The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (2003)

Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

This work of literary criticism aims to pioneer a new dimension in postwar literary discourse. Hungerford uses the historical event of the Holocaust and the subsequent academic movements of the New Criticism and deconstruction theory to show how the concept of personification (specifically the conflation of author and text, leading the text to be spoken of as the author) has taken on a new level of meaning in the collective consciousness, given that the genocide of WWII has made the fantastic possible (this is an antecedence to postmodernist thought). In Hungerford’s own words, “the understandings of literature and understandings of holocaust are connected by certain beliefs about the nature of representation and its relation to persons in the second half of the twentieth century” (12). This phenomenon of personification is not new (Hungerford gives the example of the destruction of Don Quixote’s library in the eponymous book), but personification takes on a new galvanization of life and death in our postwar discourse, and in reaction to this conflation, the schools of New Criticism and deconstruction place emphasis on the autonomy of the text, the divorcement of author and text. This is not to say that these schools render texts lifeless; in fact, “deconstructive critics imagined a text that was radically autonomous, even active.” Throughout the critics of this era, we find a tension between critics who want to homogenize author and text, and those who want separation. To conclude the work, Hungerford takes the stance that we should work to “resist personifying texts or tying them in literal ways to the people who wrote them” because when we conflate author and text we “constrict our freedom (to disagree, to read, not to read)” and limit our imagination (if a text truly represents a person or culture that we can directly experience, this effectively elides the need for our imagination) (155).

Re Joyce (1965)

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

The first line Burgess sets down in the foreword is: "Another book about James Joyce?" It is a fair question and inevitably had to be spoken at the start, for it must be justified. With the authoritative James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study by Stuart Gilbert and Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork available for scholars and non-scholars alike to use as guides, why should we take time to read Burgess's book? Perhaps the strongest answer is in Burgess's own profession as a novelist. (The highly idiosyncratic language of A Clockwork Orange certainly has its antecedent in Joyce.) From this perspective, the reader not only reaps the fruit of one who has read and obsessed over Joyce for over thirty years, but has the fruit peeled and blended into a smoothie. Who better than a novelist (as opposed to an exponent of academia) to maintain sensitivity to the lay reader while also enhancing the appeal of important books by important authors? Because Joyce is important. Ulysses (the longest day) and Finnegans Wake (the longest night) are, as Burgess has it, "twin heavens for scholars" but they also contain the entire cosmos and man's relation to it. Behind the mundane events, the books are about enormous matters. Their difficulty is by design and for our benefit. Heavily laden with a lifetime's worth of reading and study, Burgess plies us with critical extracts, biographical anecdotes, close-readings, and good humor, passionately guiding us into the dense "word jungles" of Joyce's masterpieces.

The Art of X-Ray Reading (2016)

Clark, Roy Peter. The Art of X-Ray Reading. Little, Brown, and Company, 2016.

Another book that follows in the wake of Mortimer Alder's How to Read a Book (1940) and Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind (2003, 2015). Behind the snazzy title is good old-fashioned close reading. Clark's book goes beyond an explication of a reading method, however, giving it a closer antecedent in Thomas C. Foster's fantastic How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003). Both authors guide the reader through an informed close reading of numerous classics, mostly from the American literary canon. This affords the reader indispensable insight into the tools of a seasoned reader. At the heart of both books is the simple truth that close, deep, fruitful reading of great literature comes "[w]ith age and multiple readings...." (Clark). Foster boils it down to memory, symbol, and pattern, which, of course, come only out of reading great literature over and over throughout one's life. Where the books differ, however, is that Clark's intended readers are not just readers but writers, so each chapter distills the results of x-ray reading down to concrete writing advice. After a warm and casual introduction, the book begins with an x-ray reading of The Great Gatsby, or, rather, an x-ray reading of a very small excerpt of the American classic. The book ends with everyone's current favorite literary form: lists! There is a list of great sentences from famous authors and the mandatory suggested reading list. 

From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991)

Bradbury, Malcolm and Richard Ruland. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Penguin Books, 1991.

The subject of the history of American Literature is an attractive one. Depending upon one's position it spans roughly four hundred years, making it more palatable than, say, European or Asian literary history; and it develops rather frenetically within those four centuries, thus making its study relentlessly engaging. The trouble, however, is where to start. As Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782, "What is an American?" Can we rightly group John Smith (who wrote the first romance on American soil) or even Thomas Paine (whose pamphlet Common Sense was the death knell for American independence) in with the annals of American literature? Or does truly American literature start much later with the phenomenal autobiography of Boston-born polymath Benjamin Franklin? The answer probably depends on national sentiment, and this is where a history co-authored on opposing sides of the Atlantic stands out from the pile. Indeed, the preface and first section, "The Literature of British America," assure the reader that the authors are well aware of the difficulties of circumscribing the borders of such a history and proceed to pinpoint the figures and texts indispensable for America's national literature. While the prose is more shrewd than colloquial, the authors exhibit a fine command of their subject as they move from Puritanism (with its travelogues, letters, tracts, commonplace books, and sermons) to the Indian-capture narratives that dazzled so many Europeans intrigued with the mysteries of the New World's indigenous people (i.e. real Americans, whose lore will be explored later in the text) to the political writings that stirred the dust of revolution. A perusal of the index reveals all of the expected names and movements up to the 1980s (the book was published in 1991), and, coupled with the table of contents, it appears that the ratio of material from half-century to half-century is fair. 

My Back Pages (2017)

Moore, Steven. My Back Pages: reviews and essays. Zerogram Press, 2017.

Steven Moore—an irreverent but supremely knowledgeable literary critic, editor, and writer—is new to my radar, following in the footsteps of my recent fascination with Michael Dirda and Alberto Manguel. Reading book reviews wasn't something I ever thought I'd enjoy, but, after reading through a handful of glorified reading lists (like that of Clifton Fadiman), I started to enjoy the craft of capturing just enough of the spirit of a book to make the reader (of your review) feel that the book must be purchased and read at once. The first twenty-five pages of My Back Pages are taken up by Moore's own introduction, which is pleasant and inviting, so I will exclude that from my format and focus on the book proper. Since Moore chooses to arrange the reviews alphabetically by author surname (so as to eliminate bias), the first twenty-five pages are spread across Héctor Abad to Anne Beattie, with names like Nicholson Baker, Djuna Barnes, and John Barth in between. Already within the handful of reviews, it is clear that we are in the hands of an enigmatic literary scholar. Moore exhibits an engaging conjunction between casual, crisp writing (as if you're discussing books over coffee) and a database-like mind buzzing with search and retrieval algorithms from a petabyte of data about books. Given Moore's previous two publications (two volumes that construct an alternative history of the novel from beginnings to 1800), one will never be at a loss as to what to read next if one has access to Moore's reviews.