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But E.J., if we make too many of these niche prizes ("Best Sestina by a Black Poet," "Best Article Written by a Gay Man in February"), don't we risk further ghettoizing the people who have historically been kept out of the great canons, and continue to hamper their ability to reach that more universally accepted level of greatness? I certainly found that to be the case in terms of reading material in college. Once black and female authors become the stuff of Africana studies or gender studies courses, it's like a free pass to professors in the good old-fashioned English department to keep packing the syllabus with white men. It's a detriment to the system to have an implied "white, male" in front of any major prize or course, and I think that's likely to happen if we slap "black" or "female" in front of too many other ones.
And a minor quibble, E.J.: it was W.H. Auden, not Pound, who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Although I guess the fact that you forgot who said it only furthers your (and Auden's) point about the power of poets.
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No yawning allowed? Noreen, I'd like to see you enforce that. It'll take a lot of IV-delivered caffeine. Sure, maybe it's easier for me to yawn at the literary canon now that I've switched over to journalism and no longer hope for prizes in fiction and poetry. And as far as your argument that same-sex marriage and equal pay depend on equal representation in literature ... well, I'm sorry, but I switched over because I don't actually believe literature is all that influential. As Ezra Pound wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Nothing is very important, the Buddha would tell you. And yes, I do want more women's imaginations and tastes recognized. But I don't think it has to happen by forcing men to like The House of Mirth more than Brideshead Revisited (although I'll pick Wharton first any time, thank you). Literature is just too subjective for that.
Which is my point. I think I'm suggesting a proliferation of lists and prizes precisely because I don't respect the ones that exist; prize committees include a carousel of people handing out back-pats to their friends and back-stabs to their enemies. We don't have to pretend that there really is a Best Writer or a List of Best Books or a Bestest and Most Sophisticated Literary Sensibility that can Best Detect the Platonic Best Novel. That concept always makes me think of that movie that made Jack Black famous—can anyone remember what it was called?—in which a bunch of loser dudes who work in a music store are constantly making lists about such things as the five best bass guitar lines in a rock album ever. Oh, please. Yes, I believe in being transported by literature and art; I survived adolescence because of Tolstoy, picked up girls by reciting poetry from memory (Shakespeare sonnets and Japanese tankas ... the practical benefits of an MFA degree!), and regularly worship at MOMA. But I want more lists, more prizes, less pretense that we can definitively declare the Best One Ever and more reality-checking about how different our tastes all are, shaped by our varied experiences.
P.S. I remember the movie now! It was High Fidelity.
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Separate but equal lit prizes, E.J? Haven't we decided that the first adjective always negates the second in practice? I totally get why you're bored by the whole thing, and sure, listmaking of this kind can be pretty pedantic, but since I was a little too young for the culture wars of the ‘80s, I got to sidestep the tedious infighting and just read the highlights, like this from Toni Morrison:
Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.
I buy that hook, line, and sinker. So, E.J., if you want a mainstream culture that supports everything you've advocated for, like gay marriage and equal workplace treatment for women, I think you've got to stifle those yawns!
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As Meghan points out, until recently “most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers.” But what about that “recently?” Allow me to suggest one minor culprit from my perch at Iowa: the rise of literary memoir. At the moment when it became plausible for a woman to write about major social issues in the context of a novel, writing mostly about one’s own history became massively marketable. We saw a convergence of gender norms and literary fashion; women had long been told that they could write competently about the domestic sphere, and suddenly literature that took family life as central was exactly what publishers wanted. American women could do what the culture assumed they were best suited for (and let’s not forget that our first national best-seller was a woman-authored memoir) while collecting a six-figure advance.
I don’t mean to denigrate literary memoirs or suggest that there is something small about taking a single life as a subject. But I do see the women around me devoting a tremendous amount of talent and creative energy to the crafting of memoir, and I wonder where that energy would go if we did not live in the age of Mary Karr.
I agree that we’re defining the ambitious novel in a suspect and narrow way—sprawling, thick—but I do not like the idea that male authors dominate the genre we are so defining. Major publishers don’t sell books; they sell “packages.” If a publishing house believes that it cannot market a woman writer as a credible author of an "ambitious" book, it won’t buy the book. This seems to me a case in which the implicit biases of the audience shape the market in a potentially ugly manner.
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The Guardian has published a list of 1,000 novels to read before you die. As it should, the list contains, for me, some beloved texts—and some totally unheard of. In search of a riff on your post on domesticity-vs.-sweeping drama, Meghan, I perused the list for signs of gender difference.
