supergee: (motto)
Arthur D. Hlavaty ([personal profile] supergee) wrote2011-08-09 07:34 am

Sutherland redux

More from How Literature Works, by John Sutherland

* TS Eliot made his infamous remark about freethinking Jews after World War II [1934: After Strange Gods]

* Paul de Man was a "neo-Nazi" [he lived under Nazi rule and stopped sucking up to them after they lost]

* "Uncle Tom was a "deadly insult" between African Americans in 1964 [deadly?]

* "The canon's central membership (Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, for example) is fixed for long periods" [Woolf has been canonical for less than 50 years]

* The Handmaid's Tale won the Hugo and the Nebula. [It did appear on the Nebula ballot, losing to Orson Scott Card, which I would hate to think was symbolic of the field.]

* The 1960s coincided with the paperback revolution [10-20 years after the paperback revolution]

* "Oddly no successful defense of Fanny Hill has ever been mounted." [He said that last word; I didn't. In the UK perhaps, but in Memoirs vs. Massachusetts (1966), Memoirs won.]

* J.T. LeRoy wrote under the false identity of "Laura Albert." [vice versa]

Doesn't the Oxford University Press have people to check these things?
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)

[personal profile] oursin 2011-08-09 11:51 am (UTC)(link)
Paperback revolution was 1930s - Penguin Books. He should so know that.
laughingrat: Appears to be Basil Rathbone as Holmes. (Sherlock Holmes)

[personal profile] laughingrat 2011-08-09 12:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow, that's pretty terrible.