User:Jahsonic/Momus on meta-reading
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In a 2007 web entry[1], Momus notes on meta-reading:
- "As a student of literature, something you find yourself doing a lot is reading books about books -- narratives which tear through the plot outlines, critical receptions and choicest quotes of other books, giving you some kind of rapid gist or taste of hundreds of titles you'll probably never read. What I've always liked about these books-about-books."
He mentions
- Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 by Malcolm Bradbury and
- Surréalisme et sexualité by Xavière Gauthier
He also mentions the fact that the paratext is often better than the text itself
- "In a weird, inverted way, some of the books which must be most hellish to read in real life, in real time, turn out, in these metabook accounts, to be the most entertaining to read about" (see paratext).
Example of the latter:
This reminds me of the following quote of O. Wilde:
and my own recent research in thematic literary criticism and my earlier praise of secondary literature
Also this brings us to reviews of books we've never read. Stanislaw Lem wrote a few sets of introductions to and reviews of fictional books in such works as A Perfect Vacuum. But Borges was first when he wrote "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain."
Interesting review in the latest Times Literary Supplement by Adrian Tahourdin of 'Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?' by Pierre Bayard.
