[peter richards]

Somebody thinks so, apparently... http://books.guardian.co.uk/forwardp...586472,00.html

[Christine Whittemore]

Thanks for posting this, Peter. So good to see someone given the space in the mainstream press to articulate why poetry and the arts are important.

Christine

[Tim Love]

And there's more good news from the UK press - "Theory is dead" says the current Times Higher Education Supplement (not free online, but you can browse in newsagents). There's allegedly a trend in UK univs towards reading literature rather than reading theories about literature.

[Christine Whittemore]

Hallelujah!

Christine

[epigone]

I can't find anything on the internet about it (yet), but I heard on the radio today that The Poetry Foundation has awarded its annual Pegasus Awards, which are quite generous. They gave the criticism prize to William Logan, which seems quite in keeping with Poetry Magazine's recently announced policies on poetry reviews.

epigone

[Marion Shore]

Amen, indeed!

Tim, that is good news! I hope this trend takes off. "Reading theories about literature" rather than reading literature was what made me a refugee from literary studies, and IMO turns off (and turns away) countless students in literature classes every day!

[epigone]

Yes, let's return to the days when teaching literature amounted only to making certain that students followed the plot, caught the Biblical and classical allusions, and underlined (in pink or purple, one hopes) the felicitous phrases.

And then, the instructor stands in front of the adoring students and explains to them (since how would they know if they've never read any theory?) what is really going on.

People have been pronouncing theory dead for decades now. It's preposterous. I love literature, and I think reading and appreciating literature should be at the heart of literary studies, but banishing theory is a ridiculous response to the excesses of the 80s and 90s.

epigone

[Katy Evans-Bush]

By the way, the Forward Prize has several components - before we get all excited about the Guardian's coverage (& they are great, they make a ot of space for poetry) let's take a minute for the other winners, who aren't mentioned in the interview!

Helen Farish won Best First Collection, which is published by Cape, and Paul Farley won Best Single Poem.

The shortlist was very heterogeneous, including Alice Oswald, John Stammers and Alan Jenkins.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/forwardp...585545,00.html

The above link gives you a chance to read a poem by each of the other winners.

KEB

[Susan McLean]

Here's the press release about the Pegasus awards:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/release_100705.html

Susan

[Mark Allinson]

Yes, let's return to the days when teaching literature amounted only to making certain that students followed the plot, caught the Biblical and classical allusions, and underlined (in pink or purple, one hopes) the felicitous phrases.

And then, the instructor stands in front of the adoring students and explains to them (since how would they know if they've never read any theory?) what is really going on.

How true that is, Epigone. I read literature for twenty years before I returned to university. And all that time, in my deep and untutored ignorance, I actually believed that I was seeing what was going on in the books I read.

What a fool I was.

It was not till I re-enrolled as a student that I discovered how blind I had been. To my great surprise, I learned, among many other things, that Shakespeare's plays were not the powerful presentations of human experience I had thought. No, they actually turned out to be encoded presentations of social repressions and controls. And furthermore, I learned that reading these plays as powerful insights into human reality was merely a trick of propaganda perpetrated on naïve readers by fascist “traditionalists”, whose real motivation was the inculcation of a sense of membership in a cultural elite.

What a lucky escape I had, and all thanks to contemporary literary theory. Without the spectacles of this social theory (and the linguistic theories which supported it) I would still be a blind and naïve reader. So let's hope this rumour of the death of theory is just that, and literature can continue to be saved from such ignorant approaches as mine.




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Mark Allinson