252 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/21”

1. 1. Zelazny.
   2. Herbert
   3. LeGuin.
   4. Shelley

2. Mike Glyer on July 22, 2015 at 12:35 pm said:

   ULTRAGOTHA: This confirms my suspicion that what happens in the comments and what happens around on the front page are like two different independent blogs…

   That video wasn’t on the front page when I started reading the comments. (Nether was Kevin’s comment that posted just above mine.) I checked first, honest. Too fast moving!

   I’m GLAD it’s on the front page. The more who see it the better off we’ll all be at Sasquan.

3. Msb

   One of the fascinating things about the way in which Shakespeare was viewed during the Traditional English Literary Criticism era was the willingness of scholars to literally make stuff up. Thus, scholars confidently asserted that his competitors were commercial hacks grubbing away for filthy lucre whilst his company aspired to the greatness of art, untainted by such vulgarity. There was absolutely no evidence of any kind to support this, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, but it was only as the years went by and universities started, very slowly, to have departments where people studied drama, comparing plays with plays rather than assuming that plays were a kind of inferior book, that it became obvious that Eng Lit Crit was completely delusional.

   The Golden Age of Spanish theatre coincided with the Golden Age of English Theatre; we had Shakeseare and they had Lope de Vega, who was not shy about proclaiming his own genius, and claimed to have written over 900 works, though he was probably exaggerating, and was thus treated with absolute disdain by the Eng Lit Crit brigade, who knew that art must be slowly quarried inch by inch in agony from the soul, as Shakespeare allegedly did.

   It’s unsurprising that I lose track of whether it’s 400 or 500 years ago, having spent a fair amount of time with Lope de Vega; what is surprising is that Lope de Vega sailed with the Spanish Armada to invade England in 1588. The two greatest playwrights in the world could have met in battle, killing each other, leaving us with the third greatest playwright of the time, in China, writing ‘The Peony Pavilion’, which is, in fact, an opera, but agreed to be a magnificent achievement, even if it does take many, many days to perform.

   Nobody could write a book with such a plot line; it’s too improbable. But if they did then I have first dibs on the alternate history in which the Armada did make it to our shores, and William and Lope met….

4. Camestros Felapton on July 22, 2015 at 12:53 pm said:
   Arguably the other great Greek writers/dramatists don’t quite pass the SF test on the grounds that they thought they were re-telling true stories (although they take editorial liberties).

   I’d say Aristophanes passes (for The Frogs, if nothing else), and I think a case could be made for Euripides as well – I’m thinking of his mockery of Sophocles in – was it Electra?

5. Jim

   I agree that what constituted ‘true’ to the Ancient Greek mind bears very little resemblance to what we assume it to mean, in much the same way that the ‘truth’ of large chunks of what ended up in the Bible bears very little resemblance to what we assume it to mean. People thought very differently then…

6. Stevie, I gotta ask–just when was this “Traditional English Literary Criticism era” during which stuffy lit-critters just Made Stuff Up? I ask because in the half-century-plus that I’ve spent in the lit biz*, I haven’t encountered these attitudes. None of my teachers supported such notions–and the criticism that I relied on (and still respect) starts with Victorian/Edwardian A. C. Bradley. (Though I am clearly a critical moldy fig who got his training in the pre-Theory days.)

   I write this not to be contentious, but to wonder whether these lit-critters might be chimeras or the Bigfeet of the academic world.

   * Obligatory Locating of Self: English Ph.D. with grad work in Renaissance drama; taught Shakespeare in my salad days; married to a still-teaching Shakespeare scholar.

7. I recall a college classics teacher trying to beat into our heads that a man rising from the dead was not seen as a particularly unlikely event at the time, and would not provoked comment in a religion.

   I always suspected him of being a closet Mithraist, though.

8. I haven’t read all of the books in the Bracket so I’m just not qualified to vote. I am watching with great interest though, and the writers I have read and cherished seem to be doing quite well, so I’m cheering them on.

