Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading - Softcover

Rose, Phyllis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374535361 ISBN 13: 9780374535360

Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment -- to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives.

Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it.

What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for-a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels about a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral.

A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf. Rose investigates her own discoveries with exuberance, candor, and while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf.

"Exhilarating, adventurous, original--Phyllis Rose's The Shelf is a reminder of what reading and writing are all about." -- Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Phyllis Rose's many books include A Woman of Letters, a biography of Virginia Woolf that was a finalist for the 1979 National Book Award; Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages; Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time; and The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. She divides her time between Key West and New York City.

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Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures

By Phyllis Rose

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2015 Phyllis Rose
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-53536-0

Contents

1. The Experiment Begins.............................................
2. The Myth of the Book: A Hero of Our Time..........................
3. Literary Evolution: The Phantom of the Opera......................
4. The Universe Provides: Rhoda Lerman...............................
5. Women and Fiction: A Question of Privilege........................
6. Domesticities: Margaret Leroy and Lisa Lerner.....................
7. The Nightingale and the Lark: Lernet-Holenia and LeRossignol......
8. Libraries: Making Space...........................................
9. Life and Adventures: Gil Blas.....................................
10. Serial Killers: Detective Fiction................................
11. Immortality......................................................

One
THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS
 
 
This book records the history of an experiment. Believing that literary critics wrongly favor the famous and canonical—that is, writers chosen for us by others—I wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature. So I chose a fiction shelf in the New York Society Library somewhat at random—it happens to be the LEQ–LES shelf—and set out to read my way through it, writing about the experience as I went. I had no reason to believe that the books would be worth the time I would spend on them. They could be dull, even lethally so. I was certain, however, that no one in the history of the world had read exactly this series of novels. That made the project exciting to me.
I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading. To go where no one had gone before. To ski fresh powder in the backcountry of the Rockies. To hack through a Mexican jungle and discover a lost city. To be the first to cross Antarctica, reduced to eating the sled dogs, leading my men through the frozen wastes, across the Strait of Magellan, and over the treacherous mountains of South Georgia Island. To be the first. However, I like to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose down pillow. So I would read my way into the unknown—into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no bestseller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me. In the fifteenth century, Poggio Bracciolini, a Vatican secretary, spent his leisure time combing monastery libraries for texts of antiquity. He located them, copied them in his own beautiful hand or caused them to be copied, and made them known to other humanists. I read about Poggio in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, and I envied that Renaissance geezer. I would have loved to spend weeks going through unexamined scrolls and codexes and to stumble upon Lucretius’s masterpiece, De Rerum Natura, which no one had read in fifteen hundred years. This was my kind of exploration.
Usually we choose our reading from a preselected list of books, compiled by reviewers, awards panels, librarians, teachers, and professors, and these reading lists are remarkably resistant to change. Occasionally an intellectual movement comes along, feminism for one, that opens up our sense of what is major and what is minor, enlarging the pool of books read, but this does not happen often. And then the upstarts themselves have a way of becoming canonical, unquestioned, and a new generation considers Mrs. Dalloway or The Harder They Come essential reading. What about all those books that are never read at all, never even considered? Who speaks for them? Arbitrary choice is the most radical response to conventional judgment. Let me, I thought, if only for a change, choose my reading almost blindly. Who knows what I will find?
Not all my friends saw the potential of this idea. How many books were on a shelf? Maybe thirty. How many writers? Maybe ten. “So you will write about ten randomly chosen unknown writers?” they said, smiling with feigned enthusiasm. “No,” I replied. “Something more organic. It will be more like a travel journal.” “But you’re going to discover a great writer who lived in obscurity without the recognition he or she deserved, right?” Well, maybe, but that wasn’t the point.
My generation was shaped by an approach to literature that began with the Romantics, was codified by Matthew Arnold, and reached its peak through a broad group of critics that included Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis. It believed that literature was an instrument of moral education. It imbued literature with depth and urgency, what we did not hesitate, as late as the 1960s, to call relevance to life. It believed that novelists and poets were special beings, “unacknowledged legislators,” people who taught and enlarged us. Through them we might investigate every important issue. No matter what future you imagined for yourself—as a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, a cabaret singer—engaging with literary texts in your student days would benefit you. Therefore, for a while, the study of literature moved to the center of the liberal arts curriculum. Many of us became “English majors.”
This approach had flaws, of course. It always risked becoming moralistic, and it elevated certain writers over others, writers whose works were considered especially meaningful. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, a reaction had set in. Any attempt to justify literature as giving the reader something became suspect. We had known for a long time not to seek a simple message in literature. But under the influence of French criticism, we were led to believe that there was nothing there at all. Everything we thought we saw in fiction, we ourselves brought to the text. A text was a culturally produced set of markers, no more, and the author’s role in producing the text was very small. Nothing could be more ridiculous than to discuss what he or she was trying to say. That nothing lay at the heart of the literary experience—no author-intended meaning or even set of concerns—was, temporarily, refreshing.
We English majors, despite our military epithet, never understood that we had to fight for the literature we so much enjoyed. Its study seemed so well-entrenched, we took it for granted. When the Trojan horse arrived, in the form of clever, infinitely sophisticated professors of literature from France, we accepted their delicious gifts of irony, novelty, and nihilism and did not see the danger. Now, a generation later, the edifice that took a hundred years to put in place, and that spread a kind of enlightenment over America, is gone. We have to do all over again the work of proving that there is any point to reading a novel besides making time pass more quickly. This book is my way of making amends for not fighting when I should have. I thought the problem would go away if I waited, and eventually it did. But, as with a tsunami engulfing a city, when the waters receded, the city was gone.
*   *   *
My project began with a storm. The entire Northeast was about to be hit by Hurricane Irene, which was expected to be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374535361
• ISBN 13: 9780374535360
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 284
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland