has anyone read

... f.r. leavis's new bearings in english poetry? the summary of it on Faber Finds makes it sound remarkable, and a lot like something i should read:

"It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: ‘Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'.

What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis’s dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing."

But I've never heard of it before -- this may just be my personal ignorance, admittedly -- and I can't help wondering if that's overstating the book's value, or influence; the history of the turn to free verse I just read didn't mention it, nothing else I've read on the topic mentioned it, I think.

(I figured this could be a helpful recurring thread. Format obvious, I think.)

I think that's a bit of an oversell, maybe, but it's complicated. I don't think it's that revolutionary - IA Richards & Empson were out of the prac crit gates years before this - but it does set down a lot of standard positions for mid-century critics.

I prob have a bit more to say about this once I'm not in an office: I don't really rate him as a critic of poetry , but he's prob the major figure in the shaping of University Eng Lit from the 30s onward.

& New Bearings a lively read, but he does end up as an attack dog for an Eliotic canon.

The section that praises Ronald Bottrall a highlight - I'm more interested in critics going quite wrong than the solid stuff.

i thought you'd have read this! marvellous. i might take a copy home and make friends with it. i never did go into the leavis empson et al. stuff as an undergraduate. i probably should have a go before i go back to school.

i enjoyed this book, incidentally.

Cool. I didn't get round to saying anything else because I was going to pop into a library and take another look at it before opining, but failed to. I remembering preferring Revaluation last time I looked at them both - that opening chapter is pretty good on the line of wit, particularly the point around Cowley where things get a bit stiff.

He's still a critic I don't really like, but I'll probably read a bit more of him over the coming months - I'm feeling refascinated by the Age of Criticism, have been reading Explorations by LC Knights, which leans a little on the stern New Crit side, but I'm enjoying its 'fck a character, the plays aren't plays, they're poems' hardlining, which feels loopily out of fashion.

Will pick up the 2-vol selections from Scrutiny at some point, iirc good place to get a sense of the minor players, critical tenor of the Eng Lit Donne to Eliot generation.

Hmm. From a Knights obit: "on his return to Cambridge he found himself being addressed by Leavis as "Professor Judas""

i enjoyed how leavis will quote a bunch of stuff and be like 'plainly this is just not modern in attitude at all, just look at it'

Was it Leavis who, in the 1960s, described Lawrence as the greatest of "our contemporary novelists"?

leavis certainly said that - it's quoted on my penguin copy of the rainbow, which i was just looking at the other day funnily enough - dunno if he said it in the 60s, tho (sounds a bit late.)

leavis also said that portrait of a lady and the bostonians were the two best novels in the english language, he's right abt that

There's a funny parody of Leavis in The Pooh Perplex.

Now that I have gotten down to Lawrence alone, the number of English novelists on my Index is greater than ever, and this I take to be a sign that things may be improving at last on the literary scene. Perhaps readers are beginning to learn that their reading time is precious and very limited, and mustn't be wasted on third-raters like Fielding and Joyce. There was an undergraduate just last week asking me which of Shakespeare's plays he should start with, to work up Shakespeare for his examinations. "Shakespeare!" I said. "Why, man, you haven't even read The Rainbow yet! Don't take to me of Shakespeare until you've gone through Lawrence twice and made a list of everything he has to say against the Establishment." He took it rather hard, but the point is, he took it. Another soul saved from dilettantism, if I may put it thus.

Scarcely had I penned these last words when today's post arrived, and what should I find but a symposium in The Listener on Winnie-the-Pooh. With a sense of deep grievance I read through the various pieces, and, just as my misgivings foretold, it was true that every critic, while pretending to praise A. A. Milne, was in reality attacking me! Pages and pages of vile invective, so base and dastardly that the perpetrators dared not mention me by name or even allude to any of my work! Those of you who are outside the academic world can have no idea of the cowardice practiced by these "aesthetic" dons who will turn on everything honest and generous but will never expose themselves to censure by revealing that they are all in league against me. Well, they leave me no alternative but to say a few words about their latest idol.

i am reading 'the rainbow' very soon any day now sometime this year! i look forward to my doubled vision of it thanks to this thread.

That parody is hilarious.

Sounds essential if that parody is anything to by.

Anyon read Auden's The Dyer Hand. Read a nice piece about it.

er, The Dyer's hand.

Yes, it's a great collection of stuff. When i got rid of my books it went immediately in the must-keep pile. He knows how to have fun thinking about lit - diagrams, oppositions, categories - while providing pithy and stimulating examinations of his subjects. The essay The Guilty Vicarage is canonical reading for anyone interested in detective novels of the period. Very enjoyable indeed.

