This Thing Called Literature – Reading, Thinking, Writing
Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle (Routledge 2015)
I received this book today as purchased from Amazon UK.
My earlier real-time review of QUILT a novel by Nicholas Royle HERE
***My notes on this book are in real-time below as part of this post’s comment stream.***
P4 “One of the strange things about a literary work is its very uncertainty. And literature can always be read otherwise.”
From here: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/nicholas-royle/ –>
Nicholas Royle
Nicholas is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He was born is Cheshire and has written for TIME OUT, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, OBSERVER and others. He lives in West London with his wife and son.
My review of two novels by the two Nicholas Royles two years ago…. https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/novel-doodlings/
But that is NOT the photograph of the Nicholas Royle who co-wrote this book. Meanwhile, the hybrid bio of two Nicholas Royles on the page* linked above only helps illuminate my next quote below from my current reading of ‘This Thing Called Literature’, a wonderful book which so far seems now in 2015 gratifyingly to bolster the thinking behind my gestalt real-time reviewing and dreamcatching of books since 2008.
[*a page that has been this hybrid one for many years, but please do give it a look now in case someone changes it as result of this reference to it!]
P10: “No text exists in splendid isolation, however: everything is connected,…”
The first novel I ever read by Nicholas Royle was COUNTERPARTS…
P19: “‘One must be an inventor to read well’ (Emerson, 1996, 59).”
Sky thinking…
P37: ” There is a wonderful moment in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1963 novel The Little Girls that evokes the sense of being lost in a book,…”
P44: “Mind-reading, for humans, is a means of survival. / Novels are the great art form of mind-reading.”
P44: “…’leap over the walls of self’ (Wallace 1998, 51). Only in novels do people inhabit our thoughts in this way, prompting us to reflect on the idea that they read our minds as we are reading theirs.”
This is an eye-opening book, breaking new ground even for someone like myself who has gone on interminably about filters being two-way…
My own notes on ‘dreamcatching’ that hopefully can be factored into this wonderful book by Bennettt and Royle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/i-only-buy-books-i-know-i-will-like/
There follows much interesting material on the nature of the short story…
P53: The short story “relies on ‘poetic tautness and clarity’, according to Elizabeth Bowen, another great exponent of the form,…”
My website dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com
P94: “…Elizabeth Bowen: ‘To write is to be captured – captured by some experience to which one may have hardly given a thought’…”
Cf my dreamcaptchas, dreamcatchers – and my review of ‘Finnegans Wake’ : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/finnegans-wake-james-joyce/
The full quote – “The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him – a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured – captured by some experience to which one may have hardly given a thought.”
Now – something where I disagree with this book. They encourage brainstorming when reviewing a fiction book. But then they say one should tidy it up and make it appear less haphazard, more argued as if you know what you are talking about. Well, I think there can be something valuable and revelatory in leaving your real-time thoughts written as you first write them. Those thoughts must be expressed carefully, I agree, and they must be based on the ‘truth’ of what you read and of what you feel about that reading. By revising it later you may be inadvertently destroying germs of that ‘truth’.
I think this book is advice to students and how to present considered academic essays as a result of previous brainstorming. My dreamcatchers and gestalt real-time reviews stand or fall in the cut and thrust of social media and blogs. If many of us do this dreamcatching about a specific fiction book we can increasingly ‘triangulate’ that book’s ‘truth’…
end