   Every so often I try and parse out for myself what distinctions I’m making between kinds of books and quality of stories. So, yes, I rank Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare as top tier. I’d put a work like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as really, really good, but not great. I think Jane Eyre is iconic and crucial for its consideration of power and gender, but I would rank it (merely?) as a really, really good work of fiction. On the other hand, I think Emily Bronte is the far greater writer and Wuthering Heights is genius. I get there are no right answers (depending on whether I’ve had more than one glass of wine), but I do love the debates.

   Also, the whole genre vs. literature sorting out sure is tricky. A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream? The Tempest? I don’t expect to see them shelved with Lord of the Rings on the fantasy shelves, but they are fantasy.

   Just like I wouldn’t expect to see Beloved by Toni Morrison shelved there, but the book has crucial supernatural elements. A case could be made for “Rappacinni’s Daughter” by Hawthorne being science fiction. A lot of Hawthorne uses fantastic elements. Dickens, too. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James — think of the fun that could be had if that was nominated for a Hugo — is it or is it not a ghost story?

   I suppose I’m just agreeing with some other commenters here — there are great works of literature that use either science fiction or fantasy elements. We just tend to think of those books as literature, not genre.

9. @Kurt Busiek on July 21, 2015 at 7:52 pm said:

   …but when it turn out that one of the Great Ideas is “Animal,” the whole claim falls apart for me. Apparently, we’re into nouns, here at Great Ideas Inc.

   Or maybe we’re into muppets. (Just watched the trailer for the new abc show. ANImAL!!!)

   @Rose Embolism on July 22, 2015 at 11:10 am said:

   Two excellent novels, but the unfortunate portrayals/roles for women in LoL gives the nod to Downbelow Station.

   OMG THANK YOU. Adulation for LoL seems to be so universal, I was beginning to wonder whether I was the only person bothered by its treatment of women. (I was also unimpressed with its not very subtle trans-bashing.) I suppose it’s one of those books where the idea is So Great that problematic stuff gets a pass, from most people (and I find it hard to give sexist crap a pass when it’s my gender that’s almost entirely in that book to be A) laughed at, or B) seduced, sometimes in very dubious consent situations indeed–JUST LIKE REAL LIFE YOU GUYS only projected so far into the future that apparently I’m to abandon all hope that it will EVER get better), except the Great Idea in LoL, while unique, bothered me too, from a cultural appropriation standpoint.

   I’m not prepared to argue against others’ squee or defend my squick, but the squee seemed *so* universal that it’s an amazing relief to see I’m not the only one who had a less than glowing opinion of that book.

   I actually read those two books for the first time very recently, one right after the other. Downblow Station made me feel relief. Like my shoulders were slowly and constantly tensing until they were against my ears by the end of LoL, and only once I started reading DS could I relax them. I’m not playing in the bracket game, really, but if I were, DS would wholeheartedly get my vote.

10. Jim Parish on July 22, 2015 at 2:55 pm said:
    I’d say Aristophanes passes (for The Frogs, if nothing else), and I think a case could be made for Euripides as well – I’m thinking of his mockery of Sophocles in – was it Electra?

    Good point – Aristophanes should count. Of course Aesop’s fables pre-date both Aristophanes and Plato and I suppose there is an argument that fables and satire don’t count but I don’t buy it. If it is has talking animals doing stuff or mythological being do things that aren’t part of an established mythological canon then it all counts IMHO.

    Mockery of Sophocles in Electra? I don’t know. I’ve only seen modernized versions of the Euripides version. I’d think Electra and Orestes would count in the taking liberties category (i.e. playing with an established story rather than making a new myth/legend).

11. Nicole, I have that kind of reaction to a lot of Zelazny I’ve re-read in recent years, to the point where I just stopped and decided to re-route that attention elsewhere.

12. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little, I did like Lord of Light, but think it’s deeply flawed for the reasons you mention. It’s SO well-written I can hold my nose and mostly ignore it (chanting to myself “it’s a work of its time, it’s a work of its time) but that’s why I voted for the Cherryh this round, instead.

