Friday Links
April 19, 2024
Annunciation Room by Caleb Kortokrax
David Mason reviews two new books on Lord Byron
Who is Reading Even for Anymore?
Joshua Hren: Eugene Vodolazkin on the Puppeteering of History
Well Read Mom: Changing women’s lives through great books
Valerie Stivers: Art-Making in a Disenchanted Age
Cyril O’Regan on The Legacy of Benedict XVI
David Mason reviews two new books on Lord Byron
In this excellent review of two new books on Lord Byron, David Mason considers Jerome McGann’s Byron and the Poetry of Adversity and Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron: Poems—Life—Politics. As mason explains, each book “proposes revisionist ways of reading the canon.”
Who is Reading Even for Anymore?
Kat Rosenfeld on two types of readers: “the ones quietly enjoying a book and the ones for whom books are content fodder.”
Joshua Hren: Eugene Vodolazkin on the Puppeteering of History
From page one, Vodolazkin’s preference for prophets over progress is plain. The Russian medievalist-turned-novelist who first wrote fiction in his forties has garnered many contemporary literary laurels, especially for Laurus (2012), which is set in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Russia, but he is most at home inhabiting the past. Yet which past, and whose? As pious monks and presumed poseurs recount the constant rise and fall of reigns from the Island’s ancient founding through its modern totalitarian madness and, at last, its apocalyptic end, rival versions of historical inquiry induce a distinctly modern hyperconsciousness in us: how we determine the past’s veracity (“The longer [we] live, the more surprised we are at how what’s true in the world is interwoven with what’s not true.”), or configure history’s foundations and ends; what an age leaves unseen or sees; why we fiercely remember and blissfully forget.
Well Read Mom: Changing women’s lives through great books
I love this interview with Marcie Stokman about how she and her daughter decided to read great books together, and in the process created the wonderful organization. Well Read Mom offering women the opportunity to turn to literature not as content fodder, but as an experience. God bless them!
Valerie Stivers: Art-Making in a Disenchanted Age
Stivers reviews Nicolette Polek’s debut novel, Bitter Water Opera:
One of the great satisfactions of Bitter Water Opera is in the way its immersive qualities draw the reader into Gia’s dreaminess and isolation; the book’s style mimics her state of mind. A fiction whose style reflected her religious transformation and new, outward-looking attitude might look very different. And a literary world that reflected a Christian valuation of work—not as a neoliberal abstraction, but as an essential and dignified form of earning one’s livelihood—might look very different, as well.
Cyril O’Regan on The Legacy of Benedict XVI
Obviously, one cannot speak definitively to a legacy that is as multivalent as it is excessive. Furthermore, it is likely that a real beginning is beyond us. Yet maybe we can begin to begin. With that more modest aim in mind—and suggesting more as a heuristic than a constitutive interpretive framework—perhaps we can simplify the task by looking at Benedict XVI in the mode of a Christian public intellectual who addresses himself to the secular age and who at once engages its critical stances towards Christianity determined to be authoritarian, fundamentally irrational, fanatical, and prone to violence and useless when it comes to contributing to unfettered inquiry, ethics, and modern culture. We could, and perhaps should, pursue this line of investigation in a straightforward way and critically assess what is living and dead in these episodic but recurring interventions on a range of matters in which Benedict either resists particular negative constructions of Christianity or criticizes fundamental aspects of the secular world either because of a stance it takes on fundamental issues that bear upon the understanding of society, culture, and value or its refusal to entertain Christian views that have a more particularist foundation. I propose to do something slightly different, specifically, not to talk at length to recognizable interventions by Benedict, but rather to the overall horizon and ethos of these interventions that identify him as a singularity as much—if not more—than these public interventions themselves.
