tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6414434966129274412024-03-07T04:09:35.553-04:00Novel ReadingsNotes on Literature and CriticismRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.comBlogger419125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-64356190872797227672010-05-09T16:54:00.001-03:002017-12-31T11:03:52.719-04:00Novel Readings has moved...Just a reminder to anyone who used to read or subscribe to Novel Readings and hasn't seen any activity over here recently: new posts are going up at the new address:
http://rohanmaitzen.com/novelreadings
Don't forget to update your blogrolls, subscriptions, or RSS feeds.Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-42278003914543175732010-03-21T08:58:00.004-03:002010-03-21T09:08:21.645-03:00A New Home--Who'll Follow?Yes, that's the title of a story of American settler life, by Caroline Kirkland. But it's also the state of affairs at Novel Readings, which as of today is relocating to its new address and becoming part of the family of blogs hosted by the online literary magazine Open Letters Monthly. Aside from the new address, it will be the same Novel Readings as always. I hope you'll update your RSS feeds, Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-76931059759599770152010-03-19T14:42:00.004-03:002010-03-19T15:06:17.121-03:00This Afternoon in My Class (March 19, 2010): Seamus HeaneyAs a brief follow-up to my previous post, which discussed a certain flagging of enthusiasm for one of my classes, I'll just report that I thoroughly enjoyed this afternoon's tutorial meeting on Seamus Heaney. The best thing about it was that it was the first time I can remember this term that a significant number of students were genuinely enthusiastic about a poem: that is, often students will Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-91960181796076262242010-03-18T19:42:00.008-03:002010-03-19T12:24:20.774-03:00This Week in My Classs (March 18, 2010)This week is nearly over already! Whew. It hasn't been a particularly intense week in my classes (relatively "light" reading, for instance, in both of my undergraduate classes, plus the final books of Middlemarch for my graduate seminar, which I know well enough by now not to have to reread every word--though, as a matter of fact, I did reread almost all of it anyway, because who wouldn't, given Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-67515906926427101982010-03-16T21:10:00.005-03:002010-03-17T08:53:33.750-03:00Reading TolstoyI'm not, but these posts really make me wish I were. It was Early Tolstoy Week recently at Wuthering Expectations, beginning with Chldhood, Boyhood, Youth:It's Tolstoy's first novel, yet is so Tolstoyan. The obsession with death, for example, the way death mingles with life. In Chapter 23 of Boyhood the children are all sent on a surprise sleigh-ride. What a lark!: As we drew up to the Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-73741326043272769042010-03-15T12:25:00.003-03:002010-03-15T12:29:41.487-03:00How happy the lot of the mathematician!From W. H. Auden's essay "Writing":How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were contentRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-34384237890554405502010-03-11T20:15:00.014-04:002010-03-11T22:55:36.367-04:00Louis Menand, The Marketplace of IdeasThe Marketplace of Ideas is not as interesting as I thought it would be. One reason may be that it is part of a series intended, as series editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains, to "invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends"--that is, the books are not rigorous analyses aimed at specialists but accessible and deliberately provocative commentaries Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-20737056469155410682010-03-09T19:58:00.005-04:002010-03-09T20:35:14.331-04:00Worth a Look or Listen: Louis Menand, Philosophers and Fiction, and the Dangers of TheismI haven't been keeping up my "Weekend Miscellany" posts for a while, so here's a bit of a miscellany for a Tuesday evening instead:At Open Letters Monthly, Laura Tanenbaum reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas:The basic facts will likely be familiar to current or recent graduate students: graduate school takes longer to complete than ever before, especially in the humanities, nearly Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-4922242029876798062010-03-08T14:46:00.002-04:002010-03-08T15:23:37.693-04:00This Week in My Classes (March 8, 2010)It will be easier next time. And better, too, probably.Or at least, this is my comforting mantra every time I come out of my Brit Lit survey class these days. Today it was a madcap dash through Yeats, with some gestures towards "What is modern(ist) poetry?" Wednesday and Friday are T. S. Eliot, next Monday it's Auden, then Dylan Thomas, then Seamus Heaney. It is nerve-wracking trying to decide Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-46413994097546428412010-03-03T08:52:00.002-04:002010-03-03T09:11:22.946-04:00This Week in My Classes (March 3, 2010)Last week there were no classes--it was that heady interval known as 'Reading Week,' or, to some, 'February Break.' I could tell it was a 'break' because I didn't work nights. Otherwise, I was pretty busy, especially with working my way through the major research assignment that had just come in from my Brit Lit survey class, reading through some graduate thesis chapters, and catching up on Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-51716192771849848312010-03-01T08:50:00.005-04:002010-03-10T10:10:42.764-04:003 Quarks Daily Arts & Lit Blogging PrizeIf you'd like to show your appreciation for good blog writing about literature and the arts, click on over to 3 Quarks Daily and take a look at their nominees for the 2010 3QD Prize in Arts and Literature. The editors invited nominations of blog posts of no more than 4000 words, written since February 21, 2009. I've begun browsing through the entries and it seems like a lively and predictably Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-62555394047275336142010-02-24T20:34:00.005-04:002010-02-24T21:09:09.740-04:00Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable CreaturesIn a word, unremarkable.I suppose it should be no surprise that the majority of books I read are not that good. If writing a great book were easy or common, we wouldn't have the concept of a masterpiece--or of 'the canon,' for that matter. Still, it's always a disappointment when a book seems really promising, and comes trailing clouds of good reviews ("a stunning story, compassionately Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-78071718686201393002010-02-22T09:00:00.003-04:002010-02-22T10:48:13.554-04:00Novel Readings Discovered by the SpammersFor the first time since I started this blog three years ago, I've been spammed to such an extent that I've turned on comment moderation. I've always felt that this step slows down discussion--which is hard enough to generate as it is--but it's