Interesting Things to Read Today
Feb. 26th, 2009 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julieandrewsFound off of John Scalzi's Whatever, Charles Stross discusses book series and breaks them down into 2 basic types. What I would call episodic and um.. non-episodic. "The Art of Being Late" is in response to the annoying, self-centered fans being jerks to George R. R. Martin.
In a rather different topic altogether (except it's still about writing), Salon.com's Laura Miller asks "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?". It's about Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Women currently share equality as far as bestsellers go, but when it comes to recognition by academics, critics, jurors, etc, there's a huge discrepancy.
Here's a quote from the article:
One of the conclusions seems to be that American women writers historically have just not had enough time to practice writing and get good enough to be taken seriously. Having recently read Talent is Overrated and Outliers and watched some British documentaries on reading, I have to agree with this to a certain extent. American women historically have not had the leisure to read and write in any great quantity. The article mentions the Brits having a servant class to do the domestic chores, giving some women more time to read and write and discuss books. Which is apparently what the Bronte sisters grew up doing.
If you need 10,000 hours of practice to become accomplished at a task, then you can see how girls raised up to cook, clean, keep house, and care for children would find it difficult to find those 10,000 hours. Keeping in mind how long it used to do household chores, that it often included farm chores like tending chickens, and that light is a scarce commodity before electricity was widespread.
Not that most of the men had the free time either, but at least it wasn't looked at askance if they showed interest in learning more and going on to college. As long as they had brothers to take their place at the farm.
But all that only takes you so far. Have we done any better in the last 100 years?
In a rather different topic altogether (except it's still about writing), Salon.com's Laura Miller asks "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?". It's about Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Women currently share equality as far as bestsellers go, but when it comes to recognition by academics, critics, jurors, etc, there's a huge discrepancy.
Here's a quote from the article:
Most illuminating, she will, when needed, chart the rise and fall of the reputation of someone like Sarah Orne Jewett (who wrote about late 19th-century life in the small towns of coastal Maine), a trajectory that went from being "patronized as the epitome of the little woman writer" in her own time to being touted as a "recovered" feminist pioneer in the 1970s and '80s, and finally, in the '90s, to being "excoriated and banished by feminist critics for her endorsement of bourgeois values and her political thought crimes."
Jewett's posthumous "dizzy ride on the roller coaster of critical politics" offers a textbook case of the absurdities of ideological criticism in the late 20th century. One scholar convinced herself that the meandering structure of Jewett's best-known work, "The Country of Pointed Firs" (a lovely book, by the way), was intended to be a weblike, "feminine" alternative to the oppressively "masculine" convention in which a linear plot accelerates to a climax; a more circular story supposedly corresponds to the purportedly non-goal-oriented unfolding of women's sexual response. This dubious sort of analogy is surprisingly popular among academic critics, despite the fact that the vast majority of women readers have always exhibited a hearty appetite for linear narratives -- much as most women, when given a choice, would prefer to have that orgasm, thanks very much.
One of the conclusions seems to be that American women writers historically have just not had enough time to practice writing and get good enough to be taken seriously. Having recently read Talent is Overrated and Outliers and watched some British documentaries on reading, I have to agree with this to a certain extent. American women historically have not had the leisure to read and write in any great quantity. The article mentions the Brits having a servant class to do the domestic chores, giving some women more time to read and write and discuss books. Which is apparently what the Bronte sisters grew up doing.
If you need 10,000 hours of practice to become accomplished at a task, then you can see how girls raised up to cook, clean, keep house, and care for children would find it difficult to find those 10,000 hours. Keeping in mind how long it used to do household chores, that it often included farm chores like tending chickens, and that light is a scarce commodity before electricity was widespread.
Not that most of the men had the free time either, but at least it wasn't looked at askance if they showed interest in learning more and going on to college. As long as they had brothers to take their place at the farm.
But all that only takes you so far. Have we done any better in the last 100 years?