photo courtesy of Dominus Vobiscum
A couple of days ago I found myself itching to pick up a classic, to delve into the work of one of the greats that I had yet to read. I went over my mental list of authors in the English canon, a list I had learned the hard way: studying for the English Literature GRE. To prepare for this test, I read the Sparknotes for at least fifty books that could show up on the exam. A few of these were works by Charles Dickens, which I had neatly avoided reading throughout my academic career (and never even dreamt of reading for fun). Anyway, earlier this week I found myself considering Dickens. Shouldn’t I give him a shot? The summaries of his novels weren’t that boring, right? Has anyone I know read Dickens? Do people still even read Dickens?
I decided to get some answers.
The first resource I turned to was a blog post conveniently titled “Why are we still reading Dickens?” It was published by the UK’s Guardian, so its perspective on a British writer might be a little different than the rest of the world’s, but it offered some a fairly convincing response to the central question; Dickens’s novels “‘tell us in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.’” The blog’s author, Jon Michael Varese, elaborates on this point:
And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.
Point taken, but I still wasn’t convinced. Couldn’t you say the same for any great author? Isn’t the point of writing to examine the lot of humanity, to expose each facet of that thing that makes us all human? I needed more.
I next turned to The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Contributor Grahame Smith explains that until now, there have been two primary schools of thought on Dickens in the scholarly community. The first of these is what Smith calls “prototype” studies, in which scholars attempted to discern the “real” people behind Dickens’s characters. The second stems from the school of New Criticism, of the 1950′s and 60′s, which “removed literary texts from the historical arena through a concentration on their structure and language.” I tend to agree with this emphasis on the text, though not quite to the extremes of New Critics. Thus, any argument regarding the historical importance of Dickens’s timely social commentary as reason enough to examine his works as great literary texts can be thrown out. Smith goes on to discuss the legacy of Post-Structuralism, which stresses “the centrality of writing in the construction of the self and the world, as well as literary texts.” Smith implies that this legacy reveals the value of Dickens’s work, and argues that the author carefully wrote his own life, constructing a narrative which is at times “self-indulgent” and sentimental, but always reflective of the social and economic tensions of the time, turning his experiences into “mythology.” This Post-Structuralist reading of Dickens also echoes the sentiment expressed in the Varese blog, as the author contemplates the way Dickens’s works contributed to the formation of his self.
So what I took away from all this is that, ultimately, Dickens’s works aren’t important so much as an examination of “human interaction,” but of human formation, of the struggle to create an identity.
Okay, I finally have a good reason to read Dickens. I’m interested to sense the author’s struggle to write his own “self” as his text simultaneously helps me create my “self.” Now the question is, which book should I start with?
Side note: One of my current guilty pleasures, ABC’s Castle, just happened to mention A Christmas Carol in their latest episode. I’m now even more convinced that I must read Dickens, if only to refer to while interrogating a criminal.
Tags: books, Castle, Charles Dickens, Dickens, History, literature, reading, Social Commentary, theory, writing
So I haven’t posted in awhile, thanks to some major life changes that I’ve been adjusting to, but I’m officially back. Since there aren’t a whole lot of literature themed games out there, that I’m aware of at least, I felt compelled to share this gem with everyone. Playing it, I suddenly realized why these kind of games haven’t spread like wildfire. People that love books like me, for the most part, grew up with their nose in one, no matter what, even while brushing teeth or walking, and did not have a lot of leisure time left over to spend playing video games or building fine motor skills. Therefore, after so eagerly embarking on my digital Gatsby adventure, I couldn’t get past the first level. But it looks fun!!
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but is Dickens an author of our times?
28 Janphoto courtesy of Dominus Vobiscum
A couple of days ago I found myself itching to pick up a classic, to delve into the work of one of the greats that I had yet to read. I went over my mental list of authors in the English canon, a list I had learned the hard way: studying for the English Literature GRE. To prepare for this test, I read the Sparknotes for at least fifty books that could show up on the exam. A few of these were works by Charles Dickens, which I had neatly avoided reading throughout my academic career (and never even dreamt of reading for fun). Anyway, earlier this week I found myself considering Dickens. Shouldn’t I give him a shot? The summaries of his novels weren’t that boring, right? Has anyone I know read Dickens? Do people still even read Dickens?
I decided to get some answers.
The first resource I turned to was a blog post conveniently titled “Why are we still reading Dickens?” It was published by the UK’s Guardian, so its perspective on a British writer might be a little different than the rest of the world’s, but it offered some a fairly convincing response to the central question; Dickens’s novels “‘tell us in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.’” The blog’s author, Jon Michael Varese, elaborates on this point:
And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.
Point taken, but I still wasn’t convinced. Couldn’t you say the same for any great author? Isn’t the point of writing to examine the lot of humanity, to expose each facet of that thing that makes us all human? I needed more.
I next turned to The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Contributor Grahame Smith explains that until now, there have been two primary schools of thought on Dickens in the scholarly community. The first of these is what Smith calls “prototype” studies, in which scholars attempted to discern the “real” people behind Dickens’s characters. The second stems from the school of New Criticism, of the 1950′s and 60′s, which “removed literary texts from the historical arena through a concentration on their structure and language.” I tend to agree with this emphasis on the text, though not quite to the extremes of New Critics. Thus, any argument regarding the historical importance of Dickens’s timely social commentary as reason enough to examine his works as great literary texts can be thrown out. Smith goes on to discuss the legacy of Post-Structuralism, which stresses “the centrality of writing in the construction of the self and the world, as well as literary texts.” Smith implies that this legacy reveals the value of Dickens’s work, and argues that the author carefully wrote his own life, constructing a narrative which is at times “self-indulgent” and sentimental, but always reflective of the social and economic tensions of the time, turning his experiences into “mythology.” This Post-Structuralist reading of Dickens also echoes the sentiment expressed in the Varese blog, as the author contemplates the way Dickens’s works contributed to the formation of his self.
So what I took away from all this is that, ultimately, Dickens’s works aren’t important so much as an examination of “human interaction,” but of human formation, of the struggle to create an identity.
Okay, I finally have a good reason to read Dickens. I’m interested to sense the author’s struggle to write his own “self” as his text simultaneously helps me create my “self.” Now the question is, which book should I start with?
Side note: One of my current guilty pleasures, ABC’s Castle, just happened to mention A Christmas Carol in their latest episode. I’m now even more convinced that I must read Dickens, if only to refer to while interrogating a criminal.
Tags: books, Castle, Charles Dickens, Dickens, History, literature, reading, Social Commentary, theory, writing