Re bigbooks

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Eric Alan Weinstein writes:

>the sinister economic and political
>mechanisms underlying institutional literary educations
>designed, in the name of an illusory
>comprehensiveness, to prevent repeated close readings
>of any single book...
>it continues until one abandons all hope and engages
>with the University in the perverse and closed rite of
>PhD....
>Truly important reading, creative
>reading if you will, is almost always slow reading,
>repeated reading.

Your statement resonates strongly with my own experience in the early 
seventies as an English major at Harvard (truly a "seat" of learning). 
 There the pressure was not to just read every primary text in sight (if 
only) but *rather* to consume all relevent lit crit.  English literature was 
taught, in effect, as a microhistoriography of the passing faddish parade of 
only recent literary criticism.  Sustained and profound reflection convinced 
me that the devoted and profitable act of intensive reading could not only 
be pursued outside the academy, but indeed much more effectively so---I 
graduated as an economics major (this did not, alas, expose me to a higher 
quality of the academic mentation.)

What could be the possible use of lit crit? ---or as I ended up ruling for 
myself, any lit crit not composed by a working author? much less consuming 
entire genre---how could it not be more use to reread the primary text, with 
attention, than to peruse a text about that text?  (Fielding landmined Tom 
Jones with a nasty and satirical chapter at the head of each of its six 
books, e.g. "A Crust for Critics".)  Particularly since any historically 
broad enough study of criticism becomes manifestly riddled with its own 
fashionable nonsense.  (For example, try to find any criticism of Dickens 
prior to the last 40 years---the few works are all by working writers, 
including Orwell and Chesterton---for the rest, he was just a pulp writer).

Learning to read by reading, closely, repetitively, a few great works would 
prepare a student for a lifetime of pleasure and illumination.  Other 
approaches are just literary cattleyards.


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Lindsay Gillies                           FMR Corp.
lindsay.gillies at fmr.com         82 Devonshire Street, R22A
617-563-5363                              Boston, MA 02109
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