Recent Reading
I've been wanting to keep a better log of my occasional reading (including some of my research for teaching) so I want to start experimenting with this blog. This list is mostly books I've started or read a large portion of towards the end of August, beyond primary teaching texts. I am doing a lot of teaching outside my research areas this semester, so I've had to spend a lot of time preparing, which on the whole has been a lot of fun.
Who Wrote the Bible - Richard Freeman
This is an account of the primary evidence for what's known as the "Documentary Thesis" of Biblical composition. I am really trying to focus my the early weeks of my Bible as Literature on the world that produced the Bible. This is something of a traditional historicist impulse on my part (what does the Bible say about the society that produced it?) but I think it also response to the main challenge of teaching the Bible: the fact that it a unique text in terms of previous student exposure and personal interpretations. I'm hoping that thinking about the process of composition (as well as some of the Near Eastern Myths that informed the Bible-had a great day on Marduk and Tiamat in Bablyonian myth this week) displaces those preconceptions just a little early on. I am mostly focusing on the Documentary Thesis, although it represents somewhat dated scholarship, because it allows us to ask certain questions that are inevitable when reading the first five books of the Bible with a solid framework for providing some answers, such as why are there multiple versions of the same story with contradictions, why are there multiple names for God? In the classroom you can move right from those interpretative problems in the text to theories about who wrote these parts, when they lived, what they are concerned with, etc... Freeman has been a great resource for this, although the book is introductory, and I will need to go a little deeper as the semester progresses.
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours - Gregory Nagy
This is part of research preparing for teaching The Iliad in the next few weeks. Nagy is a classicist at Harvard and this book is a presentation of a class he has been teaching for decades, but its a very compelling read and delves into philological issues much deeper than you might expect from an introductory text. Its going to be a challenge to cover The Iliad in a compelling way in three weeks, particularly as an outsider to Classics. This book is one of the better guides I've come across so far, and even a few chapters in I'm feeling like I have a much firmer grasp on ideas like "kleos" (glory) and "hora" (timeliness) than I had before.
Literature in the Making - Nancy Glazener
Extremely useful text about the codification of modern post-romantic ideas of the realm of literature in C19 American book marketplace. Does a great job bringing together a history of aesthetic theorizations with attention to publishers and material culture. At times it can feel like a very broad story, but it helps place a lot of debates you find in C19 texts about their relationship with a set of key aesthetic concepts. I also enjoy her more polemical point about the narrowing of resources to discussing literature that came with academic professionalization at the end of C19. Middle Passage- Charles Johnson A major book that I somehow haven't read until now. It was on older syllabi for the Intro to Humanities course I have been teaching, and although I replaced it with Krik?Krak! by Edwidge Danticat in part to make sure there was a woman writer on an otherwise very male heavy classically canonical syllabus, its still a great important work and I would love to teach it sometime.
On Marx - Althusser
Picked this up again as a chaser after the grand ideological apparatus of the party conventions towards the end of the summer. Still a great theorization of key concepts, and its much more readable than I remembered.
I've also been reading various comics and enjoying that a lot. Finding it to be a better mental cool-down at the end of the day than watching TV, keeps my mind used to reading and ready to go the next morning. Recent reads: Blankets by Craig Thompson, the original Secret Wars run, Preacher by Garth Ennis, and just started in on Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Also been following the ongoing runs of The Vision, Black Panther, Saga, and Sex Criminals.
