Welcome to the blog for the Intellect Journal Book 2.0. We’ve been going since 2011 but we’ve been on a blog hiatus which we’re aiming to rectify right now. If you’d like to take a look at some of the early post they are archived here: https://booktwopointzero.blogspot.com/.
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It’s taken a while but we’ve finally made it! We’re very excited about this special issue which revisits the essential questions driving the ethos of this journal and is now available from Intellect’s website for purchase (see below for link). Within its rather (we think) beautifully bound and illustrated pages you will find a range of fascinating essays responding to current research into intersections between traditional book technology and the digital. Here’s an excerpt from our editorial to, hopefully, whet your appetite.
In 2020 we find ourselves beyond traditional considerations of the book and digital technologies as opposites, but rather see clearly how they now occupy a richly evolving intersection of multidisciplinary ideas, forms and practices drawn from both camps. Framed together as they are in this special tenth anniversary issue of Book 2.0, new definitions of what a book can be and what a digitally platformed narrative can be, are expounded, and new understandings of their potential deepened, in this varied and exciting collection. Authored by scholars, practitioners, editors and publishers, the articles, features and interviews curated here ask what it is that traditionally produced books afford digitally driven practices of writing, reading, publishing and distribution? And vice versa.
With contributions from UK based and international researchers and practitioners, this issue represents a small but significant portion of the work currently being undertaken in this field.
Taken in their entirety, these articles and interviews show how the place where bookish and literary practices meets technology provides a deep well of possibilities for authors, especially for those seeking to extend their practice across mediums. At the same time, readers engaging with these points of intersection have been evolving, developing the fluency required by these new literacies, often drawing on literacies developed over centuries if not millennia. It is certainly an exciting time to be working and thinking at the intersection of these practices – a time and place that becomes richer, more rewarding, as our knowledge of the interconnected practices of both bookish things and technology continues to expand.
We very hope you’ll be moved to take a dip into the covers – and do let us know what you think. We’re also always interested to hear from potential contributors with regards to ideas for articles or even special issues, as a guest editor, for instance. So do get in touch via our pages on the Intellect website or directly: sarah.gibsonyates@aru.ac.uk
Happy reading!
Harold Bloom, who died on October 14 aged 90, was a man blessed with a prodigious memory and an insatiable appetite for reading and a passion for teaching great literature. Not for Bloom the fashionable, the meretricious or (to take his own term) the resentful. He devoted his life to reading and re-reading to the Western canon – that succession of great work which began with Homer and for Bloom came right up to the present with the novels of Thomas Pynchon and the poetry of Thylias Moss, one of a number of African-American poets he admired and championed[1] – and sharing his perceptions, insights and intuitions with as many readers as possible. It was due to his dedication to the canon that Bloom was accused by many of his critics of being an elitist. But this characterisation was true only in so far as he believed that some literature was undeniably superior to some other; he was never a believer in exclusivity (which is, of course, the opposite of elitism, but often what is understood when an accusation of elitism is made) for though his arguments might be complex and sophisticated, he wrote with a jargon-free clarity which is sadly rare in contemporary literary criticism. Bloom stated that his books might provoke his students and his fellow scholars, but their true audience were what was once referred to as ‘common readers’ or as he put it:
those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctively reach for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J.K.Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the internet.[2]
Bloom grew up in a family of orthodox Jewish immigrants. His father came to America from Russia, his mother from what is now Belarus. His parents spoke only Yiddish, and Bloom didn’t learn English until he was six years old, by which time he was already reading Yiddish and Hebrew. He taught himself English from such works as the prophetic books of William Blake which, as he explained to numerous interviewers, which resulted in his rather idiosyncratic way of speaking. As a very young child he discovered, or (as he would have described it) fell in love with and by his early teens had memorized thousands of lines English and American poetry. Bloom knew by heart (in all senses of the phrase) and throughout his life would quite from the complete works of Shakespeare, the poems of Blake, Browning, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman and Wordsworth and the whole of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Those writers and their work, along with the novels of (among others) Cervantes, Jane Austin, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and James Joyce, and of course what he always referred to as ‘the Hebrew Bible’, formed the cornerstones of the canon to which he was devoted, and whose life forces and the processes by which it persisted dominated Bloom’s private thinking and public talking and writing throughout his career.
