Digital Overtone

One of tremendous difficulties of writing about literature is the necessity to make a fundamental assumption that, as per the nature of assumptions, may or may not be true and, in the case of this weblog, is probably false. When I write about a book, as I hope soon to do, I must assume that you have already read it, that certain background information will be at your disposal, that I won’t be giving away any important plot points, and, more to the point, that I don’t need to give a plot summary but can focus my attention on the finer analytical points that spark my interest. While as an academic exercise this is not an important consideration–I will have, indeed, read the books I plan to write about–it does not make for good public writing for one to forget his audience, or to ignore significant portions of it.

This caveat does not exist, obviously, in film, music, or academic book reviews in the same way it does for the way I intend to write about literature. That is, the ultimate goal of a film review is nearly always hermeneutical in nature, an interpretative consideration of The Plot(tm) and Character Relationships(tm). The goal of a music review is to pass judgment on a specific performance of specific work, be it new or old, or to pass judgment on the work itself independently of the performance, either of which are theoretically easily at your disposal (as with recorded music) or absolutely outside your reach (as withh non-recorded concerts). Ultimately, the function of a standard book review, whether the subject is a work of fiction or not, is to familiarize the reader in a general way with the literary, narrative and thematic content of the book at hand and finally to make a judgment about its quality or usefulness, not to theorize about that content in any meaningful way. What I intend to do here on Digital Overtone is precisely the opposite: theorize meaningfully about specific content and assume you are already familiar with it.

Unless I can be remarkably concise and synthetic, and provide a prodigious quantity of quotations, this will be, regrettably, a great obstacle to the type of concrete, meaningful dialogue these reflections can generate for anyone who isn’t familiar with the text. Abstraction and free-association are welcome and, on the whole, entirely possible. Alternatively, for the Facebook-enabled among you, I may point you to a recently discovered group: “How to talk about books that you haven’t read”:http://facebook.com/group.php?gid=2245033972.

Since this fundamental assumption that you have read will be largely false, and I do not have the time or patience to undertake broad, synthetic plot summaries, the best I can hope for is that either you will not understand sufficiently what I have written, having not read the novel, to realize that I am giving away important information, or that I will write such interesting things that you will forgive me and become inspired to read the novels yourself. I will highly prefer the latter, but am, graciously, willing to settle for either.

Posted by Kyle / criticism and literature and meta