What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (8 Viewers)

[washingcattle]

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn because it zooms along and it's utterly mental and White Noise by Don De Lillo because it's brilliant and the BFG by Roald Dahl because it's the fucking BFG.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Can someone recommend me about... three books to buy tomorrow. I've got a lot of alone, seaside time here and I want some really gripping reading, but just can't think of any contemporary novelists that I haven't already just masacred beyond belief. Any suggestions?

Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock because its fantastic and if you like that theres three more follow up books that are as good or almost as good. Pyat is my favorite anti-hero.

The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe - a fucking incredible fantasy doorstep. Ignore amazon customer's average three star rating, this is amazing and you cant go wrong.

that should do for now

 

[jonah]

Top notch suggestions all around boys, I've scribbled them onto my shopping list! Not read any of them - aside from the BFG which I already have and adore, of course.

 

[worthit]

 

[Lili Marlene]

Listen to some pop music with John.

Ah yes, dismissive ignorance, I knew I was missing something all weekend.

 

[jonah]

Argh I just got my reading lists, I don't think I'll be doing any reading for pleasure this year.

 

[rettucs]

Argh I just got my reading lists, I don't think I'll be doing any reading for pleasure this year.

oh do tell, please

 

[Lili Marlene]

I mainly got it based on the picture of the author on the back (i'll have to scan it in - AMAZING) but so far it's been pretty great.

Good to know that they were writing novels about worthless degrees leading to unemployment back in 1953. The main protaganist is a good complainer, I approve!

 

[washingcattle]

Argh I just got my reading lists, I don't think I'll be doing any reading for pleasure this year.

Yeah post em, what is it you're studying exactly? My money is an "M.A in the horn".

That sounds more perverted in text form. Sweet.

 

[Jill Hives]

Got through this over the weekend, extremely charming and incredibly sad, more like. Thoroughly enjoyable and even brought a few tears to my eyes. I know this was published 5 years ago and is one of the first to add September 11th into the storyline (which is now becoming more common) but imho was done rather well without seeming exploitative (for lack of a better word). Odd (for me) that out of the cast of characters, I identified most with an 70+ old man. I always like when perspectives change and intertwine in a book because it becomes a puzzle solve. I've never read any of his other books but I give this one a thumbs up.

 

[Jim Daniels]

Yay! Glad you liked it Jill. It's a beautiful book.

Got through this over the weekend, extremely charming and incredibly sad, more like. Thoroughly enjoyable and even brought a few tears to my eyes. I know this was published 5 years ago and is one of the first to add September 11th into the storyline (which is now becoming more common) but imho was done rather well without seeming exploitative (for lack of a better word). Odd (for me) that out of the cast of characters, I identified most with an 70+ old man. I always like when perspectives change and intertwine in a book because it becomes a puzzle solve. I've never read any of his other books but I give this one a thumbs up.

 

[jonah]

As much as I would relish the opportunity to prove my horn skills academically, its an MA in Literature and Philosophy.

I got reading lists for three classes, one core [Explorations in Literature and Philosophy] and two choice [Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction in Britain & Psychoanalysis in Creative Writing].

Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction:

We shall read the following texts (all available in paperback) in the order given: Ford
Madox Ford: The Good Soldier [there is an excellent new Broadview Press edition,
edited by Womack & Baker, with incredibly useful notes; but a good OUP World
Classics edition]; Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’ (there is an excellent Norton
edition) and The Secret Agent (Penguin); D.H.Lawrence: Women in Love (Penguin);
Hilda Doolittle: Asphodel (Duke University Paperback); Katherine Mansfield: Selected
Stories (please buy the new OUP World Classics, edited by Angela Smith not the older
edition edited by Dan Davin); Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts
(Penguin or OUP World Classics editions); Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
(Penguin); Jean Rhys: Good Morning Midnight and The Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin).


There are a number of useful preliminary studies: Randall Stevenson’s Modernist Fiction
and Terry Eagleton’s The English Novel are informative and stimulating. Pericles Lewis’
recent Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is very helpful while Michael Levenson
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism is very well worth reading too. You will
find copies of these studies in the long and short loan collections of the library.

Psychoanalysis in Creative Writing

Preliminary Bibliography
Ellmann, Maud, ed., Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1994.
Brooks, Peter. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund, material from various volumes in the Standard Edition and/or Pelican
Freud Library, especially PFL vol 14 (Art and Literature, Penguin, 1985).
Hoffmann, E.T.A., „The Sandman‟, in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R.J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982: pp.85-125.
Kofman, Sarah, Freud and Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.
Mahony, Patrick. Freud as a Writer. Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1987.
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Sigmund Freud. London: Routledge, 2000.
Wollheim, Richard. Freud. London: Fontana, 1971.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. 2
nd
edn. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998.
You are advised to read Freud‟s texts rather than texts about Freud, but the most
accessible introductory books are Wollheim and Thurschwell. Laplanche and Pontalis
is an indispensable „dictionary‟ of psychoanalysis; Ellmann‟s is an invaluable
collection of essays, and includes an excellent introduction. The most important text
to have acquired is vol. 14 of the Freud Pelican Library (Art and Literature). Before
the first seminar you will be expected to have read either Wollheim or Thurschwell

Phew.

 

[jonah]

oh and Explorations...

