Update (27 Jan 2016): The course, as it stands now, only covers Part One of Don Quixote. I failed to make that clear in my post. Regardless, I'm really enjoying the course and learning quite a bit more about the book!
Update (27 Jan 2016): The course, as it stands now, only covers Part One of Don Quixote. I failed to make that clear in my post. Regardless, I'm really enjoying the course and learning quite a bit more about the book!
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
5 comments:
Dwight - thanks for the heads-up on this. I signed up, as I'm about to start the second half of the book. I may just peruse the videos until the course starts in on the second part, then try to keep pace.
Ah, I should have been clearer...thanks for bringing this to my attention. The course (as it stands now) only covers Part One. Even if that's all it does, you'll get a lot out of it that isn't noted in any edition. Let me know how it...the course and the reading...goes! Oh, and feel free to make fun of my posts in the classroom forums.
Well I already got quite a bit just from the first video - it's always helpful to have some framework. I should have been more attentive to the fact that only part one is covered, but as you note, I'm likely to get a lot of the course regardless. I've yet to wander into the forum, but you may see me there soon enough.
Please add your comments to the posts I make...I'm happy to hear what others think (even when they think I'm full of it). I still have a question posted that hasn't been answered...in the first video, there is a reference to Galdos. So you know I focused on that...but I'm still hoping to find out where the reference was from. Hope to see you there!
For what it's worth, you might be interested the Yale Open Course on the book: Span 300: Cervantes'' Don Quixote. The more you know, and all that...
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