NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Here’s why I read: 1) to find and revel in funny, beautiful,
thought-provoking phrases, 2) dwell on profound paragraphs that
contain useful truths about life and human nature, 3) lose myself in
the lives of exceptional characters.

This is the yardstick by which I measure a novel. Putting aside all the blah blah about subjectivity and influences of time, place, personal experience, etc., many of the limited number of works I consider outstanding happen to belong to the canon, a list of books that many have endorsed, and argued for, over hundreds of years…a selection that has remained essential through the ages, with the relative worth of each sliding up and down the scale thanks to arguments made by various persuasive critics along the way; the ranks of which slowly expanding, due to the production of new works and the championing of them by perspicacious readers.  

And apropos of this, an illuminating quote from Wayne Booth,  on ‘co-duction,’ a central idea in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, courtesy of a comment left at The Valve by Rohan Maitzen who explains that Booth coined the term to explain the process by which we
assert and then revise our evaluations in discussion with other readers

 "Every appraisal of a narrative is implicitly a comparison between the always complex experience we have had in its presence and what we have known before, conversation ("The term must imply a communal enterprise rather than a private….The validity of our coductions must always be corrected in conversations about the coductions of others whom we trust. They will thus always be subject to the corrections of time…") and re-reading ("if [the reader] takes seriously the task of explaining his initial appraisal, he enters a process that is not mere argument for views already established, but a conversation, a kind of re-reading that is an essential part of what will be a continually shifting evaluation"

This post represents another sortie in a carpet bombing
campaign designed to:

• clear the literary terrain of cant
• expose and explain in detail the reasons for studying canonical literature, and
• establish an ‘objective’ criteria for  determining aesthetic value. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 7:25 AM and is filed under Literary Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.