July 22, 2009
Postmodern Book List
I have read five of the 61 essential postmodern books (via), The Scarlet Letter, Metamorphosis, Maus I & II, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Hamlet. I also got bored with Everything Is Illuminated, so I put it down, and read an entirely different City of God.
Of all the possible, essential reads, Hamlet makes the most sense. The story has all sorts of postmodern turns like the play within the play or, my personal favorite, Hamlet’s observation to Ophelia about men, “We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us.” The layers of irony in that statement are just fantastic. He is telling Ophelia that all men are liars while pretending to be insane, so he is a lying liar who is both telling the truth (his madness shouldn’t be believed) and lying (since he is, in fact, trustworthy) and vice versa.
Also related is a rather interesting essay (.pdf) by Thomas Pettitt on the comparision of the contemporary and Elizabethan conception of creativity, ownership, and collaboration (pardon the academic-ese):
What I have done in “borrowing” the Gutenberg parenthesis from my colleagues is of the same ilk as what Shakespear did to Kyd’s Hamlet, or (if that would be overweening) what the traveling players did to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (or a ballad-singer did with a song she heard from her mother): I have to a dedree made it my own — or at least there is a diagram in the Appendix which is offered as proof of having tried. It seeks to offer a systematic review of how verbal material (represented, appropriately by paragraph symbols) gets into a given work (or version of a work or performance of a work), as represented by a box. (The same system would presumably apply to pictorial, musical, or other non-verbal material, but I focus on the author/performer with in indebtedness to other works (as opposed to imagination, observation or experience). A symbol between boxes (in a vertical line) indicates material carried over to a work from its source or from the work to a performance. A symbol beside a box indicates material introduced from works/performances: strickly speaking a distinction should be made here between material taken from a specific work/performance (what parenthetical attides would call plagiarism), and material (“formals”; motifs; topoi; what parethetical attitiudes would call commonplaces or even “cliches”) belonging to a given tradition as a whole.
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I’ve read three of the books and wended half-way throughabout five others (or read alterante books by the same authors) Must read more. Always.
I must not get out much. Either that — or I’ve lived a couple more reading-years than y’all. Yeah. That must be it.
Okay. I can’t resist. I gotta count ‘em up and see how I rate, pomoliterarily speaking.
It’s like one of those questionnaires in Parade or Cosmo. I can never resist those either.
Dude misspelled Sterne. It’s Laurence Sterne, not Stern.
Like Andrew and Amanda, I’ve only read a few of these, more or less. Rings of Saturn, check. Pale Fire, check. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of Borges’s solo fiction (though I haven’t read the specific English-language collection he mentions: Labyrinths). I can’t remember if I read If on a Winter’s Night, or if it was another Calvino. I’ve read some Kafka, but not Metamorphosis; some Barthelme, but not 60 Stories; some Bolano, but not 2666 (though I might if I could find it in Spanish.) Shame on me, but I don’t care about reading most of those books.
What have I been doing with my life that I’ve read nigh-on half of the titles listed?
Oh — and where is Don Quixote?
Don’t even get me started on not having Don Quixote, Sheila. DON”T. EVEN.
Eh, either this means you rate Cervantes with Andy Warhol, or you don’t. But I won’t. EVEN.
For the record, I don’t.
I suspected my tally would be zero, but, I looked anyway and it was zero!
I’m not sure what to do about it either.
I did recognise most of the titles and authors, is there a tick for that?
Only if you can talk about them.
To be honest, Andrew. I’m not much good at talking about anything, although, I am good at talking about nothing.
I know it’s a long way off, but, I will be at next years Clusterflockstock and I shall demonstrate then how adept I am at talking about nothing.
I may of course gate crash one or two of you prior to that if I have my way.
I forgot Maus. I’ve read Maus.
I won’t call these post-modern, but I’ll say they’re pretty close to being essential:
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Lord Byron: Don Juan
J.L. Carr: A Month in the Country
Kim Chinquee: Oh Baby
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Christabel, Kubla Khan & The Pains of Sleep (1816)
Guy Davenport: DaVinci’s Bicycle
Emily Dickinson: any selection or collection
Penelope Fitzgerald: The Blue Flower
Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet
Jack Gilbert: The Great Fires
Thomas Hardy: Life’s Little Ironies
Norman Lock: A History of the Imagination
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick & “Bartleby”
Paul Metcalf: Genoa
Lorine Niedecker: The Granite Pail
Ignacio Padilla: Shadow Without a Name
Ezra Pound: Personae
W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
That’s a good list, Cooper.
I read The Scarlet Letter for Frank McCourt’s class. It was the first book about which a teacher of mine ever asked, “So, what did you think? Did you like it? Hate it?” And when some of us admitted that we hated it, he didn’t act like we were stupid or lazy or childish.
I read part of The Things They Carried, for a class with Jim Shepard. I liked it a lot and still have it, but I’ve never finished reading it.
Phil, did you not even have to read Hamlet for school? I did, at least twice; don’t like it. Mainly it’s useful so you can appreciate watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I love.