On Thursday September 22 from 3-4 the Literatures and Languages Library will celebrate the opening of its new space in room 200 and the opening of its Classics Library Collection in room 225. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

As the Literatures and Languages Library prepares to celebrate 200-year anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, we delight in the news that an unknown poem written around the time she authored Jane Eyre was recently discovered. It will enrich the already remarkable collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum of Haworth, England, being  the last addition to the Brontë juvenilia involving Charlotte, their brother Branwell, and their mother, the owner of the book in which the letter was found carefully folded.

Known as Currer Bell, Charlotte penned many poems, which she and her sisters published in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), that at the time it sold only two copies. This newly discovered poem, like her entire work, makes us ponder whether to treat her creation through the lens of the personal or to treat women writers the way they were treated by their nineteenth-century contemporaries in an impersonal manner. As Columbia Professor Edward Mendelsohn once said, the reader and the critic alike need to get in touch with their own feelings to understand literature. Charlotte’s poems show her beautifully describing interwoven relationships and emotions among a group of people that only a self-introspective nature could observe and feel. Charlotte’s letters edited by Margaret Smith (The letters of Charlotte Brontë : with a selection of letters by family and friends,1995-2004, vol. 1-3, and an Oxford edition of 2007, available in our library) are all about family and friends and they alone will tell us how she would want us to understand her life and her work.

Our library acquired a new biography of the Brontë sisters The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge 2012), in which of particular interest might be Janet Gezari’s chapter on their poetry. To place Charlotte in particular in the context of her family, society, and her work’s chronology, check our library holding, A Brontë Family Chronology by Edward Chitham (Palgrave, 2003).

The Literatures and Languages Library boasts several new additions in our collection on the works on T.S. Elliott: Gabrielle McIntire (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘The Waste Land’ (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: from St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and Allyson Booth, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up (Palgrave: 2015). However, the broad public and scholars alike seem to give special attention to a new edited collection of Eliot’s poetry in two volumes  of remarkable scale and erudition:  T. S. Eliot, The Poems (2015) by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Faber & Faber, 1344 pp.)

 We read in The Guardian an overwhelmingly positive review, considering the volume as the most fully scrutinized text of his poems, and calling it a monumental achievement rightly so. Because what struck the reader immediately is the fact that, as expected, the notes, textual history, and commentaries outweigh the pages devoted to the poems themselves. Check the review at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-review.

T.S. Elliott’s works were annotated anyway despite his express wish that critics not do so. At least Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue published T.S. Eliot’s poems from youth as they were selected by the poet himself. In contrast to the previous scholarship of Eliot’s work focusing on his unorthodox views, Ricks and McCue argue that his poetic art, despite its parsimony, continues to speak across decades into the reader’s present with eminence and collective feel. Not that Eliot’s reputation could ever be maligned given the complex modernity of his poems. As Helen Vendler  mentioned, the mysterious montage, the fragmentation, the incidental symbolism, all mirrored a Western European society broken by the war and reconstruction from 1915 to 1921 when The Waste Land was published (The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, Essays on Poets and Poetry, Harvard, 2015).

Scholars now concern themselves with a new perspective on Eliot’s work, considering the concept of depersonalization inadequate for understanding his poetry and emphasizing instead passion and feelings that abound in most of his work. Ricks and McCue also describe Eliot’s juvenilia poems as containing buried feelings that will resurface in his later poetry.  Thus, shifting the impersonal in his creative acts to the sentimental side in his poems induced a sense of familiarity, strange, enigmatic and full of feelings.

Neil Patrick Harris flits across the screen, and a series of long-familiar film scenes dances beside him. Being, as it is, one of the de rigueur elements of the proceedings, we all know what to expect from the “Hollywood ode to itself” medley with which the Oscars ceremonies often open. Time-worn tropes and images lifted from the studios’ back catalogues will assert the apparently undying ‘magic of the movies.’ But where do these images really come from, you ask? And has Hollywood always been so reverentially cognizant of the immortal value of its past output? Enter Eric Hoyt’s recent work Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries Before Home Video. Hoyt traces the emergence and evolution of the business of film libraries from the 1910s to the 1950s, challenging the assumption that the industry only came to realize the economic value of its vaults with the advent of television. With many parties now scrambling to ascertain the worth, whether commercial or cultural, of digital film libraries, Hoyt’s examination of the first half of the American film industry’s 20^th century sheds a curious light on the shifting perception of film libraries’ “value.”

Holiday reading list season is nigh upon us. Which means that even as finals grind our undergraduates’ souls to a fine powder, and our collective christmas-cookie high slides helplessly into a twitchy, exhausted plateau — relief is on the horizon. A pristine span of weeks lies ahead, in which pleasure reading long-delayed can resume with a vengeance. If you’ve started planning your winter literary escape, you may already have taken a gander at some of the ‘Best of’ lists circulating in the press. There is the ever-reliable New York Times Book Review list of notable books for the year; Slate’s staff recommendations; NPR’s best of; or the Washington Post’s picks. Of course, there’s no law of god or man that says you must accompany your nog with a new release. The Lit & Lang Library will be open through December 23rd, with staff at the ready with their own personal recommendations. Whether you need an antidote to holiday treacle (some Robert Aickman might do the trick), or the season makes you crave something a bit Victorian, LLX is here to assist.

