The Right Questions To Ask About Literature

FROM : SLATE
PHOTO : http://www.slate.com

The Right Questions To Ask About Literature

Harvard's Marjorie Garber gets them all wrong.

Marjorie Garber's new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay. My marginal comments might as well have been written in red: "What is the point of this paragraph?" "Where are we in the argument—and what exactly is the argument?" "Sloppy thinking." "You need to unpack this." "Again, is there a point here, or just a mass of notes?" "You have to develop your thesis, not just keep reiterating it


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Last 24 hours

1. 1. Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag'
2. 2. What's wrong with popularising poetry? Well, the poets don't seem to like it . . .
3. 3. Karen Green: 'David Foster Wallace's suicide turned him into a "celebrity writer dude", which would have made him wince'
4. 4. Patrick Ness's top 10 'unsuitable' books for teenagers
5. 5. AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously'

Thinking the Impossible

FROM : THE GUARDIAN
PHOTO : http://www.guardian.co.uk

Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 by Gary Gutting – review

The theories of Derrida and Foucault are revisited in this fair-minded history of French deconstructionism, and guess what? It wasn't all bunkum…

Are the theory wars over? Twenty-five years ago you couldn't cocoa your cappuccino without someone accusing you of floating a signifier, much less close down the, ahem, discourse with a simple "I prefer my coffee that way". Who is this mythic "I", the theorists wanted to know, and how could he presume to know what he prefers? Has he forgotten he's as fictional as Oliver Twist or Mrs Dalloway? Doesn't he know that his likes and dislikes are as ideologically determined as the medium-term financial strategy?


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1	20.00
2	Eagle of The Ninth Rosemary Sutcliff
3	Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer
4	Faber Poetry Collection
5	Zero Degrees of Empathy Simon BaronCohen
6	Crazy Like Us Ethan Watters
7	Haud Yer Wheesht! Allan Morrison
8	Making of the British Landscape Francis Pryor
9	Essays of Elia Charles Lamb
10	Ten Poems About Tea Sophie Dahl

Among the Hagiographers

FROM : THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PHOTO : http://online.wsj.com

Early on Gandhi was dubbed a 'mortal demi-god'—and he has been regarded that way ever since

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.


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Hardcover fiction

1. The Troubled Man
By Henning Mankell. Knopf.

2. The Land of Painted Caves
By Jean M. Auel. Crown.

3. The Tiger's Wife.
By Tea Obreht. Random House.

4. Drawing Conclusions
By Donna Leon. Atlantic Monthly.

5. A Lesson in Secrets.
By Jacqueline Winspear. Harper.

6. The Pale King
By David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown.

7. Live Wire.
By Harlan Coben. Dutton Adult.

8. Lover Unleashed
By J.R. Ward. NAL.

9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules
By Jeff Kinney. Amulet.

10. Sweet Valley Confidential
By Francine Pascal. St. Martin’s.

Group Think

From : NEW YORK
PHOTO : Illustration by Dienstelle 75

(Photo: Danny Kim/New York Magazine)

Group Think

Tina Rosenberg joins a popular club for nonfiction writers.

• By Kathryn Schulz
• Published Mar 20, 2011

If I had the money, I would send Tina Rosenberg on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cairo. Here’s why: Back in 1987, the MacArthur Foundation, which does have the money, awarded her a “genius” grant. Rosenberg used it to research and write an excellent book, Children of Cain: Violence and the ­Violent in Latin America. Afterward, she turned her attention to Eastern Europe and to the moral, political, and ethical difficulties of apportioning guilt and innocence in post-Communist nations. The resulting book, The Haunted Land, possesses a rare combination of nuance and force. It also possesses a rare combination of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.


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13, Rue Thérèse

FROM : FT.COM
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE



13, Rue Thérèse

Review by Simon Schama

Published: March 25 2011 22:00 | Last updated: March 25 2011 22:00

13, Rue Thérèse, by Elena Mauli Shapiro, Headline, RRP£12.99, 288 pagesYou take a quick shufti at this debut novel and you clock its cuteness right away: the title for a start – treize, rue Thérèse; yeah got it; then all those old photos, facsimile letters, the chequered covers of a mysterious box embedded in the text and your bricolage alert is ringing like billy-o.

So you have a browse and you see right away that Elena Mauli Shapiro is having a bit of a lark, scrambling time, setting us up for the Unreliable Narrator who is made to happen upon that box full of stuff – an opening to a bigger mystery.

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Is Pakistan a ‘jelly state'?

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Is Pakistan a ‘jelly state'?

SHAIKH MUJIBUR REHMAN

The book seeks to build a body of knowledge that falls under the rubric of Pakistan scholarship

TINDERBOX - The Past and Future of Pakistan: M.J. Akbar, HarperCollins, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 499.

The publication of this book has brought some dignity to the claim that India has some serious academic expertise on Pakistan. Although more than a score of diplomats and journalists are projected by the Indian media as Pakistan experts, hardly any Indian author figures in the list of top 20 books written on Pakistan over the past two decades. This could also be said of Indian scholarship on Middle East, Latin America, and many other regions. But it becomes a bit too embarrassing in respect of Pakistan because it happens to be our most important and, at the same time, highly sensitive neighbour.

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FROM : THE TIME
PHOTO : GOOGLE IMAGE

The future of the English language

Will English survive as a lingua franca, or will translation technology make it unnecessary? In the British film Code 46 of 2003, the director Michael Winterbottom creates a visually and verbally hybrid world for a dystopian love story. Cityscapes are an architectural collage of Shanghai, Dubai and London’s Jubilee Line, simultaneously recognizable and alien, and are populated by speakers of a world language that mixes English with Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Persian. The linguistic hybridization signals that in the world of Code 46 the balance of economic and political power has shifted away from English-speaking nations and hence English is no longer quite the global force to which we have become accustomed.

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The Use and Abuse of Literature

FROM : SF GATE
PHOTO : www.sfgate.com

The Use and Abuse of Literature

By Marjorie Garber

(Pantheon; 320 pages; $28.95)

Why read? You'd think that with the e-book and the Internet, with Google searching and channel surfing, the experience of curling up with a good book is as archaic as a buggy ride. You'd think, too, that with graphic novels and celebrity memoirs, and with Wikipedia offering their entries in "simple English," the very idea of literature itself had disappeared and, along with it, the language of craft and cadence that made memorable all writers from Shakespeare to Shaw.

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