Scott Kaufman has an interesting distributed intelligence project. He’s soliciting suggestions for ‘best introductions to’ various standard topics in literary studies. Feel free to contribute. It’s a nice project. Lots of subjects could do with good lists of this sort.
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Scott Eric Kaufman 04.04.06 at 2:05 pm
I should have done this differently: held up Book X as the book to read if one was only going to read one book on a given subject. Then, over the course of many years, I’d collect all the answers to my various provocations and posted them as a completed list . . . which people could then take issue with. But thanks for the link. Hopefully it’ll drum up more interest in my pet project. (One which, for reasons explained elsewhere, I think can be a really important one. What if I know the medievalist at the institution considering me for a position specializes in the C12th renaissance? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pick up a book which’ll 1) inform me as to what that is and 2) which has a scholarly stamp-of-approval as something generally respected by the field?
Hogan 04.04.06 at 3:33 pm
I was gonna say . . .
Anyone who calls American Renaissance an introduction to 19th-century American literature is using the word “introduction” in some sense with which I’m not familiar. But I can see calling it the one book to read if you’re going to read only one book.
And as someone who regularly asks the one-book question (about the French Revolution, the Ottoman Empire, scholasticism, Romanticism . . . ) I see tremendous value in compiling the list. I will watch your future progress with considerable interest.
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