Some several things

[lunabee34]

1. Does anybody want my copy of How to Keep House While Drowning? Free to a good home. Claimed.

2. Josh's cousin's wife worked for NPR in various roles for many years starting with This American Life, so they know many people in the NPR family. His cousin, a photographer, has been close friends with Kai Ryssdal for many years and has photographed their family over that time; he's currently out in CA photographing his kid's bar or bat mitzvah, didn't catch which. We got a video text from cousin and Kai this weekend saying hi and thanking us for being NPR fans. That was a nice brush with celebrity.

3.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I first read this in about ninth grade, and I remember liking it, but on reread, I can't imagine why.

There are some moments of beautiful prose, but everything else is such a slog: nobody gets a name until the book's almost done (everybody's an epithet like "the youth" or "the tall soldier") and the protagonist is so immature and aggravating.

What keeps this from being a mere two stars, though, are a few things related to this edition being a Norton Critical Edition. First, Donald Pizer's critical essay charting the trajectory of Crane scholarship is a close cousin of Gertrude Stein's treatment of herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He apparently attempts to evaluate every single everything written about Crane ever (which seems a bizarre choice to me in writing this sort of essay), which leads him to describe the work of others in the following terms: simplistic view, awkward, mechanical, forced readings, unconvincing, flatly and tediously applied, jaundiced

and the coup de grace

"Karlen's essay must surely be one of the most superficial and uninformed discussions of Crane ever published in a major literary quarterly" (130)

all while including his own work in discussions of the most salient and convincing readings of Crane.

I also enjoyed Frank Norris's parody, "The Green Stone of Unrest," and one of the earlier pieces of literary criticism included in the appendices, Charles C. Walcutt's "Stephen Crane: Naturalist." Walcutt's thesis (with which I wholeheartedly agree can be summed up as, "Henry Fleming is a ding ding who doesn't learn a damn thing and remains a ding ding from start to finish." Amy Kaplan's essay is the best piece of criticism in the appendices, and I also enjoyed James Cox's essay.

Off it goes to the giveaway pile.



View all my reviews

Comments

[starwatcher]

I had to read "Red Badge of Courage" in a college freshman class. I ha-a-a-ted it; I found it grim and pointless. Then we had to write an analysis of the book -- without, mind you, any prior discussions / teachings of how one wrote a good analysis. Mine was titled, "The Color Symbolism in the Red Badge of Courage" -- and it was 100% bullshit, writing out of my ass.

The funny thing is, my grade was "100." Not "A" or "A+", but "100" -- as in no misplaced commas or awkward constructions? I lost a lot of respect for the teacher after that -- couldn't he tell that I was shoveling bullshit? OTOH, considering your reaction to Donald Pizer's critical essay, maybe all literary analyses are just various shades of bullshit, and I didn't know that at the time. <grin>

[lunabee34]

Heeeeeee.

Without knowing it, you hit on one of the significant areas of critical analysis for this book--color symbolism.

I agree with you re: 100. That is a bullshit grade for a writing assignment. I give plenty of As but not 100s. Except for my professional writing class where it's easy to write a business letter or something like that which is correctly formatted and perfectly grammatically correct because it is very short. LOL

I don't think all literary analysis is bullshit, but boy is a lot of it. Ha!