Literature Past and Present

The Irving Howe Memorial Lecture was delivered last night at the City University of New York Graduate Center by Robert Alter, Professor of English and Hebrew Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He decried the state of American academic criticism, whose focus on political and social issues overwhelms the study of language as a major aspect of literature. He then showed exactly how important the author's use of rhythm, syntax and diction are in understanding how literature works, using Faulkner (several times), Hemingway, Proust, Joyce and the Hebrew bible as examples. Listening to Alter one remembers how exciting a discussion of literature can be, but the most recent book he mentioned, The Sound and the Fury, was published in 1929. Now, I like Faulkner as much as the next person, and I read ten pages of Proust every day, but as I was listening I thought how interesting it would have been had Alter discussed the use of language in contemporary writers, such as John Hawkes (e.g., the "sounds" of the first few sentences of Death, Sleep and the Traveler) or Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School) or Walter Mosley's clever, quasi-vernacular narrative (RL's Dream). Perhaps none of these will ever enter the American pantheon, but the immediacy of discussing contemporary work has its own rewards. I remember hearing Christopher Ricks riff on the rhymes of Bob Dylan several years ago at The New Yorker Festival (Dylan's Visions of Sin) and, though several rockers also appeared that evening, Ricks got the most enthusiastic reception.



Recommendation of a scary novel: although I've just seemed to pitch contemporary literature over that of the past, my recommendation for Halloween is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Written by an eighteenth century Scot, it's in print from The New York Review of Books.