Skip to main content

Just in Time


In much of the secondary reading for my course, I find myself immured in horribly glib words like ‘discourse’, ‘signification’, ‘reified’ etc. in a way that no longer meaningfully refers to structuralist criticism but is a kind of easy way of saying nothing while looking like you went to graduate school. (‘Discourse’ has a particularly bad rep, though it is, I admit, difficult to avoid it.) Reading journal essays and Cambridge Companions one gets the horrible and hollow feeling that these were published out of the desire for tenure and not academic inquiry. And that is why I am so grateful to Helen Cooper, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature who was at Oxford and is now, alas, at The Other Place.

Her 2004 book The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare has not only saved my essay on romance this week but is proving to be a genuinely interesting read. Romance is one of those genres which can bore you to death, or tantalize with a hybrid of familiarity and strangeness. Cooper’s book – which investigates quests, sea voyages, fairy queens, and magic which doesn’t work – in engaging prose (such a rarity!) is the sort of scholarly work that you can sit in an armchair and read and lose track of time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Mad Girl

[A Question I am Not the First to Ask: What is it about women and madness? Are they more susceptible to delusion than men are? The subject of many books and hypotheses, we wonder if madness dogs the steps of creative women (eg. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…) Is it a biological coincidence or a recurring phenomenon? Is it socially reinforced? Do men fear the hysterical women? Is it the uterus (Greek “hysteria”) which turns the brain?] The reclusive writer, the late Janet Frame, winner of all of New Zealand’s literary prizes, spent much time in institutions and in therapy and, as far as I can tell, her novels commonly include themes of estrangement, mental health and madness. Frame considered her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer too personal be published in her lifetime. As she’d already written an autobiography ( Angel at My Table , made into a film by Jane Campion) and been this subject of several biographies, this is telling. Towards Another Su
4 comments
Read more
Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!
6 comments
Read more

Before I go

I'm at the airport with too many bags. A last minute weigh in required me to pull all my books out of my bags and redistribute the weight, while the service representative had to call Iceland (where I pass through en route to London), and the fifty pairs of eyes behind me glared and grew glassy. Though this morning the weather was pure, clear and copper-sunned, the fog has descended so low that the tips of the trees are nearly obliterated. This is Seattle. This is the city I know. Here's something I wrote a month or so ago, an ode to this city, its literary scene, and its inhabitants. When I graduated from a small Midwestern liberal arts college with the music degree I knew I might never use, I felt lost looking for What To Do Next. Despite the pressure I felt alongside my friends – future accountants, teachers, and doctors - to map out a life just so, a much respected professor suggested that each step in one’s life seems microscopic, a darkened footpath occasionally lit by a
4 comments
Read more