Waffle

The group blog Crooked Timber is holding a seminar on Susanna Clarke and her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I have given to two people so far without having read it myself - looking forward to it though). They've done one on China Mieville before.
Here's the Introduction to the seminar. Susanna Clarke is taking part herself.
They've got off to a flying start. I don't have time to read everything that's already posted, but will get back to it once I've read the novel. In the meantime, I thought some of you might like to know.

I'm sitting on a longer post about literary criticism on the internet, but focused more on the low end of the field: the livejournalers writing essays about Harry Potter for fun. I think the fact that people are writing literary criticism for fun, even if it's not exactly at the academic level (not being at the academic level has its advantages, by the way: the material posted to HP_Essays will be accessible and immediately useful to aspiring writers) will change the field a few years down the line, probably for the better. But that's something for a later posting.

This seminar, on the other hand, is by academics and will almost certainly be the sort of stuff that academics like to write about, if made slightly more accessible to the general public because it goes on a blog. Good. Yesterday, ROCR reader Martin Diehl emailed me with a question about lit crit that I was going to mull over a bit; it'll be helpful to be able to point somewhere and say "This is what they actually do" and also to be able to remind myself of just that. It's been 10 years since I got my degree, so some of my impressions of what people studying literature actually do have become a bit hazy and are probably out of date anyway.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.