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How to Read Better: a Guide to Understanding Fiction

November 20, 2018

book, ignorance, literature, mediocrity, reading, review

I have complained many times on this blog about mediocre fiction. I’ve also complained about the loss of the art of reading. Put simply, the average person has lost the ability to read. Combining the two, we need to realize that, in order to read better fiction, we must also learn how to read better.

In other words, there is a chain of causes and consequences. It goes in a way like this:

As you can see, there is a feedback loop here. Reading a book poorly will cause you to leave some erroneous feedback. That is, it will lead you to either downplay the importance of a high-quality book, or overestimate the merits of a mediocre one.

Subsequently, this will distort the book’s intrinsic value. In a world replete with noise, a mediocre book read by mediocre readers receives far more attention than a higher-quality book misunderstood by its mediocre readers. Inevitably, this facilitates the creation and propagation of mediocre literature, which leads back to poor reading.

It is a very vicious cycle. And, since art imitates life (which imitates art in another vicious cycle), this leads us to societal mediocrity.

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Coincidence and Fate (excerpt from Self Versus Self)

November 14, 2018

Fiction

coincidence, fate, fiction, poetry, self versus self

Some time ago, I told you about my unpublished Self Versus Self project. It is a literary project comprised of a literary-fiction novel and a narrative poem. It will remain unpublished, at least for the foreseeable future, due to its experimental nature. Its central theme revolves around coincidence and fate, and whether one can avoid them, adapt to them, or manipulate them.

Parenthetically, those interested in a more academic treatise of the issue, can find a short excerpt in my article on Frankenstein.

In today’s article, I’m using an excerpt from the narrative poem to talk a bit about fate and coincidence. Interestingly enough, the story is true and indeed occurred to my own late grandfather, exactly as it is portrayed.

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Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era

November 7, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, time, Victorian

Note: the following article on time in the Victorian era is a modified excerpt (pp. 29-35) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era: Changing the Scientific Paradigm

Theorizing Time in the Victorian era changed due to a series of scientific breakthroughs. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, written in the early 1830s, as well as Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, forced a reevaluation of history, suggesting the past had to be reconsidered.

In addition, the mid-century discovery of the second law of thermodynamics added further anxiety in relation to history and the future.

It was interpreted to imply the extinction of human life due to the exhaustion of usable energy – the so-called heat death of the universe. Suddenly, the existing definition, meaning, and destination of human existence seemed to be lacking. A dark, unfathomable past lay on the one side, while a rather ominous and equally uncertain future lay on the other.

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