For many in the Anglophone literary community, the debut of a new novel by Jonathan Franzen is a major event. This week, publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux announced that Franzen’s next work, a novel centered on the multi-continental misadventures of a young woman in search of her father, would be released in a year’s time. While fans of Franzen have yet twelve months to savor the anticipation of what publishers say will be a “stylistic departure” for the author, there are already indications of some of the literary history to which Franzen’s work will pay homage. Purity’s eponymous main character goes by the nickname ‘Pip,’ recalling the heroine of Dickens’s Great Expectations –as will come as little surprise to many who have previously spotted Dickens’s influence in Franzen’s work (among whom Harold Bloom might be the most notable, if not the most laudatory, commentator). While Franzen is not infrequently likened to Dickens and to Tolstoy in terms of the world-encompassing reach of his novels’ ambitions, references to his Dickensian streak of “social realism” are something of a refrain in criticism of his work. Whether fan, foe, or indifferent bystander to the Franzen phenom, an opportunity to reacquaint oneself with Dickens should not go unattended. Check out The Interpolated Tales from the Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, or Martin Chuzzlewit for some lesser-known gems.

You likely know him best as the author of such classics as Animal Farm and 1984. George Orwell, whose name is synonymous with those of some of his best known works, was both a novelist and political thinker, and one of the great talents of 20th-century British satire. In an odd move recently, the Orwellian aegis was invoked by the Amazon corporation as part of their response to the publishing group Hachette, with whom they’ve had contractual disputes over e-book pricing since the spring of 2014. Acccused by Hachette of imposing sanctions on the sales of the publisher’s books as a negotiating tactic, Amazon has attempted to portray itself as a benefactor to readers, providing financially-crunched consumers with low e-book prices by cutting the profits of an “elite” European publishing house. Some authors, both Hachette’s own and others, have supported the publisher as defending their livelihood by maintaining non-cut-rate pricing, with nearly a thousand signing an open letter to Amazon’s board of directors calling the ethics of the company’s actions into question. In a perhaps ill-conceived attempt to invoke literary authority while critiquing that of publishers, Amazon’s official response to this letter compares Hachette’s resistance to e-book prices to the reactionary conservatism of Victorian publishing houses faced with the rise of cheap paperbacks–and uses an Orwell quote to do so, writing:

The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme…When a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books — he was wrong about that.

Representatives of the Orwell Estate, literary critics, and others, however, have been quick to point out that the incompleteness of this quote robs it of its intended import. Orwell’s full comment reads as follows: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.” Far from suggesting that paperbacks should actually be suppressed, Orwell’s commentary is clearly meant to be read as ironic.

The words of the great enemy of propaganda seem to have been somewhat distorted in Amazon’s public-relations efforts–which might serve to instruct us all that, regardless of our opinion on this dispute, it’s always a good idea to exercise caution when quoting a master ironist–and moreover, that should one attempt such quotation regardless, it helps to hire a well-compensated writer with competence in literary interpretation.

To discover more about the history of the uses and abuses of Orwell’s writings, see John Rodden’s George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. For more info on proper citation and best practices for integrating sources into your writing, see the Citing Sources LibGuide.

The second annual Pygmalion Literary Festival kicks off this evening. Part of the Pygmalion Festival, the festival features readings and literary events with local and visiting writers and publishers.

UIUC Creative Writing professor Audrey Petty and author Peter Orner will read tonight at Krannert Art Museum at 5:00 PM. The festival, which takes place September 25-28, also includes readings from authors Richard Siken, Jennifer Percy, Jamaal May, Tarfia Faizullah, Alissa Nutting, and more.

All Pygmalion Literary Festival events are free to the public. For a full listing of events, visit the Pygmalion website.

“The semester is coming to a close, and I have a lot of work to do. Why can’t I put this book down?” I ask myself, having spent this last week completely engrossed in G. Willow Wilson’s latest novel, Alif the Unseen, which came out in June 2012. On Sunday, I fell asleep with the book on my pillow.

From the book jacket:

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

This book is an adventure, a veritable tour de mystical force. I cannot help but compare the book to Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods; both require the protagonist and the reader to believe, and belief opens the doors to worlds unseen. Although many may see it as such, this belief is not an exotic dressing for the novel, but a part of the world. To call fire-eyed jinn, the power of words and code, desert car chases, and revolution “mundane” would certainly be wrong, but Wilson treats them as part of the world, and this world’s got them all. Wait, how do you believe in a car chase? That there is hope of escape. In a world of increasing digital state surveillance, this is a powerful hope. It is not an exotic impulse to hope, and believe, and to act on hope and belief.

This is perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of Wilson’s writing, and is impressive for a debut novel. This is without even mentioning her wonderfully crafted characters. It takes a while to warm up to Alif, another unsurprisingly male protagonist, but his struggle with identity is real and worth note. He has personality, convictions, and a capacity to learn. Nearly all of the characters, in fact, show these traits. From the indomitable Dina, Alif’s childhood friend, who invites us to share a space both personal and spiritual, to the jinn Vikram in which Alif sees “a predatory, unnerving humor, like the musing of a leopard in a pen of goats,” G. Willow Wilson urges perspectives into the world.

Alif the Unseen won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. You can find this book in our collection at the Literatures and Languages Library. Click here to view Alif the Unseen in the catalog. Other works by G. Willow Wilson include her graphic novel Cairo (2006), comic series Air (2008-2010), and an autobiographical account in The Butterfly Mosque (2010). Currently Wilson is writing a Ms. Marvel comic series starring an American Muslim teenage shapeshifter.