And I hope I didn't make it sound frivolous. It's a reasonable representation of Auden's poetic style in writing in a way. Searching, witty, pithy.

No, you made it sound v good - will track.

i found that essay on detective type business somewhat less edifying than i'd wanted to; i'd seen the line about "a town any moviegoer could map tonight in his dreams" before and that touched a chord, for some reason; the rest of it was just, i don't know, sharp but nothing i didn't already know.

i remember i was toting that book around for a long-ass time and i don't remember much of it. i think i got stuck somewhere around all the shakespeare.

Fair enough, although I think for it's time it was quite unusual. Genre fiction being treated seriously by a fan - proto-popism? Worth reading Don Juan, thomp, if you didn't get past the Shakespeare, although it's an essay collected in lots of places, so no need as such to lug The Dyer's Hand around for donkey's again. That lugging around of books that you never read and in the end get rid of or finally admit defeat and hide on the bookshelves is possibly worth a thread in itself.

The snobbery towards American kitsch is predictable and very much of its time but well-turned.

I found pretty funny the essay about the horror of living in a society in which poetry ruled.

i might dig it out again when i'm at my parents' next. now i'm rid of my compulsion to read every word in a book and to read them in order it might be less bothersome. i just remember there being rather a lot of it, and it all getting a bit much.

A fairly easy book to dip around in.

Been away, so late on this, but I'm another fan of The Dyer's Hand: idiosyncratic to the point of nuttiness, but I find it totally engrossing. It's more enlightening about Auden, really, than the authors he writes about - suspect a lot of it is his trying to reconcile his poetic practice and imaginary landscape with 40s/50sconversion to Christianity & interest in theology - Eden, Sin, Creation, the Sacred come up a lot. But I love Auden v much, so I'm always curious to hear what he has to say.

iirc the middle (Shakespeare etc) is hardest work - picks up again with Dingley Dell and The Fleet & Don Juan. Though there's more music stuff isn't there? Always struggle a bit with Auden on music.

It is a good dipping book, though he asks you politely in the preface to read it in order.

What was the piece about it, xyzzzz?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n11/michael-wood/i-really-mean-like

^ from the latest LRB

ah, thanks. i noticed that on the cover, but I'm four or five behind at the moment, so just read it now. What I expect from Wood I guess.

Erich Auerbach - Mimesis. Not really trying to make too much sense of the argument at the moment, just enjoying EA pick up a really passage and make close-read until it bleeds...

That Leavis parody quoted above is remarkably weak. Among other things, it reads nothing like him.

Wood made the Auden book (which I've only ever heard of via him) sound almost more cherishable than I can easily believe it is.

did anyone read the new eileen myles novel, inferno? i love her poetry & find some of the writing i've read interesting, but am still curious whether or not the novel is something i'd be involved enough in to get through (also, it's on some sort of private press that you have to order direct from, & weirdly i think so far that's stopped me from buying it, that if it was in a store or somewhere else i use online i'd have picked it up by now).

Brodsky's Less than One is pretty great so far - he describes himself as an 'English essayist' and you can see it.

By pretty great I mean that we agree, damn fella pushes my buttons - the articles on the big three of Russian poetry (especially Marina Tsvetaeva), the appreciation of Nadezhda Mandelstam, best of all he picks up on Plantonov just a few years before Chandler (and others) got to translate him (Brodsky believed a translation was nearly impossible, this article could have galvised many to try). A bonus is the indifference to Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, w/my favourite bit being a description of reading a scene in Cancer Ward and waiting for the breakthrough in Russian prose that failed to come.

Most of those articles were written in the mid-70s/early 80s. Lots of scorn poured on the Soviet system and the Byzantium article is in line with the Russian obsession with the East/West frontier (cf Osip's Jouney To Armenia, Platonov's Soul).

Lots on Auden, too.

Platonov's Chevengur

sorry broke up...Platonov's Chevengur really needs a translation.

Either that or having to learn Russian...

I think patience may serve you: languagehat read it last year, and mentions that Robert Chandler is working on a translation.

Comments on that link should also make it clear how rough the learning Russian path would be.

Cheers woolf - christ that is a frightening page.

