More from Steiner

[Bekah]

I think Foster has a lot of interesting things to say.  What I remember most clearly is the subject of eating (it's communion) and water (it's baptism).    I've remembered that as I read and if I don't take Foster too literally or what he says as "rules, "  it works a lot of the time.   If people are eating together they are almost never,  ever angry with each other -  it's a communion of sorts -  a bonding.   If someone is plunged into water (from a stream to an ocean) he's reborn,  changed, entering into something new.    

So I just check and see if these ideas hold up in the context of this particular novel  - if they do,  fine - if they don't - too bad,  no biggie.  I've read other books on lit crit from Forster and Kundera to Lodge and Eco - (all novelists - heh).   They all seem to cover different things.  I'm partial to Eco. 

Bekah


On Oct 8, 2012, at 6:40 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have to say that I'm enjoying the Foster book about "...reading like a professor...", and though it is certainly not criticism, it is informing my reading, at least on a small scale. Isn't that a possible function of criticism, to inform our reading, instead of just "this is good, this is bad"? Maybe I'm looking at it too simplistically.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
> "...[b]ehind these questions lies the belief that literary criticism, particularly in its present cohabitation with the academic, is no longer a ver interesting or responsible exercise. Too much of it exhibits the complacencies of academic or journalistic values and habits of statement developed in the nineteenth century. Books about books and that flourishing though more recent genre, books about literary criticism (a threefold remove), will no doubt continue to pour out in great numbers. But it is becoming clear that most of them are a kind of initiate sport, that they have very little to say to those who would ask what coexistence is possible between humanism, between the idea of literate communication, and the present shapes of history. The gap between the academic, belletristic treatment of literature and the
> possible meanings or subversions of literature in our actual lives has rarely been wider since Kierkegaard first pointed to its ironic breadth."
> 
> Preface to "Language and Silence" (1966)
> 
> Steiner seems to me to be reeling from the war, casting for meaning in the wake of knowledge of what is possible; I see him as reactionary, in the literal sense. Though he himself is in the category threefold removed. 
> 
> So, my question, wherefore the critic?
>  
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> www.innergroovemusic.com