Amazing Bookstores

Flavorwire recently posted this amazing-looking bookstores list. As a literary nerd, of course, I love lots of different bookstores, to the point where I have favorite bookstores for every city (Powell's for Portland, Curious for East Lansing, The Strand for New York). And looking at some of these amazing places, like Livraria da Vila in Sao Paulo, Poplar Kid's Republic Bookstore or The Montague Bookmill, I am tempted to plan a vacation to one of these cities just to have an excuse to go to one of these places. Given my love of Coney Island, I am heartbroken that I cannot hang out at their Bookstore and Barber Shop, which is charming in the same way Coney Island always is.

Tolkien Chart

As a literature nerd, I always like a good webcomic that makes a reference to canonical literature. A few days ago, someone posted this amazing chart that talks about books and Tolkien's made-up words.

The Great Gatsby in 3D

So finally, The Great Gatsby will be adapted, again, into a movie. As a literary nerd, I'm sure everyone's expecting me to be excited for it, and I would be, if I particularly liked the book. As a feminist, the book just strikes me as another rich white man writing a book that ignores anyone not white (rich, able, straight, etc.) and then vilifies women, because really, how dare Daisy spur Jay on for so long and then, once she does return his affections, how dare she cheat on Tom?

My other annoyance is that this novel is being adapted over other novels. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. That same year, writers like Willa Cather, Dorothy Scarsborough, Sigrid Undset, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein were publishing novels, and their works are so frequently ignored by the general public. (Academics still read some of these writers, but are mostly ignored by the general public. Most Americans have heard of The Great Gatsby; how many have heard of The Professor's House?) Moreover, there are other great writers from the same time period who were writing about the forgotten or were part of marginalized groups, like Kafka or Proust. Once again, a story of someone with immense privilege is given way more attention than the stories that in many ways deal with the lives of more than just a small few.

The Anxiety of Influence

I was reading an article called Nancy Armstrong's "What feminism did to novel studies" and one of the things it mentioned early on in the article was something called the "anxiety of influence."  As always when I hear something that I don't know about, I go out in search of answers.

It also seems that, based on a lot of the modern poetry I read, that a lot of people are influenced by Wallace Stevens.  I actually like Stevens a lot, but a lot of critics have complained over the years that he was "willfully difficult."  I think there is some truth to it, but it's always struck me as a good thing, because then you have to work to understand his poems.  You have to read them more than twice.  Most of the other good poets I read now are like this, some to a greater degree than others.  And I like this.  I was tickled to discover the article summarizing Harold Bloom's theory mentioned Stevens, because he's the first person I thought of when I read the basic definition of the anxiety of influence. 
One of my professors once mentioned that some people are more into theory than others.  I am into theory, though I like to see it applied to works of literature, especially the kind I am familiar with, because then I have a much easier time seeing what theorists mean when they assert a particular claim.  Seeing them apply an idea demonstrates they have thought the idea out and illustrates for readers how they should similarly apply the idea.  

To this end, I then wanted to do a little research into Gilbert and Gubar's feminist response to Bloom's idea.  According to Armstrong's article, Bloom had imagined literature as a product of the oedipal struggles between father and son.  Gilbert and Gubar, naturally, imagined how women fit into theory, since women have been producing literature too.  Gilbert and Gubar decided that women's literature was always struggling with the male tradition of literature: they can't outright rebel from it but instead must demonstrate they can work within it. 
One of the many complaints I've heard of women's literature over the years is that it never does anything new or daring.  Maybe it's because we are forced into a defensive position, much like when dealing with something like the gaze.  We're never able to just create art for the sake of creating art for ourselves or the way we want it.  We have to create art that will earn the respect of our male colleagues.
I'm hoping, as women fight to have a better place within society, that these problems will (and hopefully already have) dissipated.   

I am also wondering if there is a way to complicate Gubar and Gilbert's response in some way involving something like race or sexuality.  I think it would be easy to say that many people of color have also felt the need to earn their male (and also white) colleagues respect by working within the traditional rules of art.  For example, I took a class a couple of years ago on the African diaspora, and the majority of things we read were written in a traditional novel or essay form.  I'm wondering if those mediums were chosen not because they were necessarily the best mediums to communicate the message in or the because they were the creator's first choice, but because they were the forms that white men would respond best to.  Sometimes we watched things that were avant garde in form, and some of my fellow students reactions were masked by their dislike of a medium they were unfamiliar with, covering up how uncomfortable the messages of the piece were. 
I took a class on African history, and we read an essay by an African author who complained about how white American and European authors dominated the educational lives of Africans.  When some of these Africans decided to be writers, they felt forced to write not in their own native languages but in their oppressor's language, just to have their ideas heard.  It seems like, at least in this case, authors of color weren't creating the art they wanted to, they were were creating it based on the traditions and rules of the dominant power, similar to what Gilbert and Gubar talk about. 