13. > “Mockery of Sophocles in Electra?”

    It was actually making fun of Aeschylus, and it’s pretty hilarious if you know The Libation Bearers. (Not sure how that scene would push it into fantasy, though.)

14. Nobody could write a book with such a plot line; it’s too improbable. But if they did then I have first dibs on the alternate history in which the Armada did make it to our shores, and William and Lope met….

    Pero entonces todos nosotros los oradores Inglés ahora estaríamos hablando de una forma extraña de español which habría evolucionado de manera algo diferente. Así que para un español moderno hablando se leería como una persona perezosa Inglés acababa escrito algún texto en Google translate y se convirtió en a medias españolas. ¿Sí?
    {Sincere apologies to actual Spanish speakers. The computer made me do it.}

15. “One might even argue that no romance novel that makes the cut, not even GONE WITH THE WIND, and that is a damn fine novel.”

    That JCW thinks GWTW is a “damn fine novel” says a lot about him. That he doesn’t think that Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte or Emily Bronte or George Eliot wrote great romance novels does also.

16. Brackets! (I can only vote in #s 3 and 4.)

    3. GENIUS AI IN WINTERMUTE VS. GENLY AI ON WINTER
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    AAAAGHHH why are you making me do this, Kyra.
    I vote LeGuin, for overall greater contribution to the genre.

    4. SHOWDOWN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
    Frankenstein in a landslide. I do not get people’s love for the novel War of the Worlds. Orson Welles’ radio play, sure. But… ugh.

17. Kyra on July 22, 2015 at 4:23 pm said:

    > “Mockery of Sophocles in Electra?”

    It was actually making fun of Aeschylus, and it’s pretty hilarious if you know The Libation Bearers. (Not sure how that scene would push it into fantasy, though.)
    
    My error, then. My point is not so much that the scene moves it into fantasy as that it moves away from the stories being conceived as true. (Well, Euripides may, possibly, have thought his version was true, but he was clearly dubious about Sophocles’ version!)

18. @Ghostbird

    the non-lawyer part of his college education was a “great books” syllabus designed around 1920 as a kind of synthetic common culture for an American ruling class

    I don’t think that is true. Mortimer Adler, for all his faults, was very democratic. After all, he wrote a book called Aristotle for Everybody. Barr and Buchanan, the founders of St. John’s, were both quite left-wing. For instance, Barr, a year after he left St. John’s, started the Foundation for World Government while Buchanan helped Henry Wallace run for president as the candidate for the Progressive Party.

    Alex Beam’s A Great Idea at the Time is also a nice account of the Great Books programs’ democratic (and middle-class) aspirations.

    However, I suspect your account is how Wright views his education.

19. For those curious, In Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, Electra realizes her brother Orestes, whom she has not seen since they were young children, has come home because (1) she recognizes the lock of hair he has placed upon the tomb of their father, (2) she finds a footprint and realizes it looks like her own, and (3) finally, upon meeting him, the robe he is wearing is one she wove for him. It’s a long scene, but here’s the footprint part:

    ELECTRA: And look! Another proof! Footprints matching each other—and like my own! Yes, here are the outlines of two sets of feet, his own and some companion’s. The heels and the imprints of the tendons agree in proportion with my own tracks. I am in torment, my brain is in a whirl!

    Here’s how Euripides presented the same scene in his own play on the subject, 40 years later:

    OLD MAN: … Look at the hair, compare it with thy own, to see if the colour of these cut locks is the same; for children in whose veins runs the same father’s blood have a close resemblance in many features.

    ELECTRA: Old sir, thy words are unworthy of a wise man … thou couldst find many, whose hair is of the same colour, albeit not sprung from the same blood. No, maybe ’twas some stranger cut off his hair in pity at his tomb, or one that came to spy this land privily.

    OLD MAN: Put thy foot in the print of his shoe and mark whether it correspond with thine, my child.

    ELECTRA: How should the foot make any impression on stony ground? and if it did, the foot of brother and sister would not be the same in size, for man’s is the larger.