For Bloom, ‘influence’ – in the archaic sense of ‘flow into’ (as ‘breathe’ is to ‘inspiration’) as much as it’s more commonly understood meaning of to profoundly effect change – was the crucial process in the creation and succession of the great canon of Western literature and which he tried to explain in The Anxiety of Influence (1973; 1997) and The Anatomy of Influence (2011). Many readers and critics read Bloom as proposing some simple kind of Freudian Oedipal rivalry between the antecedent writer and his or her successor. Wrong, said Bloom. As he tried to explain in a somewhat exasperated preface to the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence:
influence anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem or essay. The anxiety may or may not be internalized by the later writer depending upon temperament and circumstances, yet that hardly matters: the strong poem is the achieved anxiety. ‘Influence’ is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships – imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological – all of them ultimately defensive in their nature. What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation I call ‘poetic misprision’.[3]
The quartet of poets who first as a child and then became the cornerstones of his intellectual life, constantly inspiring him, were Blake, Hart Crane, Whitman and Shakespeare; there was also a triumvirate of great readers whose influence helped shape his reading in such works of popular criticism as The Anxiety of Influence (1973; 1997) , The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998): Samuel Johnson, Emerson and Hazlitt. And from reading them he developed his conviction that the effects or consequences of reading were personal and not social; he deplored the fact that in universities, where he spent most of his adult life teaching[4]:
reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper senses of the aesthetics of pleasure. Opening yourself to a direct confrontation with Shakespeare at his strongest, as in King Lear, is never an easy pleasure, whether in youth or age, and yet not to read King Lear fully (which means without ideological expectations) is to be cognitively as well as aesthetically defrauded.[5]
This was the sort of comment which placed him in strong opposition to what he called ‘the School of Resentment’ in The Western Canon – by which he meant the teaching in English departments of a blend of Marxist, feminist and post-colonial theory – much of it based on readings of the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu – which Bloom feared would destroy the Western canon by replacing works whose excellence had been tested over years – and in many cases over centuries – with what were by any measure inferior contemporary writing but which was seen as ‘validating’ the experience of the reader – if the reader were a member of what might be considered an ethnic or other minority – and was therefore ‘empowering’. Bloom’s response was terse:
[I]f you believe that all value ascribed to poems or plays or novels and stories is simply a mystification in the service of the ruling class, then why should you read at all…? The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.[6]
In his essay An Elegy for The Canon[7] Bloom is scornful of such leftist aims: ‘To read in the service of any ideology is not,’ he declares, ‘in my judgement, to read at all.’ However, he gives no comfort to neoconservatives either. He continues:
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and
how to endure ourselves [….] Reading deeply in the canon will not make one a
better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. All that the
Western Canon can bring is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude
whose final form in one’s confirmation with one’s own mortality.[8]
The subtitle of Bloom’s The of Influence is ‘Literature as a way of life’, and for Bloom it undoubtedly was in every sense: it was his way of life as a teacher and critic; literature shaped the way he lived in the more general and profound sense of being what made him self-aware, self-questioning and reflective (the effects of literature he consistently recommended to others); and it was a living thing – a canon that for him was constantly growing and developing through the dialectical process of ‘influence’ that he described.
He was undoubtedly combative, but he lived through times in which the comparatively new academic discipline of English studies (the English School at Oxford hadn’t been founded until 1893, and in Cambridge not until 1917) was going through a painful series of self-examinations and internal struggles to define its methods and purpose, and specifically what should be read and why – struggles which continue. Bloom himself was absolutely clear on the purposes of reading: for personal pleasure and essential to the discovery of self
In a moving personal tribute, Prof. David Jaffe of Syracuse University and one of Harold Bloom’s graduate students at NYU, concluded: ‘Bloom fought the good fight. It’s not over yet.’[9] Indeed, it is not, and there is still everything to fight for. But let the last words be Bloom’s:
I continue to write because of the Stevensian hope that the voice that is great within
us will rise up to answer the voice of Walt Whitman or the thousands of voices
invented by Shakespeare. to my students and the readers I will never meet I keep
urging the work of the reader’s sublime: confront only the writers who are capable
of
giving you a sense of something ever more about to be.[10]
[1] Other African American poets Bloom greatly admired were Jay Wright and the proto-laureate Robert Hayden. He was however roundly criticised for being insufficiently enthusiastic about Maya Angelou.
