horrible hack & slash job of explaining why we should admire it.
Quick little notes:
I tend to put Surfacing in because of the way it deals with gender and identity. In some respects, I feel it is the most "Canadian" of her novels
To me that's why Surfacing will not be the canonical Atwood book; because she was consciously trying to write the Great Canadian Novel it's not universal enough. I'd plump for Cat's Eye along with everyone else, although Alias Grace might come close.
I know I've readSurfacing, but my pick for canonical Atwood would be either Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride does. Cat's Eye is closest to the bone, but the language in The Riobber Bride sticks with me endlessly.
As for Irving, I read it all in high school. I think Owen Meaney and Garp were my favorites. (I still haven't read A Widow forOne Year, though)
Still, I could see this book, and possibly the sequels, being taught in English classes 20 years from now.
I think it's an excellent snapshot of the era, and in a way Maupin is a modern Dickens. I'm not sure it will be taught, but I hope it will be read.
And I went to the library today! Got The Things They Carried, Augusten Burrough's Dry, and The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford because the idea of a completely unreliablenarrator fascinates me.
Owen Meany and Garp are my favorite Irving books, but I also have an odd love for A Son of the Circus.
I think "The Color Purple" will be read for a long time. Not so sure about other AW.
Polter, my lamb, your long quote from Faulkner crystalized a character development point I'd been having with a long fic I'm working on and gave me the key for why the character is going to do what that character is going to do. t hugs and kisses
Part of me is horrified for using a classic author to drive a piece of vampire fanfic, the other part is patting me on the head and going "You're so smart, using all your resources, go, you." Guess which part I'm listening to.
I think I approach 'literary criticm' in an odd way-- I was an undergraduate Literature major, and about 1/2 way through I really discovered that what I loved about literature was not necessarily the language-- but what the literature of a time told me about it's people and how that compared to today's worldview.
Yeah. We did integrated studies, so lit was tied in with myth was tied in with history and politics. It meant that the one time I had a class where things weren't integrated, I was bored stiff.
Which is probably why I'm the Surfacing weirdo, because Dani's point:
To me that's why Surfacing will not be the canonical Atwood book; because she was consciously trying to write the Great Canadian Novel it's not universal enough.
while probably correct as to why it will be something like Cat's Eye instead, is exactly *why* I would put it in. Though for those of you at home, if you must read one Atwood, make it Lady Oracle, which is her most entertaining novel.
I'm hoping you don't pattern your life too closely on his....
Don't worry. I've already outlived him, anyway.
As I've noted before, the damn thing opens with a bunch of dead puppies strung over the back of a chair. Dead puppies! That'll catch your attention.
Whoa! How'd I miss the dead puppies? *looks* I can't find the bloody dead puppies. I mean, there's the living dogs with mean dispositions, but no dead puppies.
The overwhelming image from Beloved that sticks with me a so profoundly disturbing is the image of a black man in a bit (like a horses bit).
For me, it's the cow-fucking.
P-C has inspired me to give Faulkner another go, which is something that up until two days ago I would've sworn on a stack of the collected sacred texts of every culture on the planet I'd never, never do.
*beams* Awesome. I'm so inspirational. If you do Sound and the Fury, I do suggest having Cliffs Notes handy, but I was able to make sense out of Absalom, Absalom! using only the chronology and genealogy in the back. Then again, I was also four years older. I'm not sure what Faulkner is less impenetrable than those two.
I'm ashamed to admit that Handmaid's Tale is the only Atwood I've ever read, and now I feel very urgently that I need more;
JZ is me, except I've always been meaning to read more, although yes, it now feels far more urgent.
Polter, my lamb, your long quote from Faulkner crystalized a character development point I'd been having with a long fic I'm working on and gave me the key for why the character is going to do what that character is going to do.
Yay! I'm glad to have helped you. I love that passage so much, because I identify with it so strongly. I love the imagery of all people being connected like that, such that anything we do can affect someone else, and then the wish to leave a mark on the world in stone, something permanent and undying.
I'm on Chapter 8 of Wuthering Heights now, and it's actually rather interesting how it resembles Absalom, Absalom! somewhat. You have the young male protagonist being told the story of a complicated family by an older woman.