Enright Essay

I've finished off the essay we began, collectively, writing in the session on Tuesday 7th December. It's posted to the EN3314 Moodle site under week 10, as a word file (I'd post it to this blog too, but Blogger don't allow me to). I used the resources we found online, and a few things from the lecture PPT, but didn't put in a great deal of extra research or work. I also continued the line of the argument that we were starting to flesh out, and carried it through to a conclusion.

You don't have to write another non-assessed essay for this course; the assessed essay questions will be handed out next term, in week 5. If you want to write another essay, either covering some area and novel that interests you, or else taken from last year's assessed essay questions (also on the Moodle site, at the top) then I'd be happy to take a look at what you produce. But it's not required.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Enright on Winning the Prize

You should read the article at the other end of this link, in which Anne Enright talks about the experience of winning the prize, and especially the subsequent book-tour and publicity.

Do you think winning the prize, and staying in a succession of posh hotels whilst on tour made her happy? Hmm. 'It is a melancholy thing, to pass hundreds of thousands of people on the road and remember so few.'

Anne Enright, The Gathering

WEEK 10. ANNE ENRIGHT, THE GATHERING (2007)

‘[A] genuine attempt to stare down both love and death’ – A.L. Kennedy

‘There are some quite good set-piece scenes . . . but, God, it’s wearing’ – Hugo Barnacle
Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. After working for RTÉ for some years, she became a full-time writer in 1993. The Gathering was her fourth novel and the first to be shortlisted for the Booker.

Editions:

Anne Enright, The Gathering, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007; London: Vintage, 2008).

2007 Judges:

Howard Davies (chair), Wendy Cope, Giles Foden, Ruth Scurr, Imogen Stubbs

2007 Shortlist:

Nicola Barker, Darkmans
Anne Enright, The Gathering
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Topics:

• Memory and the Past.
• Narrative and Unease.
• Reviewers and Sales Figures.

Reviews:

A.L. Kennedy, ‘The Din Within’, The Guardian, (28 April 2007)
Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Intimate Relations’, The Observer, (6 May 2007)
Tom Adair, ‘Every Last Piece of the Jigsaw’, The Scotsman (19 May 2007)
Hugo Barnacle, ‘The Gathering’, The Sunday Times, (27 May 2007)
Patricia Craig, ‘The Gathering’, Independent, (7 June 2007)
Eleanor Birne, ‘What Family Does to You’, London Review of Books (18 October 2007)

Desai on Guardian Book Club 2009

Last year John Mullan (a former Booker judge himself, and a Professor of the University of London to boot) ran one of the Guardian's 'book club' sessions on Desai's novel. Check out what he said:

Week 1: Divisions. "A novel of shifting points of view, The Inheritance of Loss flits from one character to another, from one emotion or sense impression to the next, its narrative form acting out the sense of dislocation that is its theme. "

Week 2: the Importance of Food. "Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not."

Week 3: Kiran Desai on writing The Inheritance of Loss. "As I wrote [the novel], I began the process of considering that one's place in the world might be merely incidental, just a matter of perspective. Perhaps the centre was not firm at all? And as I wrote I became aware of the rich novelistic moments that come from many stories overlapping, from this moral ambiguity, and from the utter uselessness of the flag. Even the past – home of sorts to all of us – wasn't fixed. History is only someone's story. I felt as if I were writing to displace myself, and to know that my story wasn't the only one – that there would always be other books on the shelf."

Week 4: Readers' reponses. "One reader wanted to know about the book's title. How late in the day had this come? Only at the very end, Desai replied, had she decided on "The Inheritance of Loss" – despite being counselled strongly against it. Had other titles had been rejected? Yes, but she was coy about these. Her father had told her to call it "The Loss of Inheritance": "at least everyone would understand what that means". But after eight years working on the book, she was entirely stubborn."

