Elif Batuman wrote an essay for the Guardian about life after writing a bestseller. It’s like an epilogue to The Possessed, tying together thoughts on literary success, anecdotes about dinner party capers and (bien sur!) quotations from Pushkin, organized loosely around her experience attending the National Book Critics Circle Awards banquet. (The Possessed was a finalist in the criticism category.) Unsurprisingly, it is uproariously funny. (As a coda, you can read my review of The Possessed here, and our interview with Elif Batuman here.)
In the New York Times, A.O. Scott reflects on Susan Sontag’s hallmark book On Photography thirty-four years later, in a time when “the camera, the darkroom, the museum and the archive all exist in the same place.” Pair it with this essay in The Guardian on Roland Barthes’ elegiac work Camera Lucida, written at the same time as Sontag’s book, “not so much a knowing application of semiotic methods to intimate experience as a search for the aspect of experience that evaded study or critique.” They are both marvelous works of critical theory, but for all the force of Sontag’s brilliance it’s Barthes book–slimmer, unapologetically intimate–I prefer; maybe it’s that Sontag’s book is a work of brilliance but Barthes’ is a work of love.
David Thomson gives a really smart reading of the new movie adaptation of Jane Eyre by Cary Fukunaga in The New Republic:
It’s necessary that Jane’s romanticism rests in her voice and her mind—she is one of the great decision-making heroines in English literature, a model of moral intelligence, though still a susceptible young woman. The film lets us feel how physically attracted to Rochester she is; so it requires an effort to establish her higher reliance on intelligence and virtue. It’s easy these days, in talking about movies, to ignore or mock such things. Thus Jane Eyre has always been poised to slip into novelette. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier and then Alfred Hitchcock, is the prime example of that shift—and very entertaining. But Bronte meant to tell a story about principled independence without piety, and the film lets us know how thoroughly Rochester has been educated and tamed. His eventual blindness is the one thing in novel and film that seems underlined (or Freudian).
Again in The New Republic, Joseph Margulies, a lawyer who has defended Guantánamo Bay prisoners, calls 9/11 the new cultural litmus test, its symbolic potency hardening into increasingly stable–and intractable–narratives that engender not debate but ideological head-butting. “When an issue achieves the symbolic potency that the post-September 11 debate has achieved—when policies become symbols—it means that intelligent debate is impossible.”
Check out these two interviews with Full Stop EIC Alex Shephard, if you haven’t yet: with Critical Mass, the NBCC blog, and with OCBookLove, a student-written blog about writing by students and alums of our alma mater.
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