Some books

I've been thinking of applying to graduate school in English, and by way of weighing my options, I've been thinking about examples of literary scholarship I admire. Here are some nice things about four of them:

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

A few weeks ago, I brazenly touted Postmodernism as the most important book I’d ever read, but JHB was right to point out my error. For world-swallowing ambition, sophistication of argument, and sheer beauty, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious is second to none in the (admittedly small) body of recent literary scholarship I’ve read. In Jameson, the subordinate clauses are what hurt, and they never hurt so good as this:

Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

I’ve never been terribly interested in the First World War, and I’m not sure the British poetry associated with it is all that worthwhile. But Fussell’s book is a fine model of how to write convincingly about the confluence of literature and history, and one comes away from this book understanding as much about the lived experience of soldiers in the trenches as one does about, say, Siegfried Sassoon. Fussell also has an abiding fascination with Gravity’s Rainbow, which looms in this book as something like the absurd culmination of a modernity birthed from the blood and mud of Passchendaele.

Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel

Even more so than the underwhelming (but brilliantly titled) Graphs, Maps, Trees, this book is truly exhilarating. Written in choppy, effervescent prose, Moretti’s book is an insightful investigation of genre and geography, and it sketches a genuinely new approach to literary history -- one which provides far more questions than answers, and which manages to make these questions seem worthy of a lifetime of investigation. Atlas of the European Novel is also the book that first whet my appetite for the “big” later novels of Dickens: Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and Our Mutual Friend.

Robert Scholes, Textual Power and The Rise and Fall of English

Anyone who thinks that literary theory inevitably leads to pretention and irrelevance would do well to read Scholes, who approaches abstruse theory and practical pedagogy with equal seriousness. What unites these two books -- aside from a prose style which radiates decency -- is a belief that studying literature and literary theory can be a useful -- and indeed empowering -- experience for students. In The Rise and Fall of English, Scholes provides a sobering account of the present state of English as a discipline, but it is an account which nonetheless leaves me half-convinced that becoming an English professor might not be such a bad idea.

Eight Below and The Terminal

I like to watch movies on the bus. Sleep, cell-phone chatter, and headphones inevitably interrupt my viewing, leaving the plot denatured and the dialogue incomplete. In 2003, for example, on a bus to and from the anti-war protest in New York, I watched Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally in this fashion. (I was lucky; on the ISO-chartered bus, the riders were subjected to documentaries about Palestine.)

This weekend, traveling to and from New York again, I watched two more films, about which I'd like to say a few nice things. Eight Below, in which the huskies out-act Paul Walker and the dude from American Pie, is a triumph of extreme anthropomorphism, radically familiarizing the Antarctic landscape fully as much as the dogs. In The Terminal, Tom Hanks, whose character's accent now seems like a bizarre imitation of Borat's, gives us a bumbling, tragic portrayal of statelessness, and bare life appears in the guise of romantic comedy.