Inheritance of Loss

WEEK 9. KIRAN DESAI, THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS (2006)

‘What Desai gives the Booker panel is Incredible India as Beautiful Writing. The stories are of loss and humiliation, displacement and dispossession — the rich music of victimhood is never not heard. But that makes it all the more poignant and beautiful, testing every skill that she may have honed at her creative writing course at Columbia University. . . . And hence, this Beautiful Writing should not only tell the right Stories, but should also foreground the right Issues’ – Aveek Sen

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi in 1971. Currently living in the United States, she is the daughter of Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker Prize on three occasions. The Inheritance of Loss is her second novel.

Editions:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006; London: Penguin, 2007).

2006 Judges:

Hermione Lee (chair), Simon Armitage, Candia McWilliam, Anthony Quinn, Fiona Shaw

2006 Shortlist:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Kate Grenville, The Secret River
M.J. Hyland, Carry Me Down
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

Topics:

• Indian Writing and the Booker.
• Globalisation and Internationalism.
• Promise and Accomplishment.

Reviews:

Aamer Hussein, ‘Maps of the Heart’, Independent, (8 September 2006)
Natasha Walter, ‘Mutt and the Maths Tutor’, The Guardian, (26 August 2006)
Pankaj Mishra, ‘Wounded by the West’, New York Times, (12 February 2006)
Sarah Hughes, ‘Uncle Potty and Other Guides to the Truth’, The Observer, (3 September 2006)
Aveek Sen, ‘Voices of the Same Poverty, The Telegraph (Calcutta), (12 October 2006)

Banville and Irish Literature

I don't have much to say in today's lecture about Banville as a specifically Irish writer; but if you're interested in his place in the tradition of Irish writing you might want to look at this article: Kersti Tarien Powell, '"Not a son but a survivor": Beckett... Joyce... Banville', The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 35, Irish Writing since 1950 (2005), 199-211. Here's the abstract:

John Banville's fiction represents a sustained effort to investigate the mechanics of the creative act, where the author's own search for means of representation are paralleled by his characters' search for knowledge, understanding, and unproblematic utterance. Intertextual references nuance and reflect this quest, which will be traced from Banville's earliest, unpublished literary manifesto to his later fiction. Examining Banville's complex literary allegiances to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, this article analyses the representation of the creative act in Banville's fiction.

Banville's Sea

Week 8. John Banville, The Sea (2005)

‘It is a literary work of art’ – Rick Gekoski

‘Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest’ – Boyd Tonkin

John Banville was born in Wexford in 1945. One of the most widely-admired Irish novelists of his generation, he had been shortlisted for the Booker only once before, for The Book of Evidence in 1989, losing out to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

Editions:

John Banville, The Sea, (London: Picador, 2005; London: Picador, 2006).

2005 Shortlist:

John Banville, The Sea
Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Zadie Smith, On Beauty

2005 Judges:
John Sutherland (chair), Lindsay Duguid, Rick Gekoski, Josephine Hart, David Sexton

Topics:

· Literature and Passion.
· Irish Writing and Modernist Tradition.
· ‘High Art’ vs. the Beachbound Pageturner?

Reviews:

Allan Massie, ‘Point of No Return’, The Scotsman, (28 May 2005)
Peter Conradi, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Independent, (3 June 2005)
Tibor Fischer, ‘Wave after Wave of Vocabulary’, The Daily Telegraph, (7 June 2005)
David Grylls, ‘Fiction: The Sea by John Banville’, The Sunday Times, (12 June 2005)
Finn Fordham (our very own), ‘High Tidings’, The Guardian, (25 June 2005)
Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Wordy Widower with a Past’, New York Times, (1 November 2005)

Costa Prize 2010

Some interesting things in the recent Costa Prize shortlist (not least RHUL English Department member Jo Shapcott getting nominated in the poetry section for her brilliant collection Of Mutability). But the novel shortlist has surprised some people. Check out the Independent's report, and judge Jonathan Ruppin's comments:

Jonathan Ruppin, web editor at Foyles bookshop, who was one of three judges for the novel award, said the four books on the list were "fantastic stories that really gripped you and with characters that really engaged the reader". But he added that he felt it had not been a particularly strong year for fiction. "We were not spoiled for choice in terms of books that were serious contenders," he said.

