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Bloodorange's Reviews > How to Read Literature
How to Read Literature
by
by
The first chapter (Openings) and the last part of the final chapter (Values), where Eagleton analyses fragments of prose and poetry are fabulous, like a live session with an inspiring professor. But as for the middle - I am not sure I can imagine who this book was written for; am under impression that the person interested enough to read that already realizes, at least to some degree, what Eagleton says. There are some remarks on differences between modernist and Victorian writing worth getting through the middle of the book; observations on usefulness of orphans as literary protagonists; lots of tongue-in cheek macho-sounding quotes ("Narratives are like hired assassins"; an analysis of Great Expectation everyone familiar with this book should read. But I'm just not convinced this is enough to give tho book four stars.
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Reading Progress
September 23, 2016
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Started Reading
September 23, 2016
– Shelved
September 24, 2016
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28.02%
"The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation, suitable to a post-Victorian age. What it feels like to be a person is not quite the same for Franz Kafka as it is for George Eliot, and certainly not for whoever wrote the Upanishads or the Book of Daniel. Eliot sees character as 'a process and an unfolding', which is not at all how Woolf or Beckett regard it. For them, human beings do not have that..."
page
65
September 24, 2016
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34.48%
"Chapter 2 (Character) is less useful for me/ my students than chapter 1 (Openings), which was a fantastic introduction to close reading, but at least it gave me a good reason to read Jude the Obscure."
page
80
September 24, 2016
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40.09%
"...Hardy's characters can surprise us, in a way that Austen's or Dickens's rarely do. They can leap suddenly out of windows, marry a man they physically detest, sit motionless for long periods up a tree, unravel their underwear to rescue someone trapped on a cliff, sell their wife at a fair on a sudden whim, or engage in a virtuoso exhibition of sword fighting for no very obvious reason."
page
93
September 25, 2016
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43.53%
"Narratives are like hired assassins, ready to do the dirty work that their characters may flinch from."
page
101
September 25, 2016
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50.43%
"All literary works are orphaned at birth. Rather as our parents do not continue to govern our lives as we grow up, so the poet cannot determine the situations in which his or her work will be read, or what sense we are likely to make of it."
page
117
September 25, 2016
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71.98%
"Interesting analysis of Great Expectations on pp. 149-167 (chapter IV, 'Interpretations')."
page
167
September 25, 2016
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72.41%
"Whereas realist novels, as we have seen, tend to close with some kind of settlement, the typical modernist novel end with someone walking away solitary and disenchanted, his problems unresolved but free of social or domestic obligations."
page
168
September 25, 2016
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Finished Reading
(...)
So the modernists seek to question stock notions of character. Some of them do so by pressing the psychological complexity of literary figures to the point where character in its classical sense begins to disintegrate.