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Authors Talk: A Discussion with Jessica Titone

May 16, 2018

author, fiction, interview, Jessica Titone, literature, writing

A Discussion with Jessica Titone: Introduction

This article is a part of a new series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Jessica Titone, author of Watermarked, a fine example of modern literary fiction (you can read my review of Watermarked here). A detailed list of useful links to Jessica Titone’s work can be found at the end of this article.

A Discussion with Jessica Titone: General

Chris Angelis: Let’s first hear a couple of words about you as an author. Give us some background information: what kind of books do you write, for how long have you been a writer, and anything else you think readers would find interesting.

Jessica Titone: I’m contemporary fiction writer by nature, currently dipping my toes in to test the waters of YA Fantasy. If reading were a sport, I would do it competitively, but I’m the slowest writer in the entire world. Probably because I suffer from rampant perfectionism.

I’ve been a writer forever. It’s always been second nature for me.
– Jessica Titone

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Religion in A Christmas Carol

May 15, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic, literature, religion

Note: the following article on religion in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 112-115) 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.

You can also find an article about religion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in A Christmas Carol: a remarkably Secular Affair

Although religion in A Christmas Carol is mostly absent, the text still creates a framework of otherness based on Scrooge’s background and, in particular, his possible Jewishness. His occupation as a moneylender and the fact that he does not celebrate Christmas would have been obvious characteristic markers of Jewish origins for that time. Such stereotypes were not uncommon in Dickens’s works at large.

In Oliver Twist, the character of Fagin is referred to as “the Jew” almost three hundred times and the novel abounds in descriptions “that directly link him to Judas Iscariot and even Satan” (Muller 2003, xxvii), with connotations of the classic depiction of the Wandering Jew also present (Felsenstein 1995, 241). The process of shifting from a racially motivated wariness – if not outright hostility – to an absolution has been suggested to exist within Dickens’s works, although not without controversy, as Grossman argues:

[T]his understanding of Dickens’ Jews elides how Dickens’ narrators engage the problem of narrating this racial and religious other. This elision has most obviously resulted in an institutionalized disregard for Dickens’ final 1867 revision of Oliver Twist, in which he only selectively deleted the term “the Jew”. (1996, 37; emphasis in the original)

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The Future of Poetry (and why It Is Bleak)

May 13, 2018

Writing

literature, mediocrity, poetry, writing

Matthew Arnold has made a famous, as-of-yet-unfulfilled prediction regarding the future of poetry.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.

What Matthew Arnold failed to take into consideration was the paralyzing mediocrity that has overwhelmed this world. Not only has poetry not eclipsed religion (perhaps the term ‘dogma’ is easier to grasp in this context), but it has indeed become virtually extinct itself. The future of poetry looks grim, because the future of humanity looks grim itself.

the future of poetry — The future of poetry is bleak in a world of mediocrity

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