When I visit schools and colleges, I often hear from both teachers and students how difficult they find it to study the novel. How do you tackle it? What do you concentrate on? What do you need to know about the novel as a form? Help is at hand!
How Fiction Works is by James Wood, one of the best reviewers and critics around these days. He teaches at Harvard, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. He knows what he's talking about. His book is written for what we used to call 'the intelligent reader'. That is, not only academics with special interests, but anyone with enough personal interest in a topic to want to know more about it.
How Fiction Works is in fairly brief chapters dealing with key topics such as character, language, dialogue, and the nature of 'realism'. And each chapter is in numbered paragraphs or sections, each dealing with one point. You can read a passage, lay the book aside while you think it over, and then go on. As criticism, it is like a story told in episodes. There is a historical perspective, an understanding of modern literary theory, and a choice of texts as examples, all of which are worth reading for themselves.
If this makes the book sound dry, be reassured. It isn't. Wood is witty, writes without resort to obfuscating jargon, and, as all the best critics, is astute in his selection of quotations. What you're getting, as well as a study of how fiction works, is Wood's reading of various kinds of fiction. And that's what I enjoy most in criticism and which marks out the best of it for me: the pleasure of keeping company with someone whose reading helps me to read with more insight and with more understanding than I can achieve on my own.
If you're studying or teaching fiction and the novel in particular, I can't recommend the book highly enough. If you simply love fiction and want to think about 'how it works', this is the book for you too.
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How Fiction Works is by James Wood, one of the best reviewers and critics around these days. He teaches at Harvard, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. He knows what he's talking about. His book is written for what we used to call 'the intelligent reader'. That is, not only academics with special interests, but anyone with enough personal interest in a topic to want to know more about it.
How Fiction Works is in fairly brief chapters dealing with key topics such as character, language, dialogue, and the nature of 'realism'. And each chapter is in numbered paragraphs or sections, each dealing with one point. You can read a passage, lay the book aside while you think it over, and then go on. As criticism, it is like a story told in episodes. There is a historical perspective, an understanding of modern literary theory, and a choice of texts as examples, all of which are worth reading for themselves.
If this makes the book sound dry, be reassured. It isn't. Wood is witty, writes without resort to obfuscating jargon, and, as all the best critics, is astute in his selection of quotations. What you're getting, as well as a study of how fiction works, is Wood's reading of various kinds of fiction. And that's what I enjoy most in criticism and which marks out the best of it for me: the pleasure of keeping company with someone whose reading helps me to read with more insight and with more understanding than I can achieve on my own.
If you're studying or teaching fiction and the novel in particular, I can't recommend the book highly enough. If you simply love fiction and want to think about 'how it works', this is the book for you too.
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Replies to comments.
Inge of the jam. It was delicious. Thanks.
Inge of the typewriter. Have you kept up with your new 'walk to work'?
Thanks to everyone who encouraged me in this bloggy enterprise.
Please let me know what kinds of things you'd like me to write about.
Inge of the jam. It was delicious. Thanks.
Inge of the typewriter. Have you kept up with your new 'walk to work'?
Thanks to everyone who encouraged me in this bloggy enterprise.
Please let me know what kinds of things you'd like me to write about.
3 comments:
Hi Aidan,
Please just write ... :-)I get inspired by just reading this blog :-))
Greetings,
Inge (from the jam)
Ow this blog is just great, Aidan. So inspiring. Please keep on writing about what you're reading, thinking, doing...
And you're so right abou this function of criticism.
And that's what I enjoy most in criticism and which marks out the best of it for me: the pleasure of keeping company with someone whose reading helps me to read with more insight and with more understanding than I can achieve on my own.
Yes - that's exactly what I feel about the purpose of criticism. Sadly,it's the aspect which is very often lost when it is part of a formal study of literature, I fear. So often, students end up feeling that literary criticism is about dissecting the literary work, when it should be about holding up a light to illumine some of the more closely-hidden treasures. I like to think that current criticism is moving away from the very arid analysis and back towards a mode which involves deep literary pleasure, though. Certainly that is something I aim for in my own work.
I shall look out for this title - and perhaps recommend it to a few teacher friends of mine who are in the lost position you describe.
Also, a belated happy World Book Day to you!
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