This collection serves as an introduction to reading non-fiction about fiction. Video essays and streamer-critics are currently in vogue, but translating such trends into the long and exciting history of literary non-fiction has been less successful. This is a shame: it was once recognised that good writers would produce both fiction and non-fiction, and that enjoyers of the former would include some of the latter in any balanced diet.
The assumption is often that such reading is impossible in our fast-paced modern society. After all, reading non-fiction is work. Maybe some turbonerds and professors can waste their time with such luxuries, but nothing like that could belong in the world of recreational reading embraced by the contemporary market.
Not so! Back before the hellsites that we call social media, non-fiction reading was the starting point for the human needs of community and discussion around books. Many of the world's most famous culture magazines were originally focused around exactly this kind of service. Reading fiction is not just the immediate process of reading a novel: Afterwards comes the far longer process of integrating the novel into your brain more deeply. You reminisce on its content, meditate on its themes, re-live the experiences of its characters, and consider what the whole experience meant to you.
The worst way to fulfill this impulse is to shovel your raw—tender, virginal—first impressions out into the dark abyss of social media, only to receive a total feeling of emptiness in return. But non-fiction is a place where you can go through a more total version of this process and walk away satisfied. It allows you to read the detailed thoughts of other readers, consider your own experiences, and synthesise a more concrete viewpoint on the nature of literature and what it has meant to you. It also allows you to encounter ideas you have never considered before, and place your reading into interesting contexts such as politics, history, and methodologies from other artforms.
This collection will allow you to do exactly this. You will encounter various excerpts from some of the most interesting critical and analytical readers of literature. I cannot promise that every piece here will be about a story that you are already familiar with. After all, if you want such analysis of currently popular stuff such as weird Japanese pop culture, the main blog should hopefully scratch that itch. Instead, the stuff provided here will be about all sorts of stories, and will prompt you to think about your own favourite stories in a general sense, and also how the craft itself works.
This page is a work in process. More content is on the way, please keep an eye out.
I think it best to start with something familiar. All around the world, millions of students learn subjects with the reliable old formula of a professor in a classroom giving a lecture. Of course, there are problems with this method. They tend to be extremely general, and just listening to someone talk cannot serve as a replacement for actually learning the content. But it is a great starting point.
This course, from one of the best literature deparatments in the world, will use 26 lectures to cover all of the major strains of Western literary theory. If you have been to university and are used to listening to lectures, this is going to be a pretty good introduction to the world of non-fiction literature, if a little broad:
Ian Watt was one of the best literary historians of the modern age. His The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding served as a kind of textbook on the history of the novel for decades. This essay doubles as the introductory chapter of that book. It covers the early history of the novel, and the importance of the philosophical concepts of realism and subjectivity.
This is the defining work of Russian formalism. Rather than being about any particular works or authors, it is about the process of reading itself. It considers the differences between "literature" and language more broadly, and attempts to understand the techniques that art uses to intrigue us.