    OLD MAN: Hast thou no mark, in case thy brother should come, whereby to recognize the weaving of thy loom, the robe wherein I snatched him from death that day?

    ELECTRA: Dost thou forget I was still a babe when Orestes left the country? and even if I had woven him a robe, how should he, a mere child then, be wearing the same now, unless our clothes and bodies grow together?

    Which, yeah, pretty well sums up exactly what Euripides thought about that scene in Aeschylus …

20. I don’t think merely the fact that a work would be considered fictional would push it into fantasy. There’s plenty of fiction that isn’t fantasy. The question is, did the writer believe what we would consider the fantastical elements to be fantastical?

    (In other words, I’d say that if, for example, Homer thought it was literally true that gods exist and mess around with people, then I don’t think the Iliad is fantasy, even if he did not believe the events depicted in it were literally true. It’d be literary fiction.)

21. Drat, after being caught in error, I repeat the same error! Of course, it was Aeschylus’ version that Euripides doubted.

    For the rest, I concede; I was interpreting Camestros’ argument a little too crudely.

22. I’m currently planning on closing voting on this round of the bracket in approximately an hour. (And just FYI, there is one bracket where there is a work that is currently in the lead by exactly one vote.)

23. Russell

    I studied Combined Honours in Drama and Theatre Arts and Sociology, 1969-1972; admittedly, the Combined Honours where I took two thirds of each degree subject existedly solely because the admissions tutor was also my mentor in the National Youth Theatre, and therefore knew that they had finally found someone who could hack the maths needed for the Sociology degree.

    There are not all that many people who can do both an arts and a science degree; my school had wanted me to read PPE, hence my A Levels were English, politics and mathematics, and were less than happy that I proposed to avoid Oxbridge and slum it at a red brick University in pursuit of the things I find fascinating.

    I must confess that I did spend some time much more recently at the Shakespeare Institute, which is part of the English department, but in the intervening decades it has grappled with the whole evidence thing, and recognises that my analysing the socio-economic structure of the London Public Theatres is evidence based, which is more than can be said for the vast array of papers purporting to enlighten us without bothering us with petty details, more usually described as evidence.

    I do not know whether you and/or your wife have spent time in a drama department; I do know that it is nonsensical to believe that one can understand something without putting some effort into learning to understand it. The problem is that scholars in English departments have, historically, refused to do so; they may be changing somewhat now, but they still have a very long way to go. I hope you reflect on this, since I do not think this one

24. Re: Classics and fantasy/SF

    @KurtBusiek has already mentioned Midsummer and Tempest, but if we’re talking ancient Greek drama, Euripides’ Medea must be mentioned, because the heroine (anti-heroine) is literally rescued by a GODDAMN FLYING DRAGON at the end of the play.

    Ghosts give us still more to work with, though it does raise the question of whether just having an extant ghost in a Shakespearean play qualifies (extant = seen by multiple people). In which case Hamlet and MacBeth proudly join the fantasy column.

    I am racking my brain now to see if there are any Canterbury Tales that qualify, but I don’t think there are. Damnit, Chaucer!

25. @Kyra:

    (In other words, I’d say that if, for example, Homer thought it was literally true that gods exist and mess around with people, then I don’t think the Iliad is fantasy, even if he did not believe the events depicted in it were literally true. It’d be literary fiction.)

    I think you’re opening up quite the can of worms there. But first – pedantry break – the Iliad is narrative poetry rather than literary fiction. Sorry; it’s a tic.

    So the can of worms is intentionality and genre. We can make some assumptions about whether “Homer” believed stuff in the Iliad would really happen like that. But we also know that, for a couple millennia, the modal reader doesn’t believe it for a second. So which controls? Is genre beset by slippage?

