The Core Blog

Robert McCrum at The Guardian writes appreciatively of a figure whose kind is desperately wanting in our present time, W.E.B. Du Bois; and he rightly places him in the activist tradition whose standard bearer, Barack Obama, has been replaced by somebody who we can barely stand, representing the opposing tradition. It is not only for its literary merit, then, thatThe Souls of Black Folk, is considered by the folks at The Guardian as being among the top 100 non-fiction books of all time, but also for the activist function it has served in being one of the foundational texts of the civil rights movement.

WEB Du Bois: much of his rhetorical power came from knowledge of the King James Bible. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Du Bois, once one of Americas greatest social activists, has become sadly neglected, but his work was far ahead of its time. The ideas expressed here not only inspired the renewed black consciousness of the 1960s, exemplified by the differing careers of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also contributed to establishing The Souls of Black Folk as a founding text of the US civil rights movement. This is at once a work of advocacy, rhetoric and literature, a vital thread in the tapestry of American prose. In the acclaimed 2016 novel Home going by Yaa Gyasi, the narrator describes Sonny reading The Souls of Black Folk in prison: Hed read it four times already, and he still wasnt tired of it. It reaffirmed for him the purpose of his being there, on an iron bench, in an iron cell. Every time he felt the futility of his work for the NAACP, hed finger the well-worn pages, and it would strengthen his resolve. This is how classics of this calibre work their way into the literary bloodstream.

We look to the past for consolation and inspiration. Dubois' service is therefore one to humanity, only one part of which is the literature that is read for its own sake and sometimes even as agitation. Combining the force of his rhetoric with the justice of his cause, DuBois nobly reminds some of us cloistered in the ivory towers just how dark things used to be out there, and invites us to take a peek yet once again, even if itmeans having to step down and lose a peak of another kind. MLK, BLM...History seems to have a penchant forword-play just as it does rhyme.

Read the full post at The Guardian

(It is a felicity that the elision in the title allows one to pronounce it as 'Whatever persuasion', so that it suggests at once something peculiar about Austen but also about ourselves, making it then something not peculiar but universal, acknowledged or not).Dr. Looser (LOE-sir) at the TLS has very likely bemused some readers in her latest article by turning into adverbs words that really must be left as adjectives: 'conjecturally', 'conjugally', 'unblinkingly', 'glancingly'. It is a nice surprise, but one that we don't understand. The effect is to have the reader come away with the sense of having read something cringingly. Her purpose was to review two of the latest on Jane Austen. One is a new edition of Mansfield Park, edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch; another is Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly, who tries to radically politicize Austen by rediscovering her as a radical.

Bath Gin, made by the Bath Gin Company The Bath Gin Company. Image for The Times Literary Supplement

The boundaries between fact and fiction in Austen-inspired books are strikingly porous. Of the two books under review here, the ostensible work of literary criticism, Helena Kellys Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, more often resembles a novel, offering readers a copious amount of what Kelly herself dubs truthful fictions. By contrast, the edition of Austens novel, Lynchs annotated Mansfield Park, has been amplified into a significant work of criticism, mostly contained in its jumbo side margins. To make this turnabout even more strange, it is Kellys novelish critical work that employs the bombastic rhetoric of right and wrong, while Lynchs edition gives us, within its helpful concatenation of facts, a more reasonable number of mights and perhapses.

The object of this review was good until Dr. Looser began to compare the two while seeming to be unaware that Lynch was performing the task of an editor and Kelly that of a literary critic. Both editor and critic must imaginatively analyze a text, but differ in the scope and liberty with which they may go about doing so. Dr. Looser does explore some questions worth pondering about the blurring of fact and fiction in Jane Austen.

Read her full review at The TLS