Milton in May: Comus and Lycidas by John Milton

John Milton is much smarter than I am. Reading Paradise Lost, I haven’t felt that lost because I’m familiar with the general religious traditions he’s talking about. There are “pagan” traditions mentioned too, but I haven’t felt lost, and footnotes help. Reading Milton’s early writings is a different story. I feel like he’s purposely trying to add in every ancient tradition he has ever heard of before, even if it’s just name-dropping. Comus was pretty blatantly calling on other traditions, and “Lycidas” was a bit more subtle as it echoed antiquity but apparently Milton did and I missed it. I much preferred the second, even if in reading commentary, I find I’ve “missed” a lot of the political, contemporary, and traditional references.

Note: If you are looking for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction post, I should get to it by tonight. My next Paradise Lost post will come tomorrow sometime!

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The Masterpiece [L’Oeuvre] by Emile Zola

In The Masterpiece, Zola captures the pain of creation, as he claimed himself:

I want to depict the artists’ struggle with reality, the sheer effort of creation which goes into every work of art, the blood and tears involved in giving one’s flesh, in trying to make something that lives.  (Introduction to Oxford World Classics edition, page ix.)

In telling the story of the doomed Claude Lantier, Zola does capture a painful side to creation. As a self-absorbed painter, Claude is unable to see beyond his skewed perception of the world, since he sees all through the eyes of his “impressionistic” painting style. (Although Zola does not use the word “impressionism,” it is clear that such is the era of art.)

I didn’t enjoy reading the story, but I certainly appreciated it as a whole. Zola shows a realistic disconnect for people who struggle with a vision, and I felt like I was glancing at real lives between the pages of the novel. Continue reading »

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

I was a bit disappointed by Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. I’m glad I read it: it gave me a new perspective on Wharton, because it was a different setting, cast of characters, and theme from those I’ve read before. It was wonderfully written, with Wharton’s elaborate and realistic descriptions of the setting and thought processes. As in the other Wharton novels and novellas I’ve read, there was a moral dilemma.

Yet, the overall mood to Ethan Frome was so bleak that I felt depressed both while I was reading and afterward. It also felt like a study in symbolism for high school students to read: it seemed Wharton was hitting us over the head with “subtlety” to discover if we just read close enough. I felt it didn’t have the depth that The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth had, nor the matter-of-fact dilemma that The Touchstone had.

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How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

I saw How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster on the “New Nonfiction” shelf at the library. I thought I’d take a glance through it when I got home, but I certainly had no intention of reading it: I have a lot of books either in progress or on my bedside table, waiting to be read. Well, about 15 pages in to it, I decided I had to read it. Despite the fact that this is a nonfiction book about how to approach literature from the point of ” what does it mean?”, I was hooked.

The subtitle is “A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines” and I think that is pretty accurate. Foster’s tone is light, amusing, and engaging as he reminds of the various recurring themes in literature. But his point is that such themes are not random guesses by your literature professors; he argues that the subtle messages and subtle references to other works of literature really just makes literature fun. Continue reading »