Evelyn Waugh, easily one of my favorite authors (and not, as I discovered in high school, a woman), gets eight nods; I totally agree with such praise, but even the most decorated female (Jane Austen) gets only six. A full accounting was too taxing for today, but males do dominate the “war and travel,” “science fiction and fantasy,” and “crime” categories. Throughout, Carson McCullers, George Eliot, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Elizabeth Gaskell keep things interesting, but the only category that approaches gender parity is in “love” (at least it’s not all chick lit).
Sure, the list-makers have excluded short stories and nonfiction and poetry (all of which, you’d assume have the same gender imbalance), but what gives with the lack of XX authors? Equally understandable but more troublesome, perhaps, is the list’s Eurocentrism—does it have to be so white and so male? Of course, there is no comprehensive list of books about women (Flaubert, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and Jeffrey Eugenides are some male authors who might anchor that list). Maybe in 50 years we’ll have a different roster entirely?
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Nina, maybe you're right that more women might pick up a pen during this recession (though I'd imagine the free time offered by unemployment is more likely to be the impetus than money, as Bonnie notes). What struck me, though, about that Laura Miller Salon essay "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" is encapsulated in this bit:
[M]any critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Meghan wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the New York Times polled critics to find out what they thought the most important books of the last 25 years were, and big novels by men dominated the results. America's big, and any novel that represents it has to be big, or so that line of thinking goes. Even Norman Mailer, the most macho of all the 20th-century literary macho men, seemed cowed by how big a "Great American Novel" would have to be, saying once that "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed." (If you'll allow me a moment of blatant gender stereotyping, that sort of literal-mindedness—I must capture every single detail!—seems pretty classically male.)
The term "Great American Novel" first appeared in 1868 in an essay in The Nation when, America was trying to define itself, culturally and otherwise, against still-dominant Europe. The original coinage definitely didn't exclude women—George Sand was one of the European authors namechecked, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was cited as the closest thing we'd had to date. It also called for the Great American Novel to be "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." On the face of it, that's a pretty humble definition, and one that wouldn't seem to exclude those "domestic" novels we think of as typically female literature. So when did we decide that we couldn't beat Europe by merely painting the ordinary? (This all might just be the simple fact that women usually don't go in much for pissing contests, literary or otherwise.) Or was American life so gender-fragmented in the 20th century that it became hard to have a shared "ordinary"? Jezebel and Esquire seem to think so—their wildly different lists of the books every man and every woman ought to read certainly suggest that. I've read far more on Jezebel's list. So, XXers, should I be mad at myself because my reading habits have tended toward the stereotypically female, or should I be mad that more books on Jezebel's list haven't gotten wide-ranging critical acclaim?
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Good points, Susannah. At least two more reasons to be outraged by Herman Rosenblat's faked memoir: It can only encourage Holocaust deniers, as Rosenblat's friends and family have pointed out while expressing outrage at him. And it's part of a disturbing pattern of falsity. Misha Defonseca claimed to be a Jewish survivor who lived with wolves in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years; there were no wolves and she wasn't Jewish. Binjamin Wilkomirski won prizes and comparisons to Primo Levi for Fragments, his account of surviving the camps Majdenau and Birkenau—but he made the whole thing up, down to the last emotionally affecting detail. All of this is slippery exploitation, and irredeemable.
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Melinda: Reading your post, I kept expecting to get to the part where you said you were kidding. Herman Rosenblat's grotesque "reimagining" of his time spent at a Nazi concentration camp is more obscene than little harm done. As the New Republic exposed, Rosenblat's childhood tall-tale of having been fed apples thrown over the camp fence by a little girl whom he met again years later on Coney Island and then married is wholesale BS. Only after the hoax was revealed did Rosenblat admit his lies—only after he'd appeared on Oprah twice, where he was informed his story was “the single greatest love story” that his host had ever heard, only after a $25 million movie version was already in the works, only after a children's book version was published in September.
So, in response to your questions, yes, this makes Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer and James Frey, one more writer weak enough of mind and writing ability that, in an effort to score attention and cash, they made up a story they sold as truth. If anything, Rosenblat's fabulism is more offensive and reprehensible than Seltzer's wiggerisms and Frey's fake drugmoir, because what we're talking about here, in case anyone missed it, is the Holocaust. Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed.
Instead of declaring Rosenblat's act amounts to no big deal, it seems this case demands the opposite. It's a "meh" attitude toward these literary deceptions that perpetuates and encourages the increasingly shoddy practices of the book publishing industry, a slow-dying dinosaur that prefers sensationalism and bottom lines to truth and fact-checking.
