Georges Perec

Attempting to compensate for my lack of literary education, which has left me with nothing more than uninformed intuitions about literature and how it is shaped, I came across this excellent overview of the career and work of Georges Perec, an Oulipian. And here is a more biographically inclined essay about Perec in the Jewish Daily Forward.

technorati: writing

The purpose of literature

From the "unofficial" website of French author Frédéric Beigbeder:

Dans les années 1980, une nouvelle drogue fit son apparition dans les milieux noctambules : le MDMA dit "ecstasy". Cette "pilule de l'amour" provoquait d'étranges effets : bouffées de chaleur, envie de danser toute la nuit sur de la techno, besoin de caresser les gens, grincements de dents, déshydratation accélérée, angoisse existentielle, tentatives de suicide, demandes en mariage. ... Et puis, avons-nous besoin d'une pilule pour raconter notre vie à des inconnus? Alors qu'il y a la littérature pour ça?

My translation of the italicized portion: And do we really need a pill just to tell strangers about our lives? Isn't that what we have literature for?

technorati: Frédéric Beigbeder, ecstasy, literature

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

-- Flannery O'Connor,
rejecting a wild interpretation of her story "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"
from a letter dated 28 March 1961,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This reminded me of an incident from my college days. I was a film criticism major, and being an undergraduate was much vexed by the grad students who tended to throw their weight around.

Two of them particularly annoyed me, Greg B. and Louis B. The latter once offered an interpretation of a classic film, whose director I later had the opportunity to speak to in person. When I described Louis' interpretation to him, he dismissed it and said there was nothing like that at all the scene. I dutifully reported this back to Louis, who scornfully said: "Well, you can talk about intentionality all you want, but..."

Louis is the main reason I wanted never to become a grad student.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, literary theory