Sunday, January 25, 2015

This Thing Called Literature

This Thing Called Literature – Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle

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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.***
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13 responses to “This Thing Called Literature – Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle”

  1. nullimmortalis
    January 22, 2015 at 8:44 pm Edit
    P4 “One of the strange things about a literary work is its very uncertainty. And literature can always be read otherwise.”
    Reply
  2. nullimmortalis
    January 23, 2015 at 9:54 am Edit
    From here: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/nicholas-royle/ –>
    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.
    Reply
  3. nullimmortalis
    January 23, 2015 at 1:15 pm Edit
    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,…”
    Reply
  5. nullimmortalis
    January 24, 2015 at 7:56 pm Edit
    P19: “‘One must be an inventor to read well’ (Emerson, 1996, 59).”
    Reply
  6. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2015 at 1:22 pm Edit
    Sky thinking…
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    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,…”
    Reply
  7. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2015 at 1:52 pm Edit
    P44: “Mind-reading, for humans, is a means of survival. / Novels are the great art form of mind-reading.”
    Reply
  8. nullimmortalis
    January 26, 2015 at 9:21 am Edit
    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/
    Reply
  9. nullimmortalis
    January 26, 2015 at 9:49 am Edit
    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
    Reply
  10. nullimmortalis
    January 26, 2015 at 1:06 pm Edit
    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/
    Reply
  11. nullimmortalis
    January 26, 2015 at 1:47 pm Edit
    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
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