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Pixar’s latest kiddie masterpiece, Wall-E, did some massive damage at the box office on its opening weekend. As A.O. Scott recently noted in a New York Times essay about Kit Kittredge (watch this space for more on that film), Pixar has yet to build a movie around a girl protagonist. But Wall-E does prominently feature a pretty bad-ass lady: Wall-E’s crush object, Eve, a sleekly minimalist commando-bot with an itchy trigger finger. What kind of girl is Eve? One XX Factor-er wondered whether Pixar had intentionally made Eve beautiful but dangerous. The hapless Wall-E “is attracted to her,” she noted, “yet fears she will destroy him or, at the very least, come to his house and mess up his stuff.” Is Eve some kind of femme fatale? (Or, given the fact that she looks like a floor model from a Japanese tech show, is she an electronic dragon lady?) I, for one, found Eve’s wanton destructiveness hilarious, and it occurred to me that she actually evokes a specifically male comic archetype—the powerful brute who can’t control his own strength—which I think makes her even funnier, not to mention a little subversive. In other words, I think she’s more Small Wonder than Angelina Jolie.
Eve also fits into another classic comedy narrative: the chic, competent career woman who falls for a bumbling but sweethearted schlub. Do you think Judd Apatow got a consulting credit for that?
The more I thought about it, though, what Eve reminded me of most was the world’s first Eve—in particular, the vision of her found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Like her namesake, robot Eve’s initial design objective is to incubate the first stirrings of life; it’s no coincidence that she’s shaped like an egg. And the biblical Eve was pretty destructive in her own right. (“Oh, honey, about that whole ‘ruining our chances at immortality and losing God’s everlasting favor’ thing: Totally my bad.”) But even more significant in my eyes, both Pixar’s film and Milton’s poem are about the importance of finding a true partner and companion. The famous last image of Paradise Lost shows Adam and Eve standing outside the gates of Eden; as they prepare to begin a brand new life in a brand new world, they take hold of each other’s hands. If you saw Wall-E, you know that it’s pretty much a 100-minute pantomime about a boy robot trying to hold hands with an oblivious girl robot—before they go repopulate the Earth. The good stories never change, I guess.
Also in Slate, read Dana Stevens' review of Wall-E and see what critics are saying about the new Pixar film in Slate V's Summary Judgment.
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Heckuva week for word filchers and fabulists, from Tim Goeglein at the White House to Scott Templeton on The Wire. Not to mention that poor woman who claimed to have walked from Brussels to Warsaw at age 4, along with some highly maternal wolves, after the Nazis killed her parents. But for those of us fascinated by plagiarism, how disappointing to see journalistic thievery defined downward to the point that it's hard to imagine who isn't vulnerable.
I've thought a lot about rip-off writers and wondered not only why they steal but why they steal the cheap stuff, lifting boldly and yet at random, like those guys who broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum years ago dressed as Boston cops—and after going to all that trouble, left behind The Titian. (Of course, if you really loved words or art, you wouldn't steal at all, out of pride if not reverence.) My interest goes back to my first reporting job, at the Dallas Morning News, where one of my colleagues was busted for copying the most banal imaginable observations about dating out of a magazine for a feature-section piece on relationships. As this was pre-Internet, she had to work at getting caught and went so far as to leave the magazine she'd lifted from open on her desk, where its discovery led to her dismissal. Along with the rest of the staff, I joined in endless speculation about why she'd do that when walking outside the building and interviewing the first person who happened by would have been so much easier. (This was before she wrote a best-selling book about the depression that drove her to it and was hired by The New Yorker.)
Google has long since made getting caught inevitable, of course. And mostly that's not only a positive development, but one that makes the question of why anyone would do this, knowing how the story would end, all the more interesting. But while volume is up, quality has suffered, and some of these recent plagiarism cases are iffy at best: Goeglein's is a classic of the genre; why would a lovely guy with a great job appropriate material for guest columns he was under no pressure to submit—and didn't get paid for—in his hometown paper in Fort Wayne, Indiana? Now that is one worth mulling. But Obama's failure to consistently credit his friend Deval Patrick with a line he fed him? As scandals go, that's pitiful. And with all due respect, Jack, that Times reporter who scribbled down the definition of the illegal drug he was writing about and then popped it into his story without bothering to rewrite the sentence? If we damn that guy, we're rewriting the definition of plagiarism.