Those translated passages are good tho'

do i read the great tradition or not

ugh

Did you see Leavis on this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013fbf0/Great_Thinkers_In_Their_Own_Words_The_Culture_Wars/

"(as was Defoe) use was made in much the same milieu of Sterne, in whose irresponsible (and nasty) trifling, regarded as in some way extraordinarily significant and mature, was found a sanction for attributing value to other trifling."

xp i can't stand watching television about books /:

leavis is a butthead imo just in case you were wondering

It wasn't really about books -- more about the re-definition of culture by these one-time authors and thinkers, with accompanying footage of their appearances at the Beeb. Its starts off w/Leavis.

julio this show is depressing -- "once upon a time we just let these people talk but now we excerpt them with terrible music and a patronising voiceover"

lamp i am unsure how i feel about leavis, i think in some ways what he thinks of as the tradition of The Novel is the novelistic tradition i care most deeply about or feel most allied to -- & at least when he's being dogmatic and nasty about alternative traditions he is funny about them -- otoh i think he possesses a fuzziness of mind that lets him try and argue to himself that people he likes fit his idea of value even when they're, like lawrence, plainly just balls

too, i don't think this show's version of leavis - which is a cartoon of leavis - is a friendly, or a helpful one; the parody above is a cartoon, too, but at least it knows it, & is funny

haha ok I do like to watch archive footage. My fave was CLR James doc he made on cricket, but yes no joy in seeing what the bbc doesn't do anymore.

leavis on lawrence is the source of my animosity but lol because i like lawrence quite a bit and think he gets him 'totally wrong'

fuzziness of mind is otm

mostly i think i dont have the patience/intelligence for leavis's style of criticism

it is lovely to listen to old cambridge dons i guess

but, i mean: this show just spent a while going: c.p. snow famously made a lecture about two cultures. the bbc doesn't have any footage of it, it wasn't recorded. so here's snow, years later, saying, 'yes, that made some kind of an impact'. in reaction to that, leavis said some very mean things about snow - however, he didn't trust the bbc at all at that time, so we have no way of presenting them to you, but they were very mean - look, here's snow agreeing they were mean

-

tbh i have only the most passing of acquaintances with lawrence, tell me what i should actually read

i feel like one of the great things in leavis is he gets annoyed when people don't actually say anything -- but then some of the things he asserts are too big and too empty to contain meaning and end up saying even less -- ? anyway, the half hour i have scheduled for caring about leavis today is now over, also lol at yr faux-humility

haha 'faux-humility'

theres a penguin classics collection of lawrence's 'short novels' that i usually recommend to people who dont like his longer fiction. it still has a lot of his terrible desire and religiosity but its clearer and smarter 'st mawr' in particular is really beautiful and just dirty w/ lawrence's sanctified yearning. i think 'women in love' is probably s.thing like a 'masterpiece' but its a heavy weight to bear too and the rest of his novels are p flawed. i like bits and pieces of the short fiction too but nothing to recommend in particular unless you like the short novels

has anyone read:
- either of those new sheila heti books, the novel or the transcript of her friend

Thomp,

Lawrence is a curious mixture of the great and the awful. I love his work but you have to be prepared to forgive a lot. His full length novels are pretty much devoid of a real sense of form or structure and he is intermittently preachy, arrogant, self-indulgent and nutty. That said, for me he's the outstanding creative writer of the 20 Century in English, a view that seems to have been quite common a generation or two ago but makes you one of a small, recalcitrant, eccentric and unfashionable minority now.

For a good summary of his strengths it's worth getting a hold of the chapter James Wood wrote on Lawrence (can't remember which collection it's in). Wood is unusual in writing from the perspective of a major fan who knows that Lawrence has gone out of vogue and that a case needs to be made for him almost from scratch.

Unless you have a real intolerance of Victorian/Hardy type fiction I'd start with "Sons and Lovers", moving on to "The Rainbow" and then "Women in Love". L is always somewhat lyrical and eccentric but S & L is still a novel in the realist tradition. WIL is a continuation of the Rainbow, and in the course of these novels L becomes increasingly modernist and symbolic (and sui generis).
There may be no other novel I'd say this about but it's worth getting some sort of critical guide to WIL - it's clear from reading the critical history that the consensus view about what it means took a long time to develop, indicating that early readers didn't understand it. The orthodox view was established I think by Middleton Murray and developed by Leavis, so reading the Leavis will cover it.

The best of the short stories and novellas are utterly superb and at least some avoid the worst faults of the novels - try The Blind Man, Odour of Crysanthemums or The Captain's Doll.

good post

'the captain's doll' is v good and is in the collection i mentioned before

Short stories are kick-ass.

Another vote for DHL's short stories here, too.

one of my lady friends has the theory that DHL must have been a secret cross dresser, given his lovingly detailed descriptions of women's underwear.

thx frankie (& all) -- i suppose i really should read lawrence properly

i think i have a penguin 'the short novels' at my parents' and i'm heading there this weekend, so i will pick it up if i remember

http://arttattler.com/Images/Europe/England/Newcastle/Baltic%20Art%20Centre/Harland%20Miller/Harland-Miller_Dirty-Northern-Bastard_2_300dpicropped.jpg

Spurious by Lars Iyer?