Reflecting on the omission of Howard Jacobson's Man Booker prize-winner The Finkler Question and Mitchell's work, he said they had both certainly been contenders, but their work was too cerebral to recommend to the masses. The prize has veered towards more commercial reads in recent times.

In the website comments, 'Tim Footman' adds this: '“...too cerebral to recommend to the masses.” Oh just give the prize to Katie Price and be done with it, for Christ's sake.' He doesn't sound pleased.

Hollinghurst and Henry

Henry James, that is. I wonder if it's possible properly to appreciate The Line of Beauty without some sense of James's novels.

Have a look at this very interesting review essay from The New England Quarterly [78:4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 631-642], Michael Moon's 'Burn Me at the Stake Always', which covers the odd little rash of contemporary novels 'dealing' in some sense with Henry James that appeared in 2004. Moon covers The Master by Colm Toíbín (a beautifully written novel, that; and also Booker shortlisted); Author, Author by David Lodge; The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and a couple of non-ficton titles (Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men edited by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe; and Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 by Henry James, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi).

The real question: why did everybody suddenly think that writing about Henry James was the thing to do? What was it about 2004 that made it so Jamesian a year for fiction?

Amazon reviews

Like many, and perhaps most, writers I have a problematic relationship with amazon, and especially with amazon reader reviews, in which fans, as many idiots as clever people preserve their considered, or unconsidered, reactions to the books they have just read. I thought I'd take a look at the page for The Line of Beauty.

There are ninety customer reviews listed, with a preponderance very impressed with the novel and with Hollinghurst's style in particular: 'this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant and evocative English, shimmering phrases' according to Septimus; 'this book is superbly written and impressive' (Phil Shanklin). In fact, many reviewers go over similar ground to the mainstream newspaper reviews (the links to whom are in the main post on the novel): the shallowness of the characters, the effectiveness or otherwise of the satire, the treatment of AIDS.

The negative reviews are in the minority, but are in some ways more interesting. Several toot the 'boredom' horn (Mr Crow: 'it just d-r-a-g-g-e-d along...'; Ventura Angelo: 'Yawn ... absolutely boring'), which is a pretty lazy critical response -- and one banned on this course, incidentally. But some make the point that beautiful writing about (morally) ugly people can be as wearing to read as ugly writing about beautiful people.

'Pen ultmate' gives the book one-star, attacking it in terms that (I'd guess) would actually bring a blush of pleasure of Hollinghurst's brow. This, despite its hostile intention, is actually a pretty good account of the Henry James aesthetic that Line of Beauty follows:

This story reads as if it was written by someone with no personality of their own, just a lot of unexpressed mundane thoughts about the world which he's now using the excuse of a novel to finally dribble out, unfortunately. There are endless descriptions of how a character thinks he might react to something that's just been said, but decides not to, and why he decides not to, and how his non-reaction might affect the speaker differently to how he'd be affected if he had actually said what he nearly said but didn't.

It's exactly James's ability to explore that aspect of human interaction, delicately and subtly but with great penetration, that makes so many people fall in love with him as a novelist. Of course, you need to believe that what people feel but don't or can't say is a major part of human life. Similarly, some of these readers come over as, er, foolish. Here's A Customer's one-star review:

When I read the first page I thought i was reading a typical Jeffrey Archer. i have never been so dissapointed in a book.

On the upside, none of the amazon reviewers appeared phased by the detailed depictions of homosexuality as such, which perhaps suggests that homophobia is less a feature of culture today than it was in the 80s: which would be heartening if true. And some of the reports (check out this, different 'A Customer' for instance) are pretty insightful.

