Journalists writing about books about writing
Some US newspaper article (link via Bookslut), by someone with parents who couldn�t spell Sean, lists “three types” of books about writing. After describing and giving examples of the first two, Shawn Miller says that the third type are “are often penned by literature professors who feel both guilty about reading novels for a living and inadequate that the body of knowledge they generate - about, say, allusions in TS Elliot - doesn’t do anything in the way that scientific knowledge can do things, like put people on the moon or clone sheep.”
Of course, not one example is given. We all know why. (And not just because no-one writes about TS “Elliot” FFS). Moreover, how does Miller know the authors of these mythical books feel guilt? Has he asked all of them or spoken to their shrinks? And what about that “inadequate … body of knowledge”? Inadequate compared to science? Doesn’t that say more about his own na�ve positivism than anything about literary studies? I would say this article offers barely a cell of knowledge let alone a body. What does that say about Miller’s condescension?
The article ends by talking about an Umberto Eco book about writing. Presumably Miller knows that Eco feels no guilt so this book escapes being deposited in the third category unread. And apparently he�s also excluded because he�s also written “three novels”. (Evidently Miller hasn’t heard of Baudolino or or the new one out in June). Anyway, apparently Eco has an argument that is “startling and fresh”: that novels “helps us prepare for and accept life’s most difficult and unchangeable inevitability � death”.
Well, that�s only startling and fresh if you have never read novels for anything other than numbing entertainment (i.e. the detective novels mentioned proudly in the first line). Michael Schaub of Bookslut pokes gentle fun at this idea, but many a true word spoken jest and all that: for death read life.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Oh where art thou, Editor Sir?
- The Right To Not Remain Silent Steve recently s…
- Productivity
- The impossibility of hopelessness
- Lily of the galley
