So, here's where I'm at now: not the beginning, but very very close. After reading "On the Road" as per the canon, I read "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" and from there resolved to read "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky (currently purchased) and to acquire a reasonable guide to the world of literary philosophy and contemporary thought. Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" fell into my lap (and I imagine will be followed by Milan Kundera's "Encounter"). That's what I start with.
Against Interpretation
1. We understand art as mimesis or representation; art by definition says something
- "form" vs "content" -- What's the difference? Form is words on a page or images in a painting, whereas content is what those words are about and what the images resemble.
3. Last Year at Marienbad - I'm putting this here only because it's the second time this week I've heard of this film by Resnais (Jim Emerson being the editor for Roger Ebert).
4. "To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become 'merely' decorative. Or it may become non-art."
- Sontag cites Godard's "Breathless" as a film that does not demand interpretation, as "anti-symbolic"
- "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more." (Is this related to Artaud's total theater?)
- And how to go about doing this? Perhaps more emphasis on form instead of so much content-based interpretation.
- Erwin Panofsky "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures"
- Northrop Frye "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres"
- Pierre Francastel "The Destruction of a Plastic Space"
- Roland Barthes on Robbe-Grillet
- Erich Auerbach "The Scar of Odysseus"
- Walter Benjamin "The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov"
- Dorothy Van Ghent "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers"
- Randall Jarrell on Whitman
"... It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent to us - as logical and methodical generalizations cannot - our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions."
"There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so. [...] If some day a tourist notices, among the ruins of New York City, a copy of Leaves of Grass, and stops and picks it up and reads some lines in it, she will be able to say to herself: 'How very American! If he and his country had not existed, it would have been impossible to imagine them.'"
Updated II -- things that impressed me from Walter Benjamin's essay:
"Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
... and further, the idea of eternity fades and the idea of death fades; it's possible now "to avoid the sight of the dying" (although I'm not sure why this diminishes the idea of eternity; wouldn't it enforce it?)
"The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader."
"A man ... who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five."
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