Hollinghurst's Beautiful Lines

WEEK 7. ALAN HOLLINGHURST, THE LINE OF BEAUTY (2004)

‘A winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite Eighties’ – Chris Smith, chair of the judges, 19th October 2004

‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’ – Daily Express headline, 20th October 2004

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud and spent thirteen years on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Andrew Davies’s adaptation of The Line of Beauty was broadcast by the BBC in 2006.

Editions:

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, (London: Picador, 2004).

2004 Shortlist:

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Gerard Woodward, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon

2004 Judges:

Chris Smith MP (chair), Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, Fiammetta Rocco

Topics:

• Sexuality and the Modern Novel.
• Tapping in to the Past: Henry James and the 1980s.
• The Luxury of Style and the Lowest Common Denominator.

Reviews:

Geoff Dyer, ‘The Last Summer’, The Sunday Telegraph, (28 March 2004).
Andrew Crumey, ‘Marque of the Master Craftsman’, Scotland on Sunday, (4 April 2004)
Alfred Hickling, ‘Between the Lines’, The Guardian, (10 April 2004)
Peter Conradi, ‘Art and the Cruelty that Goes with It’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 April 2004)
Gregory Woods, ‘Love, Loss and the Tory Story’, The Independent, (16 April 2004)
Thomas Jones, ‘Welly-Whanging’, London Review of Books, (6 May 2004)

Criticism:

There's little of this, especially for Hollinghurst's later books. Take a look at this brief entry by Nick Rennison in the Routledge Contemporary British Novelists volume for instance.

DBC Pierre

Some links on Vernon God Little, for those interested in writing about this novel.

First, as the lecture stresses, this book is so thoroughly a 21st-century remix of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) that you'll need to read that novel -- if you haven't already done so (and if you haven't already done so then ... why on earth not?)

One angle I'd like to discuss has to do with narrative voice, and the notion of character as performance. And talking of that, by way of overcoming my natural hesitation at straying from proper lit-crit into biography, to what extent do you think the novel's success had to do with Pierre's creation of a media-friendly authorial 'persona' or 'character'? Have a look at this for instance; and this, and see what you think.

On the subject of making comedy out of the Columbine School Massacre: do you think this is funny? How does it compare to Pierre's approach?

Vernon God Little

WEEK 5. D.B.C. PIERRE, VERNON GOD LITTLE (2003)

‘The winner was the Mexican-Australian first-time novelist Peter Finlay: a man who, we learned at the weekend, enjoyed a past life as gambling-addicted junkie con-artist who sold his best friend’s house and fled with the cash. (This is a charge levelled insufficiently often, for my tastes, against Anita Brookner)’ – Sam Leith
D.B.C. Pierre (a.k.a. Peter Finlay) was born in Australia to English parents, has lived in Mexico and the United States and was resident in Ireland when he won the Booker. Vernon God Little was his first novel. His second, Ludmila’s Broken English, was published in 2006.

Editions:

D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

2003 Shortlist:

Monica Ali, Brick Lane
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor
Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Clare Morrall, Astonishing Splashes of Colour
D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little

2003 Judges:

John Carey (chair), D.J. Taylor, Rebecca Stephens, Francine Stock, A.C. Grayling

Topics:

• A Taste for Scandal.
• Ventriloquy and Originality.
• The Non-American American Novel.

Reviews:

Carrie O’Grady, ‘Lone Star’, The Guardian, (18 January 2003).
Jonathan Heawood, ‘Growing Up With Jesus’, The Observer, (19 January 2003).
Sam Leith, ‘Springer’s America’, The Daily Telegraph, (25 January 2003).
Marianne Brace, ‘A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem Generation’, Independent, (3 February 2003).
David Robson, ‘Who Dies? You Decide’, The Sunday Telegraph, (23 February 2003).
M. Kakutani, ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia)’, New York Times, (5 November 2003).
Sam Sifton, ‘Holden Caulfield on Ritalin’, New York Times Book Review, (9 November 2003).
James Wood, ‘The Lie-World’, London Review of Books, (20 November 2003).
Chris Lehmann, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, Washington Post, (2 December 2003).
Theodore Dalrymple, 'Escape from Barbarity' The Spectator (3 Jan 2004).

