The Reader Online

Phil Davis’s passionate defence of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (2008), has been reviewed in the current edition of The Cambridge Quarterly. Claire Charlotte McKechnie writes:

Perhaps it is Davis’s role as editor of the non-academic literary magazine The Reader that gives him licence to argue vehemently for the role of the reader in Victorian novels and poems… It is readers, he contends, who ‘go to the book to internalize it, personally, emotionally, as if they might just find revealed there a version of the secrets of their lives’… Essentially, Davis’s book is about a philosophy of literature; in it he expands the possibilities of what studying literature can mean, how we can expand our minds in order to reach new and exciting conclusions about things we often take for granted, about ourselves, about the past, about life… Readers – all readers – cannot ignore that they are emotionally moved by literature, and why should they?

So why does Victorian literature still matter? If we are to take part in attempting to respond to the title of Davis’s stimulating study, perhaps it is that Victorian literature is fundamental to understanding ourselves and our past. Like the Victorians, with their fascination with origins (culminating in Darwin’s Origin of Species), perhaps we too feel the need to trace who we are and where we come from. The Victorians left their legacy in our architecture and designs, music and art, politics and science, and even (or especially) our theories of life and death. Yet, most of all, perhaps we find ourselves in their literature.

You can read the review in full here. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters by Phil Davis is available to buy (along with all the Victorian literature you could ever want) from our online bookshop.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is celebrated as one of the great poets of the Romantic period, and Kubla Khan is one of his most famous , and best, poems. A brief preface written by Coleridge usually accompanies this poem, outlining the events of its composition. Coleridge claimed that Kubla Khan was inspired by an opium-induced dream, in which events detailed within the poem were first imprinted on his mind. The moment Coleridge woke from this dream:

he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.

Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A Damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
S.T. Coleridge, 1816.

Coleridge’s explanation of his inspiration for the poem may clarify some of its more unusual aspects. The opening lines ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’ immediately immerses the reader in a strange and unfamiliar environment, which the poem then goes on to explore in more detail as it progresses. Images of majestic ‘greenery’ in the poem soon give way to the supernatural, and a chasm ‘Haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’, before concluding with a warning to ‘Beware!’ the ‘flashing eyes’ of the demon, and to receive him with holy dread’. The subtitle: ‘A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment’ reminds the reader that the poem is not completed exactly as Coleridge had envisaged: the alleged interference from someone calling at his house left the dream ‘scattered’ within Coleridge’s mind: the remnants of which make up the entirety of Kubla Khan.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is running an ‘experiment in close reading’ in which seven women are reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carrying on a conversation about it in the margin. While the comment area–the virtual page margin–is only open to the seven there is also a forum where the rest of us can weigh in on the novel and on the experiment itself. Bob Stein, who is managing the project, emphasises that the best way to read the book is to buy or borrow a copy, but the online version is nicely done. I wonder whether this really adds a great deal to the large, diverse, and often complex conversational output of literary bloggers and their commenters, while the idea that “we don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment” is disputed by at least one commentator. It might also be disproved by arguably the largest and most complex conversation in history, Wikipedia. Nevertheless the level of detail this format makes possible is certainly intriguing as an opening up of the seminar room. Here’s what Bob has to say:

On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to “try it on” again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature.  It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other’s reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn what’s necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.

Here’s the link again to The Golden Notebook.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Jonathan Gottschall has an article in the Boston Globe which supports my view that academic literary criticism has reached a dead end and is slowly dying. This is partly to do with demographics I think. The average age of academics has been rising for years and while younger scholars struggle to find a foothold ideas and approaches that might otherwise have been pushed aside linger on. And on. The recent arguments over whether academics should retire at 65 shows how deep-rooted the problem is; it is based after all in careers and personal positions and final salary pensions. And of course the most powerful individuals–also frequently the oldest–hire and promote successors in their own image, breeding weaknesses into the flock.

Gottschall points to intellectual failures: the lack of scientific testing of literary theories and the way in which literary criticism finds supporting evidence rather than attempting to falsify its claims. In many ways his description of English resembles descriptions of the field of psychology before the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. Nevertheless this is an optimistic article suggesting that a more scientific approach to literature might bring with it a resurgence in literary studies as a way of understanding the human condition:

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

This proposal may distress many of my colleagues, who may worry that adopting scientific methods would reduce literary study to a branch of the sciences. But if we are wise, we can admit that the sciences are doing many things better than we are, and gain from studying their successes, without abandoning the things that make literature special.

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Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana