Intelligent observations about an array of important writers and worthy reflections on leading a more thoughtful existence,...
Pulitzer Prize winner Coles (Psychiatry and Medical Humanities/Harvard Medical School; Political Leadership, 2005, etc.) spotlights artists who guide us toward moral and social awareness.
Transcribed and edited from recordings of lectures for “A Literature of Social Reflection,” a course the author taught for two decades, the text has a casual, intimate tone. Coles frequently offers personal reminiscences, seeking to encourage students to connect literature with “the hidden curriculum we have before us over the decades of our existence. By this I mean not a subject matter that is intellectual in nature but one experiential and moral in nature. Indeed, he spends a lot of time taking potshots at intellectuals—himself as a younger man included—who avoid emotional engagement with art (and life) by overanalyzing and putting everything into academic categories. Though his central questions are the biggies—“How does one live a life? What kind of life? And for what purpose?”—Coles prefers writers who grapple with these questions on the level of daily detail and texture: William Carlos Williams, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston. (The author looks glances back at the Victorians, but his primary concern is with 20th-century literature.) Even when dealing with works generally evaluated as political statements, such George Orwell’s writings, he focuses on the authors’ personal relationship with the material, the way they challenge us to look into our own hearts for the sources of injustice and prejudice. That is also the Coles’s agenda, but with a distasteful twist. He assumes his students, and readers, are privileged people whose privileges are largely invisible to them, who must be goaded to acknowledge their human kinship with the poor, the ignorant and the oppressed rather than merely pitying them. This stance can be irritating, especially when the author parades his superior sensitivity under the guise of personal anecdotes.
Intelligent observations about an array of important writers and worthy reflections on leading a more thoughtful existence, delivered with an off-putting undercurrent of self-satisfaction.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6203-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White—e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05631-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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