At http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/04/critical-library.html
The National Book Critics Circle regularly posts a list of five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries. We recently heard from writer and critic Richard B. Woodward. Here is what Rick pointed out as worth keeping in your library at all times.


Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature
, edited by Fredson Bowers (1980)

Nabokov is a dangerous writer to emulate. In college I revered his books and sought to imitate his casual majesty until I realized his linguistic or formal brilliance was beyond my reach. As a result, I abandoned any hope of trying to be a novelist myself.

His critical standards toward literature can be no less inhibiting. Periodically I have to banish him from my mind as an icy, out-of-touch aristocrat in order to enjoy in good conscience Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner, and others crushed beneath his weighty judgments. Then, someone will quote him in a review and, remembering the glinting precision of his intelligence, I am forced to bring him back from exile.

These two volumes collect his college lectures from the 1950s on seven works of fiction––Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Walk by Swann’s Place, The Metamorphosis, and Ulysses––and on a select group of Russian writers, not necessarily his favorites. (Dostoevsky and Gorky are included.)

Nabokov’s analytic vocabulary can sound musty as he discusses “themes” and “symbols.” He was unpardonably chauvinistic toward women writers. But his zeal for literature is contagious. Above all he wanted his students to appreciate the array of special effects novelists keep in their bag of tricks.

He was unafraid to throw around the word genius, being one himself.
 
Those who regard themselves as attentive readers should take two of his sample exams. When I totaled my humiliating score, I realized how much of a novel’s detail I ordinarily miss in my haste to finish and arrive at an opinion. In an essay here titled “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” he attacks mundane realism and argues that “a seemingly incongruous detail” always trumps “a seemingly dominant generalization.” Or as he puts it in a more Nabokovian fashion: “I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child, but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.”

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