Look at me, reading shit and all

[lunabee34]

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this one. I knew a little bit about most of the people discussed in this book (you can't study Victorian literature without knowing bit about Richard Burton or Swinburne or the Rossettis, for example) but only the very superficial. This is a really interesting look at several loosely connected and intersecting groups of people (the pre-Raphaelites, the Cannibal Club, and the Aesthetes) and how their art and lives were focused on their sexual experiences. The book is written much more like creative non-fiction than the usual academic book, so it's incredibly readable. Every now and again, the author uses an awkward turn of phrase or says something in a confusing way or gets out her thesaurus just to remind us that we are reading the work of the erudite, but on the whole, the style is very readable and accessible and the subject matter is deeply interesting.



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Oronooko: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not one I'll be rereading. I somehow missed reading this in college and wouldn't have read it now except that I'm teaching it. I know it's an important text, and I'm glad I've read it, but I found it very underwhelming. Also, the almost complete lack of dialogue made reading it fairly tedious.



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Comments

[wendelah1]

I'm not a teacher so this is probably a stupid question, but why are you teaching a book you don't think is very good?

[lunabee34]

This is not a stupid question!

There's two reasons. First, I'm frequently asked to teach a new class I've never taught before, and I have to create a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and I don't have time to read everything for the class before the semester starts. So sometimes I pick something that ends up not being very good or engaging or that I don't think works for whatever reason; I just don't teach that one next time.

Second, and this is what's going on here, frequently works that are important are not my favorite. So Aphra Behn is the first professional woman writer; she's a prolific playwright, and Oronooko is arguably the first (extremely short) novel. So in a class called Literature by Women, she's an obvious choice to teach. I think it's also important to note that I don't necessarily think Oronooko is a bad novel; I just don't like it much. It's very interesting in terms of the colonial lens, discussions of slavery, etc. I just find her writing style tedious; there's another professor out there who just swoons over her style, I'm sure. LOL

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that especially when you have a high teaching load and are often asked to teach a variety of classes, the professor is often just a couple weeks ahead of the students.

[kore]

Yeah, I remember from my (VERY SHORT) career teaching and (much longer) EngLit grad student days, the Important stuff or the First stuff (altho what is considered First or Important, a whole other thing) is often not that great. But like Woolf said, we should all go lay wreaths on the grave of Aphra Behn. IIRC she's also writing in the tradition of a kind of mannered style, it's not like Jane Austen who basically came up with her own free indirect thing. I think.

[lunabee34]

*nods*

She paved the way for other women to follow. I suspect I would find her plays more enjoyable than Oronooko, but I don't care enough to go find some and see. LOL

[executrix]

A lot of times, truly great works are hard to fit into a pattern because they're idiosyncratic. The more middle-of-the-road, convention-observing works are easier to say "this stylistic trend and these themes were important at X time, and changed at Y time."

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

That's very true.