Session 1. Introduction: reading philosophy, reading literature
Discussion on the texts from the summer reading: information will be emailed to all
students registered for this course in mid-August.
Secondary literature on two examples of reading: R. Ingarden. ‘Introduction’ and Chapter
One in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art; W. Iser. ‘The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach’, The Implied Reader; H-G. Gadamer extracts from Truth and
Method; P. Ricoeur. ‘The World of the Text and the World of the Reader’ in Time and
Narrative CR; P. Ricoeur. ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’ in From Text to
Action
Session 2: Parataxis and Subsumption
A. Danto ‘Philosophy and/of/as Literature’ in J. Rajchman and C. West eds. Post-Analytic
Philosophy (Columbia UP: 1985) CR
S. Kierkegaard, ‘Notebooks’ in J. Turner and J. Ree, Kierkegaard Reader CR
H. Putnam ‘Pope’s Essay on Man and Those “Happy Pieties”’ in Cohen, Guyer, Putnam eds.
Pursuits of Reason (Texas Tech UP:1992) CR
Session 3. Disciplinary Boundaries
Picking on the concept of the ethical advanced in Kierkegaard we look at different ways in
which this can be thwarted, realised, be deemed inappropriate.
T.W. Adorno ‘Commitment’ in Notes to Literature vol.2 (Columbia UP:1992) CR
T.W. Adorno ‘On the Morality of Thinking’ Minima Moralia (Verso:1987) CR
T.W. Adorno ‘On Resignation’ The Culture Industry (Routledge: 1991) CR
Secondary literature on Adorno: Gillian Rose The Melancholy Science, Simon Jarvis, Adorno.
An Introduction; George Paddison Adorno and the Aesthetics of Music; Gordon Finlayson
Session 4. Disciplinary autonomy
We look at one statement of aesthetic autonomy and consider how it fits with questions of
politics, ethics, and truth.
T. W. Adorno ‘Presuppositions. On the Occasion of a reading by Hans G. Helms’ in Notes to
Literature vol. 2, pp.95-108
Oscar Wilde ‘The Decay of Lying’ in Intentions
Martha Nussbaum ‘Reading for Life’ in Love’s Knowledge pp.230-244.
F. Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy
Secondary literature on specific examples of ethicist readings: Mary Devereaux ‘Oppressive
Texts, Resisting Readers, and the Gendered Spectator: The “New” Aesthetics’ in Neill and
Ridley, pp.381-398; Christine Battersby Gender and Genius; Rita Felski Beyond Feminist
Aesthetics; Leela Gandhi Postcolonial Theory; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture; (6)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams
Secondary literature on the intersection of ethics truth and literature Wayne Booth from
The Company We Keep; Curtis Brown ‘Art, Oppression and the Autonomy of Aesthetics’ in
Neill and Ridley; Catherine Wilson and Jerome Stolnitz in John and Lopez eds., pp.317-323,

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Page 3[/FONT]​

PLEASE NOTE THAT MINOR CHANGES & ADDITIONS TO THE PROGRAMME ARE LIKELY
DRAFT COURSE OUTLINE JULY 2010
Page 3
and pp.324-328, also Budd ‘Truth, Sincerity and Tragedy in Poetry’, pp.83-122 and Tanner in
Neill and Ridley.
Session 5. Disciplinary Crossings
Focusing on one example of a philosophical reading of a text, we examine the role of the
reader as philosopher. The idea of judgement and the idea of defeat are also examined.
M. Nussbaum ‘Seneca’s Medea’ in in Cohen, Guyer, Putnam eds. Pursuits of Reason (Texas
Tech UP:1992) CR
H. Arendt ‘The Social Question (On Melville and Dostoevski)’ Reflections on Literature and
Culture (Stanford UP: 2007) CR
Seneca ‘Letter LXXXXVIIII’ Letters from a Stoic (Penguin: 2004) CR
On selves: Martin Hillis ‘Of Masks and men’ in Carruthers; Adam Phillips from Darwin’s
Worms ; Amelie Rorty ‘On Selves’; Marcia Cavell from Becoming Subject
Session 6. Philosophy and Literature as Culture
Wittgenstein Culture and Value pp.35-37,
Stanley Cavell ‘The Future of Possibility’ in Kompridis ed., Philosophical Romanticism
Charles Taylor Ethics of Authenticity, pp. 1-29 and pp. 55-121
Richard Rorty Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity pp. 73-121
Session 7. Transience & Transcendence
Sigmund Freud ‘Transcience’, Simone Weil extracts from Gravity and Grace; extract from I.
Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Session 8. Life as narrative.
We will focus on Bernard Williams ‘Life as Narrative’ European Journal of Philosophy
17:2(2009) and secondarily on the texts by Bernard Williams, Richard Eldridge and James
Conant on study direct. The aim is to examine issues around narrativist accounts of
selfhood. We will also be looking at philosophical narrative with extracts from J. Rée, extract
from Philosophical Tales: An Essay in Philosophy and Literature (Methuen: 1987) CR
and CR

 

[Lili Marlene]

Good times Jonah. I'm still reading my 'preliminary' list halfway through my course

 

[jonah]

I anticipate a similar remark escaping me come Christmas. That said I have read almost all of the Preliminary texts on the British Fiction one, and a handful from each of the other two so I'm not completely buggered.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Of these what do you suggest I start with. I trust your taste.

Wild Child
The Tortilla Curtain
Women

well, The Tortilla Curtain is the only one out of those three that i've read. it's good but not his best. i would start with Drop City. it was my introduction to him and remains my favourite. World's End, Riven Rock and The Inner Circle are also amazing. I'm going to read The Women next

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

oh and Explorations...

I know nothing about Adorno (or Marcuse or semiotics) but those words fill me with horror. why you couldn't have just stuck with mine and washingcattles reading list i dont know.

 

[rettucs]

This is for you jonah

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[St. Fechin]

As much as I would relish the opportunity to prove my horn skills academically, its an MA in Literature and Philosophy.

Your horn is equal to the square root of minus one.

 

[jonah]

You know, oddly that would work as a very geeky chat up line, the answer being 'i'. A really odd grammatically incorrect one, but a pretty awesome one.

That said ANGST. I have no life, etc.