certainly preferable to having the comments sections littered with links to pornographic sites or essay mills. So, my apologies to the real readers and Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-69427570708731614942010-02-18T09:39:00.006-04:002010-02-18T10:03:17.891-04:00More of Woolf on the Victorians: "an abandonment, richness, surprise"I think I must be on the verge of a breakthrough in my relationship with Virginia Woolf, a writer I have been interested in, drawn to, even, for many years but whose fiction nonetheless I haven't seemed able to read. I know my way around A Room of One's Own pretty well, and I have thoroughly appreciated a number of Woolf's essays and reviews. I love the crackling intellect of her critical writingRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-77582817102719992102010-02-12T20:35:00.013-04:002010-02-15T09:04:30.566-04:00Finishing A Suitable Boy"I hate long books," says Amit Chatterji, Lata's poet-suitor, near the end of A Suitable Boy:"the better the worse. If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for a few days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-3706560727327253952010-02-10T15:35:00.003-04:002010-02-10T16:15:29.258-04:00This Week in My Classes (February 10, 2010)Don't let the lack of new posts between last week's teaching update and this one mislead you: there has been plenty of novel reading around here lately! Specifically, I have finished A Suitable Boy--yes, just a few short weeks after deciding it would be the perfect complement to a term already well-stocked with loose baggy monsters. It became a thoroughly enjoyable and often surprisingly poignantRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-73577129721407723082010-02-03T14:51:00.003-04:002010-02-03T15:29:50.958-04:00This Week in My Classes (February 3, 2010): "words, ingeniously used"It's Agatha Christie week in Mystery and Detective Fiction, which means fun times with "words, ingeniously used." When we start The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the things I point out is that it is published in 1926, so within hailing distance of a couple of other very famous novels including Ulysses (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Unlike those novels, however, The Murder of Roger AckroydRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-65452821882780677792010-01-30T11:04:00.004-04:002010-01-30T11:36:32.229-04:00Reading A Suitable BoyVikram Seth's A Suitable Boy has been in my TBR pile for some time. I started it once before but didn't make it much past page 300, which isn't really that far in a 1500-page novel. It wasn't that I didn't like it: I just started picking up other things to read instead, because they were more portable, for instance, or met some more immediate need. Then I decided that if I were going to finish itRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-13124592946374247932010-01-26T21:26:00.008-04:002010-01-26T22:14:59.448-04:00This Week In My Classes (January 26, 2010)Last week went by too quickly for comment, apparently. The usual term-time feeling of things hurtling by is exacerbated by my Brit Lit survey course: Monday was Tennyson, Wednesday was Browning, Friday was Arnold. Forget the Romantics--they're so, like, the week before last! But I also tripped into my own small version of the perpetual 'crisis of the humanities,' and there went all my blogging Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-89051596742488250192010-01-23T18:38:00.007-04:002010-01-24T16:31:24.361-04:00The "Skills" Argument Sounds Even Worse When We're Talking about Ph.D.s in the HumanitiesThe most recent issue of University Affairs includes these remarks in a letter from Robert Stainton, a philosophy professor and associate dean at UWO:Notably, there is a new and crucial role for graduate degrees in the humanities. In the 1960s, undergrad enrolments grew exponentially because Canadians recognized that a high school diploma was no longer sufficient. Nowadays, the master's degree Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-66784280371862714022010-01-22T19:08:00.002-04:002010-01-22T19:28:15.791-04:00The Case for the HumanitiesIn response to my previous post, a lurking friend sent me a link to a rousing piece by Mark Slouka from laast September's issue of Harper's. (Thank you! Also, you should comment here some time. Choose a sly pseudonym; we'll never know it's you.) Some excerpts:You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there’s something almost chess-like in the way the other side has Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-60318893738788655272010-01-20T20:37:00.006-04:002010-01-20T22:07:54.989-04:00Is Arguing for the Practical Utility of Literary Studies Ultimately Self-Defeating?There's a review of Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas up at Slate:The Marketplace of Ideas is a diagnostic book, not a prescriptive one, and Menand's proposals for how we might invigorate the academic production of knowledge are added as afterthoughts. He thinks we ought to shorten the length of study required for graduate students; the fact that it takes three years to get a law degree andRohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-8275114014432997692010-01-19T14:33:00.003-04:002010-01-19T14:39:39.900-04:00Duthie Books to CloseSad news from Vancouver:VANCOUVER - Independent bookseller Duthie Books will shut its doors at the end of February after 52 years in business.Facing pressure from online bookseller Amazon and multi-national chains such as Chapters, owner Cathy Duthie Legate has decided to pack it in and close the last of eight locations on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano.The family-owned chain was founded in 1957 by Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-33313248340290057012010-01-16T21:43:00.004-04:002010-01-16T23:12:11.263-04:00Recent Reading: Ghosts (or Not)It was an interesting experience reading Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry one after the other. Both are well-written, original books by consummate story-tellers. Both invite us to imagine a lot of "what if" questions about our world, particularly about whether there's more to it than we can see, whether we (at least some of us) live in it longer Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-641443496612927441.post-26468979254587305002010-01-13T09:54:00.005-04:002010-01-13T13:09:51.377-04:00This Week in My Classes (January 13, 2010): "Most of them seem to be twaddling stuff"It's always fun when there's an unexpected synchronicity between two (or more) courses. Even the sheer coincidence of juxtapositions can be fruitful: I remember the thrill I felt as an undergraduate when I happened to be assigned the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality in my historiography seminar for the same week I was reading John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman for my Rohan Maitzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com3