Gish Jen, author of Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, is the author of four novels, including Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and World and Town.For The Daily Beast she named her favorite lectures on writing, including:
Lectures on LiteratureRead about the other entries on the list.
by Vladimir Nabokov
Take, for example, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. Insisting that “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash,” he flies with serene ecstasy inthe face of academic dogma, caressing instead the details of a work: the routes of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the wax on the dancing slippers of the eponymous heroine in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. “There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius,” he maintains, there is only “the pleasurable shock of artistic truth.” As for whether we agree, exactly, never mind. The lectures and their argument are themselves such a pleasurable shock, we can only be charmed and enlightened.
--Marshal Zeringue
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