Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Virginia Woolf On Reading the Original
Boy Eats Universe
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Opening your Mind to New Perspectives
Friday, April 21, 2017
Reading the First and Ultimate Pleasure
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Virginia Woolf on Letter Writing
The art of letter-writing is often the art of essay-writing in disguise.
Woolf while talking about women in literature made the germane quote above about women writers. Until the 1800's it was considered unseemly for women to be writers, but letter writing was considered to be acceptable. We begin to get a glimpse of the lives of women through women's eyes emerging in their letters. While many of the letters may have been somewhat bland, they did give some insight into the lives and concerns of women in the 1700's.
In fact some of these letters were lengthy and polemic and would nowadays be considered as essays..
Woolf's own letters also reveal much of life in late Victorian and early Georgian times.
DK
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Samuel Johnson on the Common Reader
“… I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.”—Dr. Johnson , Life of Gray .
Long live the common reader. This is the quote from which Virginia Woolf took the title of her books, The Common Reader1 and The Common Reader2.
I am reading these books again and I'm refreshed with Woolf's style. No academic jargon or philosophical high flying. Just readable essays that we "commoners" can appreciate.
Ciao
DK
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
African Writers Bypass World Literature Centres
The flow of global capital is not to be ignored, but equally interesting are the grass-roots networks linking African writers to other regional writers—in South Asia, say, or Latin America—without necessarily going through metropolitan centers such as London, Paris, or New York. This is not the centralized and hierarchical “world republic of letters” that Pascale Casanova equates with world literature. It is a very different paradigm. And those who are spearheading this kind of research are not tenured professors but unemployed graduate students, the hundreds of people who applied for the job we advertised. - Wai Chee Dimock
This quote is from a Chronicle of Higher Education article titled A Literary Scramble for Africa.
This is great news. A grass root movement that is not driven by the West. African, Caribbean, South American and Asian countries have their own vibrant literary networks that are effective for them. In the wired world London, Paris and New York have less sway - and that is an excellent thing. The West has a tendency to see other non Western cultures as back waters populated by non persons(to paraphrase Chomsky). But the "non Persons" don't care any longer what the West thinks and this is excellent for literature.
Bring on the Revolution.