    I tend to think so, and when it comes to science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, I think it’s tragically inevitable. Frederick Turner has a couple of lines about this in his book-length narrative poem, Genesis. I don’t have it to hand, and can’t quote it even remotely exactly, but he compared the “science-fictionality” of a work to a live theater performance in that both are perishable. On that view, “science fiction” ceases to be “science fiction” when the speculative content passes its sell-by date. And this can happen in a couple of different directions. e.g. On the one hand, Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” no longer fits the set of definitions paraphrased as “hasn’t happened, but could.” On the other hand, Ben Bova’s “Zero Gee” (from Dangerous Visions) has for a long time now been mimetic fiction set in space, even though when it was written it depended on technological and social developments that did not then obtain (sustained orbital habitation and a coed astronaut program). We don’t know if anyone’s Done the Deed in outer space yet, but nothing science fictional stands in the way.

    So we either accept that “science fiction” is a transitory label, or we mentally add qualifiers about the conditions obtaining at the time the story was written. (And the standard better be written,/em>. Larry Niven has told how between when Fred Pohl bought “The Coldest Place” and the publication date, astronomers learned that Mercury wasn’t tide-locked with the Sun after all, so the entire conceit of the story collapsed.)

    I feel the pull in each direction myself, but I take the normative lesson that the value of scientific speculation in an SF story is transitory; at some point it will survive or not based on its residual “literary” qualities.

26. I am racking my brain now to see if there are any Canterbury Tales that qualify, but I don’t think there are. Damnit, Chaucer!

    http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2008/06/14th-c-robots-ii.html

27. 1. AZI AND THE ALLIANCE AGAINST THE ASPECTS OF THE ACCELERATIONISTS
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station

    2. THE SANDWORM SOLUTION
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)

    3. GENIUS AI IN WINTERMUTE VS. GENLY AI ON WINTER
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    4. SHOWDOWN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    I make no defense of my choices; I like what I like.

    Unrelated: I am currently open to suggestions for my next audiobook. Current year science fiction or fantasy. No horror. I don’t do zombies, and I don’t do vampires unless you can tell me you have access to Octavia Butler’s secretly finished sequel to Fledgling. With those parameters, go for it!

28. 1. Cherryh
    2. Tiptree
    3. Gibson
    4. Shelley

    I hope this comes in under the wire.

29. It is indeed under the wire, but if I want to get this round done and the next set up before I collapse asleep, I think I need to call it here. Results will be posted soon.

30. I don’t have it to hand, and can’t quote it even remotely exactly, but he compared the “science-fictionality” of a work to a live theater performance in that both are perishable. On that view, “science fiction” ceases to be “science fiction” when the speculative content passes its sell-by date.

    I think the ‘what-if’ aspect is not entirely transitory even when circumstances mean we now what happens. Mind you that does suggest the possibility of SF novel in which the premise is “What if the allies had won the second world war?”.

    Having said that I think Stephenson’s Baroque cycle has that sort of feel – a SFish novel but set in a past in which all the same major events that happened in our past also happened.

    At this point I decide I’m talking rubbish but rather than wisely deleting the post I press “Post Comment” anyway.

31. BRACKET ROUND 3 RESULTS!!!!!!!!!!!!

    WINNER: Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light – 35 runs
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station – 15 runs
    A solid win for Lord of Light, but not at all an embarrassing showing for Downbelow Station, which leaves the match with its head held high. A Pulvapies Write-In Award is also hereby given to Cyteen, which received an additional four votes.

    2. THE SANDWORM SOLUTION
    WINNER: James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories) – 26 runs
    Frank Herbert: Dune – 25 runs
    This one is basically within the statistical margin of error, and they can honestly be assumed to have been pretty much evenly matched. After I started tracking it when they tied each other at 14 points apiece, they tied a total of nine times over the course of the rest of the voting. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever shall be the one to move on, but Dune hereby gets an “Alley Man” Award for works that could have gone further had circumstances been slightly different.

    WINNER: Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness – 47 runs
    William Gibson: Neuromancer – 13 runs
    The Gibson was acknowledged as being a seminal work, and it got some solid support. But the Le Guin continues to handily best all comers. The Left Hand of Darkness will be the first seeded work in the next round.

