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"Alternating Current" by Octavio Paz A scintillating thinker and a prescient voice on emerging world culture, Paz reveals himself here as “a man of electrical passions, paradoxical visions, alternating currents of thoughts, and feeling that runs hot but never cold. Learn more | See related books
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You start out wanting to like this author. She has a witty, humorous way with words, a reverence for the written word and a telling grasp of what distinguishes writers of various eras. Of Elizabethan dramatists, she writes, "Theirs is the word coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping." She writes about Classical Greek damatists as one who understands what separates them from all writers who follow: "To understand him," she says of Aeschylus, "is is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words ... for words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray..." For her, the best writing, whether that of a Greek or an Englishman, has a meaning that defies words, a meaning that we percieve in the mind -- without words. Coming down the centuries and pausing to consider Jane Austen, she captures the essential writer in terms that encourage and enlarge: "Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discriminaiton of human values." Along with her interest in the well known (she treats many more than the few mentioned here)she has a teasing regard for near greats and nobodies, whose seldom touched books rest in near oblivion. Of the memoirs of one, Laetitia Pilkington, she writes: "... the dust lies heavy on her tomb ... nobody has read her since early in the last century when a reader ... left off in the middle and marked her place with a faded list of goods and groceries." Nor is it just to have a chuckle that she looks at such relative unknowns, but to give us a look at their pained and frequently bereft lives.Read more ›
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
The Second Common Reader is merely an extension of Woolf's own literary genius as she enters into the minds of authors such as Donne, Hardy, DeFoe and Swift, among others. She uses her "stream of consciousness" literary tool to incorporate the life of the writer into his or her own work. This book is necessary for anyone interested in stream of consciousness writing and criticism. Woolf, once again, never ceases to amaze me.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
In the opening essay in this book Woolf tells us she is writing for the common reader. The common reader is not the critic and not the scholar."He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing."
Woolf then goes on in the subsequent essays to write of Chaucer, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Montaigne, George Eliot, Defoe, Addison, 'Modern Fiction' 'The Lives of the Obscure' ' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights' 'The Russian Point of View'.
She writes with a special kind of insight and artfulness. I especially liked her essay on Montaigne who she sees as one of the few writers who truly makes a portrait of himself, and writes truly of the whole of his experience. She sees him as one who knew not only how to communicate himself but to be himself, who defied convention and ceremony, and prizing contemplation and retirement made a book which was himself.
It can be said that Woolf in a way does the same with these reflections upon others which hold up a mirror to her own masterfully insightful sensibility.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
As background information, I read most of her work starting with her first novel "The Voyage Out" published in 1915, skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop, Night and Day from 1919 - and then read "Jacob's Room," her third, then went on and read "Mrs. Dalloway," her fourth, and next read "To The Lighthouse," etc. Also, I read much of Woolf's non-fiction and set up a Listmania list on amazon.com.
We are the "common readers," as Woolf describes us, we readers of her books. The present book is an informal summary of all literature from the Greeks to Joyce. It is not complete but it is bits and pieces that Woolf thinks are interesting. This is a medium length book about 200 pages long and available free on line at the Gutenberg project. I think her best fiction is "To The Lighthouse" - that is a masterpiece - and her best non-fiction is "A Room of One's Own." I like the Oxford version of the latter published along with "Three Guineas." Also, the present book is almost on par with "A Room of One's Own."
I got interested in Dostoevsky, and read most of his work, so I was interested to read what Woolf might say about him. These two comments from Woolf on Dostoevsky show you what you can expect from the "Common Reader." The two quotes below are from the section on Russian literature.
Comment #1: Her question: it was written in Russian, and is the sense lost in the translation to English?
"Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by "understand".Read more ›
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This item: The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition
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