An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge

Source: Harvard University Press 2002

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 2 Literary Criticism & Literary Creation

• "There are writers and there are critics. Each group has its task, its priorities, its privileges. Writers produce original works of imagination. Critics classify, evaluate, interpret, and analyse them." [p. 93]
• "What [T. S.] Eliot most distrusted was what he called 'interpretation'; 'for every success in this type of writing there are thousands of impostures. Instead of insights, you get a fiction.' ". [p. 93]
• " 'Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once.' [Archibald MacLeish]" [p. 96]
• "Academic criticism ... has its own hidden agenda: the demonstration of a professional skill, the refutation of competing peers, the claim to be making an addition to knowledge." [p. 98]
• "... tension is likely ... to occur between the creative writer and his journalistic critics, since they have a more direct impact on the writer's career - his status, his financial prospects, and his self-esteem. ... Reviewers, like scholars, have their own hidden agenda, which explains why their judgments are often so extreme." [p. 100]
• "In those days literary reputations were made first among a small elite, and through the medium of small-circulation literary magazines. Structural changes in the economics of publishing ... have made it possible in our own day for a gifted literary writer to become rich and famous quite quickly. ... literary journalism has never been so obsessed as it is now with the personality and private life of the author." [p. 101-102]
• "Criticism as the expression of subjective response is of course an essentially romantic idea ... the idea that there is no essential difference between creation and criticism has been given a new academic respectability, and a new sophistication, under the aegis of post-structuralism, and especially the theory of deconstruction, which questions the very distinction between subjective and objective." [p. 103]
• "As Professor Morris Zapp says, in my novel Small World, 'every decoding is another encoding.' " [p. 106]
• "Graham Greene said, 'An author of talent is his own best critic - an ability to criticise his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent: it is his talent.' " [p. 106]
• "... as readers, as critics, we [writers] are so interested in the genesis of works of literature, in authors' notebooks and draft manuscripts, and in their comments on their own work - it is a way of reconstructing and sharing the 'critical labour' that is part of creation." [p. 107]
• "Where the writer has an advantage over her critics is in explaining how a book came to be written, what its sources were, and why it took the form that it did. But few writers are eager to use this privilege. ... [David Lodge]: There are many facts about the composition of my work that I could never recover and many that I would never divulge." [p. 108]
• "The very idea of the individual self, he [Daniel Dennet] argues, is constructed, like a novel." [p. 112]

I am not sure that I would call academics' criticism "hidden".

The quote on page 107 leaves out the situation of an academic psychologist who could also be interested in the process of writing.

The quote on page 108 applies to all forms of autobiographical writing - including this web site. That is not to say that there is not some value in the activity and some value in the result. It is only to admit that all such forms have a dimension of editing behind them.

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 3 Dickens Our Contemporary

• "Publication in parts and magazine serialization, pioneered by Dickens, became the standard form for the initial publication of novels in the Victorian age ... The audience absorbed the story and became familiar with the characters in a rhythm almost as slow as their own lives." [p. 118]
• "... the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness [Jane Smiley]". [p. 121]
• "When the real author encounters real readers, it can be an uncomfortable experience on both sides." [p. 122]
• "Dickens's attitude towards love, marriage, and sexuality, in his life and in his work, is a complex and puzzling subject." [p. 127]

As a result of reading this chapter, and a comment by Leah Fowler, I bought "Nicholas Nickleby".

The first quote reminds me of two television series in the late 1970's on Masterpiece Theatre (BBC) {Anna Karenina and I, Claudius} where we would all wait for the next episode. I suppose this is one of the appeals of the daily soap opera programs as well.

I have only met one "real author" (Les Murray) in Lismore. The experience (for me) was enjoyable, while also having the tension of two strangers wondering what they should say to one another.

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 4 Forsters Flawed Masterpiece

• " ... but most of us are enmeshed in capitalist economies, uncomfortably aware (or complacently unaware) that the quality of our lives depends ultimately upon economic structures which entail injustice and inequality on a global scale." [p.137]
• "The manners and morals of middle-class English society in the decade before the Great War are preserved in its [Howards End] pages like a collection of perfect fossils." [p. 137]
• "Forster set himself a difficult task: to tell a convincing story of personal relationships in which every character and every action also carries a heavy freight of representative significance and contributes to the thematic design." [p. 151]

As a result of reading this chapter, I bought "Howards End". It was in a collection of "Great Masterpieces" at the Barnes & Noble store in Great Falls, and was the one written by Forster.

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 5 Waugh's Comic Wasteland

• "Satire in any era is a kind of writing that draws its energy and fuels its imagination from an essentially critical and subversive view of the world, seizing with delight on absurdities, anomalies, an contradictions in human conduct." [p. 164]
• "Modernist fiction was difficult, obscure, experimental. It sacrificed story to the representation of subjective experience. It heightened and distorted language to imitate the workings of the consciousness and the unconscious." [p. 165]
• "Waugh ... his volume of autobiography, A Little Learning." [p. 169]
• " 'anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.' [Waugh]" [p. 171]
• "Vile Bodies is my personal favorite..." [p. 172]
• "The basic message of the book [Scoop] is that newspapers construct the reality they claim to report - not (as modern media studies often claim) for sinister ideological reasons, but because they are so obsessed with the mystique of their trade - the need to entertain their readers, to scoop their competitors, and so on - that they make gross errors of fact and interpretation all the time." [p. 179]

The second point is made as a contrast to Waugh's writing.

I love the title of his autobiography!

The quote on schools and prisons is a gem.

I will try to find Vile Bodies. Also Scoop.

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 6 Lives in Letters: Kingsley & Martin Amis

no notes

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 7 Henry James & the Movies

• "Henry James was supremely a novelist of consciousness. Consciousness was his subject: how individuals privately interpret the world, and often get it wrong; how the minds of sensitive, intelligent individuals are forever analyzing, interpreting, anticipating, suspecting, and questioning their own motives and those of others. ... consciousness of this kind, which is self-consciousness..." [p. 202]

I will try to find The Portrait of a Lady. I continue to be amazed at what I haven't read! The Lodge book is a good place to find some suggestions.

I did not find the remaining chapters to merit additional notes.

Psychology Index