Bibliography
Mar. 27th, 2007 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyQuick paragraph catch-ups, as I'm very behind myself.
Goethe - Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
The ultimate in Bildungsroman - I quite enjoyed this, although not hugely. It's a very complicated and interwoven text, and I suspect it's the sort of thing that needs re-reading. It's all about a young man's search for himself and 'becoming a subject', which is actually all good fun. There's a lot about theatre and meta-theatre and a whole cutting and odd performance of Hamlet and stuff, not to mention the fact that it all turns out to have been manipulated from the very beginning by a secret society (gratifying since I'd wondered this since book I of eight). Probably an awful lot there left to read out, but quite frankly, I'm not sure I have the energy to unpick it all. And having read it with a very heavy feminist/Freudian/symbolic reading, I'm not too sure I'm overly inclined to go over it again except for academic purposes. Plus Wilhelm is a bit of a wimp.
Schlegel - Lucinde
Oh, such an odd text. Very modern in its concept of experimenting with the form and structure of the novel, with disjunction of time and event - almost filmic in some ways. But I can see why it doesn't get read much, as it's very dense and a bit complicated to work out what's going on. Answer - quite a lot of sex, veiled and not so veiled, some interesting allegory about Novels, more relationships between man and woman stuff, possibly heavy homoerotic subtext. All about the development of the male subject this time - for a book with a woman as the title, the character is strangely absent from the actual text. A little oddity probably worth a quick read as it's very short, but definitely worth reading twice. Especially given that Schlegel thought the only way you could have a theory of 'the novel' was by writing a novel - so this is a literary and a theoretical exercise. Before he got old and conservative and excluded it from his Collected Works, but a little curiosity nonetheless.
Schiller - Maiden of Orleans
This is such a tempting text to do a readthrough of, again! All these Germanic plays which just enthrall me and sound like they'd be good staged! Especially since we did the Shakespeare counterpart of this episode told from the English side! There's a great deal of fun to be had with that, actually, in terms of why a German author is choosing to write about an episode of French history from the French perspective which the English author has just done in English and has probably recently been translated into German... good stuff. Johanna (Joan of Arc) is full of beans and generally great apart from when she wimps out when she feels she's lost her virginity by falling in love; Queen Isabeau is fabulous; Agnes Sorel is odd but very interesting. Actually, this play is full of good female leads, which would make a nice change. The French King Charles is a wimp, however, although the Bastard is pretty darn good. Johnanna's father is nasty, to engage in deep character analysis. I enjoyed this a lot, and you don't really need to do a great deal of theoretical analysis to see all the parallels being drawn between Johanna, Isabeau and (of all people) the Virgin Mary and the general problems with being a woman.
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Can't remember why I wanted to read this. Must have been a reason. It's not a great Waugh novel, however - certainly won't be usurping Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies from my affections, although it plays with a lot of the same social proprieties. Rather a lot more here on the politics of 'The Club' and how one should properly run having an affair - rather more bitter, actually, in a lot of ways than the empty brightness that was so affecting in said previous two novels. Anthony Last's (note surname) affection for his ancestral home is probably the highlight of the book - the way that the house is described is absolutely infectious. Poor old Last ends up trapped in the jungle, of all places, reading Dickens to an illiterate native while the rest of the world believes him dead. Including his wife, now freed of the need for divorce, whose young man has chucked her anyway. The whole motivation behind Brenda Last's affair with Beaver (what a choice of name!) is rather murky and not terribly convincing; neither is her reaction to her son's death. The death of the son equally feels like a bit of a cheap trick thrown in for cinematographic Gone With The Wind value, I have to say. Probably worth beach reading, but I'd not recommend it as a first toe to dip into Waugh.
Goethe - Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
The ultimate in Bildungsroman - I quite enjoyed this, although not hugely. It's a very complicated and interwoven text, and I suspect it's the sort of thing that needs re-reading. It's all about a young man's search for himself and 'becoming a subject', which is actually all good fun. There's a lot about theatre and meta-theatre and a whole cutting and odd performance of Hamlet and stuff, not to mention the fact that it all turns out to have been manipulated from the very beginning by a secret society (gratifying since I'd wondered this since book I of eight). Probably an awful lot there left to read out, but quite frankly, I'm not sure I have the energy to unpick it all. And having read it with a very heavy feminist/Freudian/symbolic reading, I'm not too sure I'm overly inclined to go over it again except for academic purposes. Plus Wilhelm is a bit of a wimp.
Schlegel - Lucinde
Oh, such an odd text. Very modern in its concept of experimenting with the form and structure of the novel, with disjunction of time and event - almost filmic in some ways. But I can see why it doesn't get read much, as it's very dense and a bit complicated to work out what's going on. Answer - quite a lot of sex, veiled and not so veiled, some interesting allegory about Novels, more relationships between man and woman stuff, possibly heavy homoerotic subtext. All about the development of the male subject this time - for a book with a woman as the title, the character is strangely absent from the actual text. A little oddity probably worth a quick read as it's very short, but definitely worth reading twice. Especially given that Schlegel thought the only way you could have a theory of 'the novel' was by writing a novel - so this is a literary and a theoretical exercise. Before he got old and conservative and excluded it from his Collected Works, but a little curiosity nonetheless.
Schiller - Maiden of Orleans
This is such a tempting text to do a readthrough of, again! All these Germanic plays which just enthrall me and sound like they'd be good staged! Especially since we did the Shakespeare counterpart of this episode told from the English side! There's a great deal of fun to be had with that, actually, in terms of why a German author is choosing to write about an episode of French history from the French perspective which the English author has just done in English and has probably recently been translated into German... good stuff. Johanna (Joan of Arc) is full of beans and generally great apart from when she wimps out when she feels she's lost her virginity by falling in love; Queen Isabeau is fabulous; Agnes Sorel is odd but very interesting. Actually, this play is full of good female leads, which would make a nice change. The French King Charles is a wimp, however, although the Bastard is pretty darn good. Johnanna's father is nasty, to engage in deep character analysis. I enjoyed this a lot, and you don't really need to do a great deal of theoretical analysis to see all the parallels being drawn between Johanna, Isabeau and (of all people) the Virgin Mary and the general problems with being a woman.
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Can't remember why I wanted to read this. Must have been a reason. It's not a great Waugh novel, however - certainly won't be usurping Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies from my affections, although it plays with a lot of the same social proprieties. Rather a lot more here on the politics of 'The Club' and how one should properly run having an affair - rather more bitter, actually, in a lot of ways than the empty brightness that was so affecting in said previous two novels. Anthony Last's (note surname) affection for his ancestral home is probably the highlight of the book - the way that the house is described is absolutely infectious. Poor old Last ends up trapped in the jungle, of all places, reading Dickens to an illiterate native while the rest of the world believes him dead. Including his wife, now freed of the need for divorce, whose young man has chucked her anyway. The whole motivation behind Brenda Last's affair with Beaver (what a choice of name!) is rather murky and not terribly convincing; neither is her reaction to her son's death. The death of the son equally feels like a bit of a cheap trick thrown in for cinematographic Gone With The Wind value, I have to say. Probably worth beach reading, but I'd not recommend it as a first toe to dip into Waugh.