    WINNER: Mary Shelley: Frankenstein – 42 runs
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds – 15 runs
    War of the Worlds is the first work to give Frankenstein even close to a challenge, and while it had its supporters, close to a challenge still wasn’t all that close. Of these two foundational works, Frankenstein came out the clear victor. It will be the second seeded work in the next round.

    And so, the works for the second-to-last round are set, and the brackets will be posted soon. It will be some combination of Frankenstein, The Left Hand of Darkness, Lord of Light, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

    Um. Good luck with that …

32. Much later than Chaucer but this is very SF 🙂
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friar_Bacon_and_Friar_Bungay

33. What? Wait! A sockpuppet wants to vote for Frank Herbert!

34. Had I closed the voting 12 minutes earlier, before the last two votes came in, Dune would have gone on to the next round. So, um, blame the podcast I was listening to?

35. Greg on July 22, 2015 at 5:30 pm said:

    I am racking my brain now to see if there are any Canterbury Tales that qualify, but I don’t think there are. Damnit, Chaucer!

    Not Chaucer but here are tales that pre-date The Arabian Nights and have mechanical vultures, singing automatons, and crocodiles with pearl earrings.

36. (The next bracket has now been posted on the 7/22 Pixel Scroll.)

37. Stevie,
    Great idea: Will meets Lope! I am big fan of both. One of Patricia Finney’s novels (Gloriana’s Torch?) has a “what if the Armada had landed” scenario in which Will is killed fighting as part of the Warwickshire levy – horrible thought!

    Russell,
    I think Stevie’s referring to earlier Victorian critics, pre-Bradley. I think Bradley’s work has lost nearly all its currency by now, but “Shakespearean Tragedy” had a very long life: published in 1910, it influenced the teaching of Shakespeare that I received in high school in the 70s.

38. EARLY SF & FANTASY SUBTHREAD:

    @Will: That Chaucer is full of win. There’s a ring that lets you talk to birds, a mirror that lets you mindread, and the horse can teleport.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squire%27s_Tale

    @ULTRAGOTHA: I am embarrassed that I completely forgot the Arabian nights, or related works. The tales look excellent.

    @Camestros: The Robert Greene is completely new to me; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, however, is not and would completely qualify, since it features Satan, teleporting, teleporting to Rome beat up the Pope with sausages, invisibility to further assist with beating up the Pope with sausages, and Faustus literally getting sucked down into Hell.

    And speaking of getting sucked into hell, a guy named Wolfgang wrote something about that… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK1_vm0FMAU

39. Nicole, Bruce, there’s a lot of Zelazney that I loved as a teen, that I now have a lot of trouble with. In the case of Lord of Light, it was realizing that if one was a female character in that book, there was basically a a choice between being a madam and a “psycho lesbian” cliche who really wanted to be a man. The Christian fundamentalist who has a zombie army is portrayed more sympathetically than the lesbian character. It’s not quite as bad as Ringworld, but it’s not something I can ignore.

40. @Shao Ping Mortimer Adler, for all his faults, was very democratic…

    Interesting – thanks for setting me right on that. I was working backward from Wright’s own views, which is hardly fair to the people who compiled the original Great Books programs.

    ObSF: R A Lafferty’s “Fourth Mansions”. There’s a quiet scepticism about Great Men and their Great Works all through Lafferty’s writing, but “Fourth Mansions” is probably the most comprehensive treatment. And I notice Lafferty is the only major Catholic fabulist Wright doesn’t seem to get on with.

41. EARLY SF & FANTASY SUBTHREAD:

    I’d argue that Apuleius’ The Golden Ass is fantasy even from the point of view of the time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass

42. Greg on July 22, 2015 at 10:31 pm said:

    And speaking of getting sucked into hell, a guy named Wolfgang wrote something about that… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK1_vm0FMAU

    🙂 Saw this very recently http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/man-and-superman
    G.B.Shaw of course well into the period of when SF was definitely a thing but still not an obvious source of fantasy and yet this play has the hero finding himself in hell as his ancestor Don Juan (aka Mozart’s Don Giovanni).

