BOOK PROJECT

I’m working on a book project that might interest readers of my essays on William Faulkner, John Updike, Shelby Foote, and other late greats. The book concerns the ethics of reading in a time of generational upheaval. That is, how do we read writers whose politics and social attitudes belong to a different era? We don’t want to get in the habit of irritably canceling writers we disagree with or our literary canon will be null set. We also don’t want to retreat to a narrow aestheticism that prizes literary form to the exclusion of political and social reality. Writing, after all, asks us to engage with the world. We need an ethics of reading that allows to bring all of ourselves to the page, both the parts of us that delight in style and the parts that want to test a writer’s implicit claims about the way things are.

I am working on a full-length proposal that I am hoping to post. I’d be interested in engaging with your feedback. What are the ways that we are getting this wrong?