The Possessed made me think about an interesting workshop-style class I'd like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant - and what else? I have never read Nicholson Baker's U and I, but that might be a candidate - a few of Hazlitt's essays about the Romantic poets - perhaps an Eminent Victorian and some other critical essays (an essay or two by Richard Holmes?), I'd definitely like it to be not just all contemporary...
Students would have their own project - in order to be admitted to the seminar, they would have to offer at least speculatively the name of a writer with whom they have an intense enough relationship that they would be willing to pursue a larger project of this obsessive and personal biography-oriented sort. There would be short writing assignments every two or three weeks, and some workshop time in class, culminating in a 5,000-7,000 word essay at the end of the semester.
(Another book I have been meaning to read is Lawrence's book about Hardy. Not talking literary biography here so much as a personal and essayistic form of criticism that seems to be having a resurgence these days.)
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This would be a wonderful class! And yes, U&I would be perfect. There's also the anthology "The Story About the Story" with lots of great essays. I've gotten in email spats with the anthology editor :) but still, the anthology itself is mostly excellent.
ReplyDeleteI've got The Possessed on my shelf and will get to it ASAP.
This class sounds like so much fun!
ReplyDeleteFlaubert's Parrot and The Common Reader (too obvious?) would work well too!
If you're looking for something really not contemporary (and completely out of left field), Petrarch used to write letters to Seneca, Cicero, etc. as if they were his friends and still alive. In these letters, he would both praise and critique them. There's definitely a strange reader-author relationship going on there. Following with this epistolary strand, I've always loved Herzog's angry letters to various philosophers.
Sounds like a really great class!
ReplyDeleteTwo things spring to mind:
1) Anthony Burgess on Joyce.
2) The essays of Borges on various writers he likes...
Nicholson Baker's newest one, THE ANTHOLOGIST, is another good one in the Batuman vein. Charming and funny and structured around the protagonist's frustration with (and devotion to) the project at hand.
ReplyDeleteYes, and like the Dyer book it is the book written while the author protests he can't write the book. Jenny, I want to take this class -- any space for the middle-aged? (But 2x Baker would probably be too much.)
ReplyDeleteI second the recommendation of The Story about the Story (and from what I hear, Dorothy, you're far from the only person to get in a spat with the editor). I also have a stranger recommendation: Gregoire Bouillier's short novel The Mystery Guest, which is about loss and time and, in an odd, convincing, and affecting way, about the meaning of Mrs. Dalloway. It's quite a book.
ReplyDeleteThere's also Phyllis Rose's book Parallel Lives about literary couples in Victorian England. It's not exactly about literature, but it's not exactly not about literature, either. And it's so juicy.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea for a class. The world needs more intelligent and creative non-academic writing about literature. I have just read Laura Miller's The Magician's Book, about her relationship to c. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles, and it was a delight.
ReplyDeleteMy post about Miller is at www.nathaliefoy.wordpress.com
ReplyDeleteLawrence on Hardy is entertaining, though he tends to judge Hardy's novels by how closely their plots resemble that of _Lady Chatterley_.
ReplyDelete