Italian Literature
Confessions of a Young Novelist
Umberto Eco
Harvard, 2011
853 E19e
"In this tongue-in-cheek-titled collection of four Richard Ellmann Lectures he gave at Harvard, semiologist, medievalist, and bestselling novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose)—hardly young anymore, as he and we know—confronts the question of what, exactly, creative writing is. ("Why is a bad poet a creative writer, while a good scientific essayist is not?") To answer the question, Eco examines the slippery relationship between author, text, and their interpreters. How does the author's intent come to engage the reader? Can the text in itself produce its own Model Reader? How might we best identify the qualities that make readers believe fictional characters really exist?, The final third of the book is devoted to a favored Ecoian pastime: enumeration, with the last stop being infinity. An eclectic list of writers who themselves use lists "as a literary device" joins in the fun: Rabelais and Joyce; Homer; Whitman; Alfred Döblin; and the "confessing young novelist" himself in a shameless package of self-referencing and promotion. Always clever and thoughtful, these musings will delight devotees and enlighten newcomers alike." -publisher's weekly
Hindi Poetry
Songs of Kabir
Kabir
NYRB, 2011
891.431 K11so
“This is a lovely book of translations of the poetry of Kabir, a truly visionary egalitarian thinker of the fifteenth century whose songs remain very alive in the folk tradition of north India. In bringing Kabir to an English-speaking audience, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has made a major contribution to the global reach of that inspiring vision.” -Amartya Sen
The Use and Abuse of Literature
Marjorie Garber
Pantheon, 2011
801 G213u
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.
"Harvard English professor Garber (Patronizing the Arts) leads an expedition through the archives of literature, rejecting expansion of the term's meaning to include all printed material or just about anything professional or research-based written in words. She sets out to reclaim the word, asserting that "the very uselessness of literature is its most profound and valuable attribute." Employing the history of literature to demonstrate the difficult work the act of reading entails, she draws on examples from authors as diverse as 15th-century Leon Alberti ("No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication") and Virginia Woolf on the difference between reading fiction and poetry; she even works in a reference to Oprah's book club. Garber describes approaches to literary scholarship such as the close reading of the New Criticism and deconstruction to justify her claim that how a text is studied and analyzed will determine if it is literature. She succeeds brilliantly at demonstrating that true literary reading is the demanding task of asking questions, not of finding rules or answers. Though the book is peppered with specialist terms like catachresis, Garber's erudition serves to educate general readers willing to embark on a moderately difficult trek with an authoritative guide."