Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
Category: words
Icelandic Culture Has Survived Since The Age Of The Vikings, But Can It Survive The Age Of Tourism And The Internet?
“Icelandic … has changed so little since then on our small and isolated island, that we can still more or less read [the Sagas] as they were first written. But Iceland is not so isolated anymore.” Novelist Ragnar Jónasson explains the factors that are making English more prevalent there than ever before (“Will Icelandic soon become the second language of Icelanders?”), and then looks at a couple of surprising sources of hope for the mother tongue.
The First Pop-Up Books Weren’t For Kids — They Taught Adults Science
“From about 1450 to 1750, most pop-ups appeared in scientific books. Movable paper parts were once used to explain the movements of the moon, the five regular geometric solids, the connections between the eye and the brain, and more.”
Haruki Murakami Is Not Going To Explain His Weird, Weird Books To You
About the scene ion Kafka on the Shore in which fish fall from the sky: “People ask me, ‘Why fish? And why are they falling from the sky?’ But I have no answer for them. I just got the idea that something should fall from the sky. Then I wondered: what should fall from the sky? And I said to myself: ‘Fish! Fish would be good.'”
Look What Has Become Of Reading! (It Ain’t Pretty)
The first decade of the 21st century was a transitional one in terms of reader-writer relations, its habits now as foreign as those of Edward R. Murrow’s America. Gone are the happy days when we dialed up to submit a comment to Salon.com, only to be abused by Glenn Greenwald or destroyed — respectfully — by the academics at Crooked Timber. Back then, we could not have imagined feeling nostalgic for the blogosphere, a term we mocked for years until we found it charming and utopian. Blogs felt like gatherings of the like-minded, or at least the not completely random.
Ambient Literature: The Latest High-Tech Hack Of The Reading Experience
“Using data from your smartphone such as weather, location and time, the programme interacts with the reader to tell the narrative in a unique and individualised way. No two stories will ever be the same experience. The technology enables the narrative to sync to the reader’s surroundings. So if it’s raining in real life, it will start raining in the story, if you’re sitting in a cafe, the action will take place in a cafe.”
Man Booker Prize 2018 To Anna Burns’s ‘Milkman’
“The experimental novel, Burns’s third, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl, known as ‘middle sister’, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman,” during Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Burns, the first Booker winner from Ulster, “beat writers including the American literary heavyweight Richard Powers; Daisy Johnson, at 27 the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the award; and the Canadian writer Esi Edugyan.”
What It Means To Live A “Bookish” Life
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind.
Reviving Latin As A Spoken Language Is A Politically Fraught Project
“Latin’s revival, among young teachers on the one hand and nostalgic nationalists on the other, appears to flourish on two opposing ends. But while they may seem to be separate, the two are inexorably and uneasily linked through the history of white men’s appropriation of Latin as a marker of superiority.”
‘It’s Something Of A Counter-Museum’ — American Poetry Museum Operates Without Exhibition Space
Board chair Jon West-Bey, who developed the institution based on his graduate thesis: “We wanted to put programs before space. We didn’t want to be the type of place where we said, ‘If we build it, they’ll come.’ It was more, ‘We’ll come to you.'”