Note: there are some interesting things in several of these reviews, but the meatiest and most useful is the James Wood LRB piece, linked above.

Essay

Your non-assessed course essay is due in by Tuesday of week 7 (check Turnitun and you'll see).

I'm not going to distribute essay questions for this project -- if you're interested as to what the final assessed essay questions look like, I've stuck last year's paper on Moodle: you'll see it there as a Word file at the top.

What I'd like you to do is write a 1000-1500 word essay or review about any of the novels on the course. The only constraint upon you is that you must contextualise the novel. You may choose to do this in a number of ways:

(a) you could write an essay on any of the novels contextualising it in terms of the other shortlisted titles for that year's prize: comparing and contrastng it with the other fiction published that year.

(b) you could contextualise your novel in terms of a theoretical or critical approach, discourse or genre: connect The White Tiger to postcolonial theory, for instance; read The Blind Assassin in the context of misery memoirs, or science fiction.

(c) or you could contextualise with respect to the Booker itself, take your chosen novel as a starting point for an analysis of the cultural or social significance of the prize, or prize culture more generally.

Martel Links

Rather thin on the ground, these. Start with the reviews in the previous post.

Here's one interesting article: June Dwyer, 'Yann Martel's Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative', Modern Language Studies (35:2, 2005), pp. 9-21

James Mensch, 'The Intertwining of Incommensurables: Martel's Life of Pi', in Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz (eds), Phenomenology and the Non-human Animal: at the Limits of Experience (Volume 56 of Contributions to phenomenology; Springer 2007). This is an interesting essay, but be warned: it's hard philosophy rather than literary criticism (the book's blurb: 'The question of the relation between human and non-human animals in theoretical, ethical and political regards has become a prominent topic within the philosophical debates of the last two decades. This volume explores in substantial ways how phenomenology can contribute to these debates. It offers specific insights into the description and interpretation of the experience of the non-human animal, the relation between phenomenology and anthropology, the relation between phenomenology and psychology, as well as ethical considerations')

Most of Christine Lorre's essay on the novel is available on google books.

You might enjoy Merritt Moseley's overview of 'The Booker Prizes for 2001 and 2002: Cool Young Authors and Old Codgers' The Sewanee Review (111:1 2003), pp. 157-169

Also: I mention in lecture the plagiarism row that flared after Martel won the prize: the accusation being that he had lifted important elements straight from the Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar's novel Max and the Cats. You can read more about that here, and here. Scliar's prior novel is about a young boy stranded in a lifeboat with a panther, you know. Martel's own account 'How I Wrote Life of Pi' isn't very forthcoming on this topic. On the other hand, this Library Journal article is rather forgiving to Martel. Some interesting questions about plagiary raised here, I'd say: relevant to the novel (but also to students writing essays and so on)

One final link: as I mention in the lecture, animal fables have a long history in human culture. Probably the best book on the way 'beasts' have signified in human culture and self-image is by the philosopher Mary Midgeley: it is called Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature (1978; rev; ed., Routledge 2002), is in the library, but is also available (or at least, a good chunk of it is) free to read on Google Books.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)

WEEK 4. YANN MARTEL, LIFE OF PI (2002)

‘It is as the author says, a novel which will make you believe in God – or ask yourself why you don’t’ – Lisa Jardine

‘It is the nugget of a good idea, but it is spread out over 300 pages by an author who seems to have a knack for making the fantastic seem utterly mundane’ – Finlo Rohrer

Yann Martel was born in Spain, lives in Montreal, speaks French as a first language and writes fiction in English. His third book, Life of Pi, won the first Booker Prize to be sponsored by the financial services group Man (known from then on, officially, as the ‘Man Booker Prize’).

Editions:

Yann Martel, Life of Pi, (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003).

