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deathtocapslockSo in my daily internet browsing I stumbled upon a link to an excellent little essay by Twain on the subject of literary offenses - Fenimore Cooper's, in this particular case, but helpful in diagnosing such in other authors too no doubt. Many of the specific offenses he names were, indeed, quite familiar, as I'm sure any reader of this comm would find. So I started thinking that perhaps we need to...update the essay a little (with due apologies to Mark Twain). But I don't want to do it by myself - it's so much more fun to shred authors together, no? So how would people feel about a little impromptu project, "JK Rowling's Literary Offenses," eh? I'm sure someone here has something to say on the subject, JKR-worshippers that we all are..... ;)
As a taste of the delightful bloodletting waiting for you at the link, have a few bits:
"[The rules of literary art] require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale [by Cooper] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together."
"We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's books "reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention." As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless you heart, Cooper hadn't any more invention than a horse; and don't mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes- horse."
As a taste of the delightful bloodletting waiting for you at the link, have a few bits:
"[The rules of literary art] require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale [by Cooper] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together."
"We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's books "reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention." As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless you heart, Cooper hadn't any more invention than a horse; and don't mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes- horse."
"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language."
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Date: 2013-08-29 09:16 pm (UTC)That really frosts me! The designated heroes never grew up. In fact, Gryffindors never grow up, it seems.
This reminds me of when a newspaper (the Globe and Mail, I think) declared DH to be the Book of the Decade back in 2010. It wasn't - it was the Marketing Event of the Decade. There's a big difference there.