Like the class, hate the books. The hardest thing about this class is actually having to read the books, though in the end it's worth it for the discussion they provoke. For example, last week I read Felisberto Hernandez and Laura Esquivel and my immediate reaction was that the first was brilliant and the second crap without being able to say exactly why. The class encourages one to ponder the grounds for one's subjective evaluations and what seems self-evident and in this sense is similar to an aesthetics class in that it explores the rational basis of taste and the possibility of standards in art. It has also made me aware of my own snobbishness (which, despite it all, remains intact) and gender bias. Regarding the latter, I recently discovered that almost every author in my bookshelf is a man and that I don't think I've ever actually read a female novelist--despite having started but never finished novels by Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, and Virginia Wolfe not withstanding, whose Mrs. Dalloway I had to read for a first-year liberal arts course and which literally put me to sleep. A course on bad literature is necessarily a course about canon formation, a pantheon that has largely, for better or worse, been determined by men.
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Hi Niall,
Your blog inspired me to check my bookshelf for literature by woman authors also, and I was surprised to find so few. Here are a couple that I found in case you're looking to read a couple good books by woman authors:
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones- This book was a #1 bestseller and therefore we'd be inclined to regard it with trepidation (sp?) in our class, but it uses narration in a really original way and covers a taboo topic (a 14 yr old girl is raped and murdered and the story is from her perspective watching how her killer, her loved ones and her town deal with her murder).
Maryse Condé, Traversée de la Mangrove- I had to read this book for FREN221, but I really liked it AND think it's good literature...it also plays with narration, discussing the same event throguh the eyes of I think 21 different residents of a town in Guadalupe.
I also found The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which I think I thought I should read more than I wanted to read it, and I remember not liking it very much.
Gillian
Your blog also inspired me to head to my bookshelf and compare the ratio of male to female authors. Looking through, I am sad to say that almost all of my favorite works of fiction are by men. Not counting the books I bought for all my lit courses this year, I have only 13 books by female authors! (including three graphic novels) And most of them I didn't really like. Like Gillian, I have the Bell Jar by Plath. Good read if you think you're ready to end your life. She'll push you over the edge.
But I did find a book that I really liked. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. About a family in the Indian diaspora. Main character's a man interestingly enough (maybe you can't relate to female characters?). It won a pulitzer.
The God of Small Things won a booker (though in my opinion not the best book to win the booker), very odd ending, but not bad.
And two graphic novels called Persepolis (1 and 2) by Mariane Satrapi are worth while.
Well, I hope you find a book written by a woman you like one day. A friend once told me that women were terrible writers and I fiercely would like to prove that wrong.
hey niall!! uhm a mi tambien me encanta la clase! e disfrutado mucho de ella las lecturas si son algo dificil de leer sabiendo qeu son malas y pues en momentos me encontre frustrada especialmente con el libro que empezamos a leer para la proxima semana a ver si te sientes igual de frustrado que mi! la verdad es que es interesante eso de los escritores masculinos vs. las femeninas. no se yo leo pero nunca me fijo tanto en quien lo escribio pero pueda que si talves los homrbes tengan en cierta manera mejor way de conveer ideas y crearlas en libros buenos. A la ves tambien hay poetas famosos que son hombres que me gustan muchos.
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