Recent stories of note:
“‘Mark Twain’ review: The Most American Writer”
Jay Parini, The Wall Street Journal
Mark Twain, in almost every image of him, sports a voluminous head of hair, thick eyebrows whose strands extend over an inch, and an unmissable mustache framing his stern-looking mouth. Writing for The Wall Street Journal that “almost everything about Twain seems exaggerated as well as true,” Jay Parini does not refer to Twain’s hair, of course, but the statement applies all the same. Parini reviews a recent biography of the legendary satirist, who Hemingway declared was the source of all modern American literature, by Ron Chernow, a vaunted biographer in his own right. Parini writes that he incorporates “Twain’s sizzling remarks,” usually a stumbling block for biographers whose writing pales in comparison, “almost seamlessly into his own narrative.”
“Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding”
Philip Hensher, The Spectator
For many a reviewer and reader, Stefan Collini’s new book Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain must raise the specter of English departments today, often bemoaned by alumni and scholars, and decreasingly popular among students. In his review for The Spectator, Philip Hensher argues that the plight of today’s literature departments has precedent. The study of literature long held low prestige and was “considered a subject for the less able.” Many teachers favored literature as an instrument for teaching moral ideas rather than as an end in itself—then as now. Dickens and Thackeray, for example, were in 1914 called by one Cantabrigian “entirely below the university’s dignity.” Hensher writes, “If you envisage the subject of literary history as ‘the study of ideas through literature,’ as one person put it, you will pass over most of the good stuff.”