2002 Shortlist:

Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Carol Shields, Unless
William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
Tim Winton, Dirt Music

2002 Judges:

Lisa Jardine (chair), David Baddiel, Russell Celyn Jones, Salley Vickers, Erica Wagner

Topics:

• Children and Animals
• Modes of Veracity: truth, literalism and metaphor
• Narrative and Belief

Reviews:

Justine Jordan, ‘Animal Magnetism’, The Guardian, (25 May 2002)
Tim Adams, ‘A Fishy Tale’, The Observer, (26 May 2002)
Judith Palmer, ‘Life of Pi’, The Independent, (22 June 2002)
Jonathan Kiefer, ‘Fascinating Life of Pi Gives Readers a Reason to Believe’, San Francisco Chronicle, (23 June 2002)
Gary Krist, ‘Taming the Tiger’, New York Times Book Review, (7 July 2002)
Bryan Walsh, ‘Castaway with Karma’, Time, CLX, vi (2 September 2002)

Some Carey Links

[1] In the lecture I make reference to the 'Jerilderie Letter', the most significant surviving example of Kelly's own writing. You can see a facsimile of this letter here, or read the whole thing more easily on wikisource.

[2] Google books has most of this collection of essays on Peter Carey's fiction edited by Andreas Gaile, Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005), including the following (or most of the text of the following):

'A Contrarian Streak': an interview with Carey.

Carolyn Bliss, '"Lies and Silences": Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang'

Susan K Martin, 'Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang and Ned Kelly in Australian Fiction'

[3] If you're interested in the historical Ned Kelly (and who wouldn't be, especially after reading Carey's novel) there's a wealth of material online. Wikipedia is not always to be relied upon, of course, but their page on Kelly is pretty good, and contains links to a deal of other sites.

[4] Also, since this is a course on literary prizes, you may be interested to discover that the Crime Writers Association of Australia run The Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing.

Kell and the Gang

PETER CAREY, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2001)

‘I think they only gave it to me out of sympathy because they know I’ve never won the Booker’ – Beryl Bainbridge on being made a Dame of the British Empire in 2001

Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. True History of the Kelly Gang was his second Booker winner: the first was Oscar and Lucinda in 1988; Illywhacker was shortlisted in 1985.

Editions:

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).

2001 Shortlist:

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Andrew Miller, Oxygen
David Mitchell, number9dream
Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room
Ali Smith, Hotel World

2001 Judges:

Kenneth Baker (chair), Michele Roberts, Kate Summerscale, Philip Hensher, Prof. Rory Watson

Topics:

• The Booker Prize and the ‘Two Horse Race’.
• Australia: Fact and Fiction.
• History and Venriloquy.

Reviews:

Robert Edric, ‘Remaking Ned’, (6 January 2001)The Guardian
Jane Rogers, ‘Remaking the Myth’, The Observer, (7 January 2001)

Ruth Scurr, ‘One Mother’s Son’, The Times, (10 January 2001)

John de Falbe, ‘The Reluctant Outlaw’, The Spectator, (13 January 2001)
Kathy Marks, ‘Hero or Villain?’, Independent, (19 November 2001)
D J Taylor, 'A ventriloquist's tale', New Statesmen (8 January 2001)

Further Reading:

Ian McEwan, Atonement, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). Though reading any of the shortlisted novels listed in this booklet would be a useful exercise, Atonement is a special case, because it won the first ‘People’s Booker’, voted for by members of the general public, thereby opening up a whole new can of worms: possibly in response, the 2001 judges broke sharply with tradition to give explanations as to why they hadn’t awarded the prize to McEwan.

Atwood

I'm reposting (from last year) a few links that you may find useful if you're thinking about, or writing about, Margaret Atwood.

[1] David Ketterer, '"Another Dimension of Space": Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy and Atwood's Blind Assassin', in Jean-François Leroux and Camille R. La Bossière (eds), Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (University of Ottawa Press, 2004) An essay in a critical collection. This includes a useful interview between Ketterer and Atwood about the novel: I quote from the interview at some length in the lecture.