A Feminist Aesthetic of Reading

A week ago, I read this article called "Pleasure, resistance and a feminist aesthetic of reading" by Geraldine Heng, which explored medieval literature and feminist interpretations of it.  I've spent a lot of time working in medieval history, so I was impressed by Heng's writing on that history, since she covered a lot of ground in very little space.  But I also liked the idea of looking at medieval writing from a feminist standpoint. 
In March, I read The Song of Roland, which is about Roland, a knight of Charlemagne, who defends a particular spot in the Pyrenees to the point where he and all his men die, but allow the rest of the troops to avoid being attacked by the Moors.  (The Moors, in the words of one of my professors, is another way of saying "You, them there Muslims.")  What bothered me about this story was, at the end, Charlemagne has to tell Roland's fiancee (who wasn't mentioned previously in the story) that Roland has died.  Then this fiancee goes off and dies, with the writer implying she had nothing left to live for.  Obviously, as a feminist, I don't like the idea of a woman being forced to marry, and I'm not a fan of the idea of women not having anything better going on in their life than a man, so this bothered me.  Because I was reading The Song of Roland for a history class and I didn't have to write a paper on it, I kept these thoughts to myself.  Even though Heng didn't discuss this work in her essay, I suspect she would probably have something to say about it. 
I'm also wondering how she would feel about literary interpretations of letters.  I turned in an essay six weeks ago on the letters between Pope Gregory VII and Countess Matilda of Tuscany.  Is it possible to see these in a feminist light, even though they are not the traditional idea of "literature"?  Matilda obviously defended Gregory, but Gregory helped her as well.  Since Heng advocates seeing women in medieval literature as both dependent on men but also with some degree of power themselves, I find myself wondering if I should see Matilda in the same light. 
I'm also wishing I could read the Vitas written about her by various monks, because those would come much closer to qualifying as literature.  Vitas, or Lives, were basically biographies.  They were usually written by men working within the church (as monks, abbots, bishops, canons, etc.) that tell a person's life story, emphasizing how saint-like they are.  If they were written before they were canonized, the goal is to persuade readers they should be, and if they were written after canonization, it's because they wanted to use the person in question as an example of living one's life justly.  There's been a lot of work by historians on these biographies in the last twenty to twenty five years, analyzing them using close reading, a technique that any English major worth their salt understands.  So I'm wondering if it's possible to do something similar while working in English and not history. 
I wasn't really looking to read these feminist essays in order to work on the issues between history and literature or feminist in medieval literature, but Heng's essay opened up a lot of really interesting thoughts for me. 

Book Sale

The Red Cedar Review today had a book sale to raise money. Hopefully, you got out there to support us and to get some cheap books. I have classes all day on Thursday's, so I didn't get a chance to check this out until later in the day, but I do have some pictures, which I've decided to post for everyone to enjoy. One of the things we had to do last night to prepare was to design posters. This picture above is the one Ashley did. I love it.

Kim designed this sweet looking poster for the event. She's such an amazing artist. We're definitely putting this up in the office.

Look at some of the awesome books we had. Most of them were high literature, but a few, like the one in the corner, was knock-knock jokes for kids.

Natalie, Emily, Katie and others actually selling or buying books.


Here is Amelia and Rachel. These two were on rock duty at the time. We decided that in addition to having a book sale, we were going to paint the rock. Most universities have a rock, and MSU is not different in this regard. The painting rules are clear: You have to guard it all day, then you can paint it after nightfall. If you leave it in the night, it's fair game to paint again. Once it's dawn again, you can't paint. I love this picture because Amelia is playing harmonica and because Rachel looks like the sun is killing her. (Also, she's holding Ashley's poster!) I've always enjoyed hanging with both these girls. I feel like I would love to watch a sitcom about the two of them, since Amelia's random and Rachel's fun.