[2] Harold Bloom (2011) The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. London: Bloomsbury: 8.
[3] Harold Bloom (1997) The Anxiety of Influence: a throw of poetry, second edition. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press: xxiii.
[4] Bloom was Sterling Professor Humanities at Yale – where he taught from 1955 to his death – and from 1988-2004 Berg Professor of English at New York University. He gave his last Yale class, by video link, only four days before he died.
[5] Harold Bloom (2002) How To Read and Why. London: Fourth Estate: 22-23.
[6] Quoted in Casey Haskins (2013)’The Myth of the Autonomy Faultline in Aesthetics’ in Owen Hulatt Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy. London: Bloomsbury :119.
[7] in Lee Morrissey (ed) (2005) Debating the Canon: a reader from Addison to Nafisi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 241-258.
[8] Morrissey (2005): 250
[9] https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/292633/harold-bloom-2 [accessed 19 October 2019]
[10] Harold Bloom (2011) The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. London: Bloomsbury: 16.
The present issue of Book 2.0 (9.1&2) is a special double issue marking the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages jointly edited by Mick Gowar, Principal Editor of Book 2.0 and linguistic anthropologist Prof. Mark Turin of the University of British Columbia, who also co-edited issue 1 & 2, vol.4of Book 2.0 on Digital Humanities.
Tibetan anthropologist Bendi Tso writes about the efforts currently underway to preserve and revitalize Shépa, a collection of traditional oral wisdom in the Chone language. Anthropologist Pasang Yangjee Sherpa writes about efforts to maintain Sherpa languages and cultural traditions by and for the Sherpa community in New York, and especially the importance of Kyidugs – cultural and educational centres – for both preserving languages and cultures and helping to ensure that they remain vibrant and current.
Victoria Bouvier is a Michif writer and scholar, and gives a personal account of how she has reconnected – partly through her academic work – with her Michif-Metis language and holistic way of life. Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw writer Lucy Hemphill contributes a dual-language story for young children, in which a child, helped by her mother, gathers berries and language. With linguist Daisy Rosenblum, she then reflects on the book and how it and similar children’s books might contribute to the revitalization of a language.
Anthropologist Patrick Dowd writes about the challenges involved in creating and publishing a collaborative story book for children in the Ladakhi language. Publisher Bidur Dangol tells editor Mark Turin about his long career as a publisher and bookseller in Nepal, and the changes he has witnessed and on occasion has been instrumental in effecting.
Maori information technology scholar Spencer Lilley reflects on the contribution that libraries can make to language revitalization, especially for younger speakers. Daniel Bögre Udell and Kristen Tcherneshoff of Wikitongues put forward the case for the Internet offering a unique means for both documenting and helping to revive Indigenous and endangered languages and cultures.
Michael Wilson contributes an article on the work of Francois-Marie Luzel, the Breton speaker, collector of stories and scholar, and his own translation of the Breton tale Jannick aux deux sous (Tuppenny Jack) which was collected by Luzel.
Scholar and poet Sienna Craig addresses complex questions of loss, ageing, friendship and responsibility in her piece Letters for Mother. Khasi scholar and poet Janet Hujon investigates the decolonizing potential of translation and storytelling.
The issue concludes with a short article and two book reviews. Julia Schillo and Mark Turin explore a selection of recent children’s books created by Indigenous writers and illustrators that make use of the Cree language in creative and innovative ways. Tom Ue, writes about the latest volume of Louis Cha’s monumental multi-volume, chivalric martial arts masterwork Legends of the Condor Heroes. Vayu Naidu reviews Rita Chowdhury’s Chinatown Days, a novel about the plight of Assamese Chinese indentured workers.
Welcome to the relaunch of our Book 2.o blog. You’ll find posts sharing ideas, discussions, reviews about all things connected to the theme of our journal Book 2.0. We have been on a bit of a hiatus but we’re back, so please follow, subscribe and tag along. We’d also love to hear from you. Look our for our contributors calls. You can find an archive of our early blog here: https://booktwopointzero.blogspot.com/.
Book 2.0 Journal 