[2] Eleonora Rao, 'Home and nation in Margaret Atwood's later fiction' in Coral Ann Howells (ed), The Cambridge companion to Margaret Atwood (CUP 2006) Interesting discussion of home and estrangement in Atwood's later writing, including the Blind Assassin.

[3] Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: a Critical Companion (Greenwood Press 2004) Some useful things here, although (sadly) the chapter on Blind Assassin is not one of the ones available for google-books viewing.

[4] Coral Ann Howells, '"Don't Ever Ask For The True Story": Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin' in Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction: Refiguring Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Atwood's latest novel, the SF/dystopian Year of the Flood (2009) has been widely reviewed, not least by your course tutor, here.

Seminar Groups B and C, next Thursday (14th Oct)

If you're in Seminar group B or C then there's a small shake-up next week, for one week only. The lexture is at the usual time and place, but the seminar will take place on Wednesday 13th October at 1pm in Windsor 105. The session is on Atwood's Blind Assassin; so come along if you are interested in that novel. But if you can't make it, for sporting or other reasons, don't worry: you won't be penalised for non-attendance (this week only, I repeat, and stress). The week after, we go back to the regular timetable.

Peter Carey on BBC

Carey has won the prize twice already (we're looking at his Kelly Gang later this term): and if he wins next week it will be for a record breaking third time. Have a listen to what he said to the BBC about the prize.

(He may win, too: although my money's on Tom McCarthy's C ...)

Coetzee's Disgrace

The whole of Coetzee's oeuvre has gotten a lot of attention from critics, but Disgrace has been subject to more readings than any other.

Here, for instance, is the googlebooks version of Encountering Disgrace: reading and teaching Coetzee's novel By Bill McDonald, William E. McDonald (Camden House, 2009), a collection of essays on the novel.

In the lecture I discussed Lucy Valerie Graham's article 'Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace' Journal of Southern African Studies 29:2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 433-444.

I also quote from 'J. M. Coetzee in conversation with Jane Poyner', in Jane Poyner (ed) J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Ohio University Press 2006), p. 22.

Nobel Prize for Literature

Here's a list of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, surely the single most prestigious literary prize there is.

Here's Ted Gioia's Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe.

Which list do you think works best at detailing the world's greatest writers of the last hundred years or so?

Week 1

Welcome, everybody, to the course blog for EN3314 Booker Prize, Aesthetics and Commerce in Contemporary Fiction.

The point of this blog is partly to post-up material relating to each of the novels as we cover them, week by week; and partly to coordinate more general discussion about these novels, the Booker Prize, and contemporary fiction as a whole. I also want to use this site as a record of some of the things covered in lectures and seminars: hopefully that will be useful to you. Accordingly some of the stuff here will duplicate material from the course booklet (which you all have); and some of it will be re-posted from last year's version of this course, which is all still there in the archives if you want to rootle around. But hopefully there will be some new stuff too.

The way to get the best out of this course, and to do well on it, is to read as widely as you can, and take as active an interest as you can in the state of the contemporary novel, in prizes and the prizegiving culture, and in the questions of aesthetic and commercial judgment they entail. The course doesn't encompass this year's Booker Prize, but I urge you to at the least follow the reviews and news coverage of the shortlisted titles, and if possible read a couple, in addition to doing the reading for the course itself.

I have put some links on the sidebar: some of these are relevant to the course, and some more general. Some of the links are to pieces I've written about previous Booker titles. I try and read the shortlist, or some of it, and post some reviews.

The 2010 shortlist (also linked, right) was announced was announced on Tuesday 7 September. The winner will be declared in a few weeks time, on Tuesday 12 October 2010. We will have a class on the winning book, whichever it is, next term.

New Term, September 2010

Welcome to a new term. This blog will carry on for the new year, although a cetain amount of its content will be reposted from last year. Last year's course only covered 10 titles, where this year's covers 12.

You should also check out the Moodle site for EN3314.