Feel like I should, to 'keep up'. Wasn't taken by a page or two I read in a bookshop though.

Fizzles, weren't you on the verge of reading it last year?

http://somethingthatilike.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/harland_miller_hemingway.jpg

yes, pulled back from the verge a bit. still meaning to.

Product Description
In a raucous debut that summons up the classic Goon Show, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself and his friend, W. - albeit a slightly more successful friend - and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin. Another reason for their yammering journeys is the fact that the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus and no one knows what can be done about it.

Spurious follows W. and Lars, who dream of great philosophical and literary deeds as they bumble drunkenly through Europe. It's a raucous debut novel that forever ping pongs between intellectual seriousness and absurdist British comedy. The novel speaks with equal wit and insight on Spinoza's Ethics, the virtues of 'man bags' and why Poles are the best drinkers. It is Franz Kafka, Laurel & Hardy, Thomas Bernhard, Ricky Gervais, Maurice Blanchot and Monty Python all at once. Witty, suicidal, slapstick, foolish and profound, Spurious marks the arrival of a singular and electric new literary voice.

well, this is either brilliant or shite, then

Ricky Gervais...Monthy Python

Thanks but no. Just no.

yeah why did they have to go there? sounded great until you get to those 2 names. i don't know who maurice blanchot is...

some sort of poststructuralist beckett iirc

Death Sentence is really good. Few years before Robbe-Grillet got going, not as geometrical. Also think he ws a fascist in that loveable way that only the French can do, e.g. by retiring to the country and playing at being 'invisible' etc. Good stuff really.

I wouldn't back off just because the product description pushes the RIYL associations a little too far. Mention of Laurel and Hardy makes me think of Beckett's Mercier et Camier, though the forlorn cuteness is a set-up (in a good way, it's a goood suckerpunch, Mr. B)

The novel that is, though he also adapted it for the stage, could see it as warm-up for some of Waiting For Godot
http://www.pileface.com/sollers/IMG/jpg/beckett_oeil.jpg

sam looking sort of like my dad there, worryingly

gosh, that smile is worth a lot.

the hair remains severe though.

great photo! never seen him smiling before, I realise

Yep. Here's another--time to get those specs checked?
http://iskon.mk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/6a00d8341c562c53ef015393e28531970b-800wi.jpg

With his intrepid publisher, Barney Rosset, who just recently died.
http://irishamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Samuel-Beckett-and-Barney-Rosset.jpg

Dyer's hand started out really amazing, quirky and aphoristic. But once it settled into actual lit-crit I think it lost some steam.

Al Alvarez - The Savage God. Anyone?

The Savage God is great! Good combination of theory, history, and autobiography/personal essay. Good for insight regarding suicide, but also for literary history since Alvarez is largely concerned with the plague of suicide among 20th century writers, particularly confessional poets (he was friends with Sylvia Plath and writes at length about her).

Yeah, good overview and up close, doesn't overdo the Plath connection or his own attempt and its aftermath. Was required reading for sccial work classes at University I attended in 70s.

i keep failing to find james fenton's poem making fun of it. or do i mean john fuller.

has anyone read paul de man's blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism, and can they tell me which of the essays therein are actually worth bothering with?

has anyone read the book losing ground: american social policy 1950-1980 by charles murray author of the bell curve because oh god

"This outspoken and explosive book argues that the ambitious social programs of the Great Society to help the poor and disadvantaged not only did not accomplish what they set out to do but often made things worse."

Anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aesthetics_of_Resistance

I didn't like The Magic Mountain, maybe Weiss is better. Only one vol has been trans. so far.

Sounds intriguing. Though the fact that that 1st volume was translated 9 years ago suggests it sold so few that the other 2 aren't happening.

I love the title, its possibly an exciting idea...

Probably sold nothing. Then again only French and Russian Literature has ever had anything like sales in the English speaking world. Maybe w/Pinocchio and Quixote as well.

Doesn't help the translator of that vol also died.

Klaus Theweleit?

gesundheit

Only scraps of Male Fantasies, a very long time ago.

From what I recall, it had incisive readings of a strange and ugly archive of extreme-right narratives, but I don't remember it well enough to say how it holds up as a general analysis of fascist thinking.

Just read this review of it and it sounds like a classic. Richard discusses the holes in the analysis but the eye for quotation (excerpted in the review) is frightening.

Apparently it contains a discussion of Juenger's writing too.