    Also Voldemort!

43. Lori Coulson on July 22, 2015 at 9:15 am said:
    (Quoting moi regarding a recollection of mine of what Judy Merrill wrote back in the mid 60s))

    SF has yet to even have a Christopher Marlowe, much less a Shakespeare.

    Responded with:

    Wrong — for your consideration I submit: Ray Bradbury.

    Well …. I’m quite sure Judy Merrill was very familiar with Bradbury when she made that statement.

44. I’m quite sure Judy Merrill was very familiar with Bradbury, but Shakespeare wasn’t recognized as Shakespeare! when he was writing popular plays for general entertainment, either. Real assessment of lasting value and high influence takes time.

45. I may have missed something in that list of 100 best films, but I think the following films should be on the list.

    Phantom of the Opera
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    It Happened One Night
    High Noon
    Forbidden Planet
    Marty

46. Regarding Shakespearian critics:

    While it is true that the Victorian era was the high tide of bardolatry, and also the high point of closet drama, the problem with Stevie’s general characterization of the lit. crit. establishment — assuming that it is based on that period — is that academic literary criticism began only in the very late 19th Century. There were certainly Shakespeare critics before then — Johnson and Malone spring to mind — but there was no academic literary critical establishment of any sort (except in Classics) until English Literature was created as a “discipline” to compete with Classics. (The Oxford Department was founded only in 1894, for example.) The overall approach of the departments took much longer to settle out; there were fights between Lang and Lit sides until the thirties, and renewed fights beginning in the 1970’s over the place of theory.

    Bradley is usually considered to be the first major academic Shakespearian critic, and neither he nor any later schools I can think of (Wilson Knight, for example, or the New Critics, or anybody more recent) corresponds very closely to Stevie’s picture of literary criticism’s attitude towards Shakespeare. Granville-Barker’s Prefaces To Shakespeare — the works of a practical director and producer — were published beginning in the late 1920s and were well-received academically.

47. ULTRAGOTHA: I have the Modern Library edition of the Hamzanama, which may also qualify.

48. Evelyn

    The writer, Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, wrote that he knew that men could do everything better than women could, until the day he read Jane Austen; he concluded then that no man could write as well as she did…

49. James

    If you read the essays on Shakespeare by F. R. Leavis it should give you a good idea of why Eng Lit Crit fell so dreadfully short of any understanding that plays are not novels, and that trying to treat plays as if they are novels leads inevitably to, at best, a gross oversimplification of what a play is, and at worst the intentional devaluation of plays on the grounds that they are not novels and should be.

    Leavis, who doted on DH Lawrence, notwithstanding the fact that he was a good short story writer but lousy novelist, was immensely influential; few English departments in English universities cared to cross him. Having read Leavis’ appallingly ill-informed criticism of Othello, I would not then set foot in an English department; nobody who has ever seen Othello performed could reconcile the play with Leavis’ claims about it. Of course, people studying in English departments under Leavis’ influence didn’t go to the theatre and watch the plays they were supposedly studying; they read the texts and criticised those instead…

50. James

    I should, perhaps, also add that Bradley didn’t view plays as plays, either. All of Bradley’s works on Shakespeare contain multiple references to Shakespeare’s readers, with a very, very occasional reference to Shakespeare’s audience; since Shakespeare wrote plays to be performed, not read, this makes no sense.

    Moving past F.R. Leavis to the last part of the 20th century, Stephen Greenblatt was still writing about Othello as if it was a novel in 1996; his inability to grasp that Shakespeare was writing a play directly leads to his convoluted theory that Othello was ‘about’ Christianity and sexuality in marriage. This is based on one throw away line which takes less than 30 seconds in performance in a play lasting for three hours, which is nonsense. Playwrights, and Shakespeare was a great playwright, don’t allot less than 30 seconds out of more than three hours, for a major theme.

    Admittedly, it’s marginally less nonsensical than the argument that Othello is ‘about’ Othello’s castration complex, but there’s not much in it…

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