The Sometime Seminar engages in an extended conversation concerning talks at some length about discusses Correction (1975/English 1979) by Thomas Bernhard.
How does a primitivist power fantasy become the kernel of a fleshed-out fictional world? How do you write an interesting story about an invulnerable hero? (Hint: giant snakes.) And when a pulp classic gets the full authorial-originalist textual-editing treatment, is the work honored or just entombed?
The Sometime Seminar discusses The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (2003), which along with The Bloody Crown of Conan (2004) and The Conquering Sword of Conan (2005) collects all of the Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard in the early-to-mid-1930s in the order of their composition. (The editorial history of post-Howard Conan stories and books is quite complicated.)
If you cram enough occasional criticism into a volume, will an aesthetic theory emerge? How far can you go as a critic with a gift for attention, a way with adjectives, a love of unsubordinated details and a healthy contempt for self-inflation? (Pretty far, it turns out!)
The Sometime Seminar discusses the film criticism of Manny Farber (1940s–1980s), collected in Farber on Film (2009).
The Sometime Seminar discusses Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), a mysterious novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay which was adapted into a film directed by Peter Weir (1975).
It’s a late-Victorian triple-decker novel about the poor souls who write late-Victorian triple-decker novels and the psychosocial tightropes they walk (or plummet from) while doing so. Plus thrilling rooftop adventures!
The Sometime Seminar discusses New Grub Street (1891), a novel of struggling writers by George Gissing.
Supplemental links: “An Outburst on Gissing” (1920) by Douglas Goldring is an entertaining rant against Gissing’s style.
Note on e-texts: None of the electronic editions of New Grub Street that we examined were any better edited than Project Gutenberg’s, unfortunately. The Modern Library and Oxford World’s Classics commercial versions were riddled with errors.
An anthology of American chicaneries, an allegory of human nature and its dubious trustworthiness, a virtuoso feat of metafictional irony, and/or the shaggiest shaggy-dog story you’ve ever read.
The Sometime Seminar discusses The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), a satiric fiction by Herman Melville.
The Sometime Seminar discusses Sartor Resartus (1836), a satiric novel about a fictional German philosopher by Thomas Carlyle.
How to re-estrange and re-enchant the most familiar stories in the world? Apply generous quantities of sexual drama, stylistic brilliance, emotional intensity and psychological complexity, and don’t forget to be a genius.
The Sometime Seminar discusses The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of short stories which retell or rework folk tales, by Angela Carter.
Do kids these days look at their phones all the time because they’ve lost touch with their inner selves, or is the world around them in fact really boring? If you heap up enough observations about a social phenomenon, will an analysis of that phenomenon automatically emerge? Is pop social science just a set of rituals to exorcise anxiety? And what’s so scary about communications technology, anyway?
The Sometime Seminar discusses Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015) by Sherry Turkle, a book expressing and documenting widespread cultural anxieties about the social effects of social networking and mobile networked technology.
The Sometime Seminar discusses Nazi Literature in the Americas (La literatura Nazi en América, 1996/English 2008), an encyclopedia of fictional authors by Roberto Bolaño.
Supplemental links: Michael Wood on Nazi Literature and Bolaño’s work in the LRB; Giles Harvey’s “User’s Guide to Bolaño” in The New Yorker
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