Bick, you wrote, "Sometimes I feel a bit of a Philistine, as my literary knowledge and any depth of appreciation is self taught. I should perhaps read some biographies or critical essays of the authors I find I like!"
To anyone who is considering such collateral reading, I would say that you may do well to avoid a great deal of the critical work published since the 1970s or so, because so much of what's been published since betrays an obsession with race, class, "gender," and the employment of jargon. Freudian psychoanalysis is dead, except in university literary departments, etc. (see Frederick Crews's
Skeptical Engagements, Oxford UP), where Lacan is influential. Here is a link to an award-winning essay on
King Lear. It seems to me something of a travesty, but if you like it you might be quite happy with much academic criticism of the past 30 years or so.
http://www.english.org/sigmatd/pdf/publications/Review14.pdf
As an English professor in a small state university, I make a point of advising my students away from grad school in English because of such stuff. The corruption seems to be fathomless. If they are going to go, the students should take off at least a year to read widely and deeply in the literary masterpieces. This should be delightful (if English is really for them), and, thus equipped, they would be better prepared, if they go to grad school, to recognize occasional flare-ups of worthwhile insights in their theory-pervaded reading then, and also to recognize how rubbishy a lot of it is. A have a colleague who has evidently had the by now traditional indoctrination in theory and I have wondered if literature has happened for her. First, has she read very many of the perennial books, but second has she really been initiated into the love of literature?
As I said (approximately) to one of my brighter students years ago, thinking of the kind of environment universities have become: "So you now love a good book? Welcome to the underground." It is one thing to love good books, to read and reread them ever more perceptively and to experience imaginative formation; it's another to become an adapt deployer of "critical lenses" who has assimilated (rather, been assimilated by) a very familiar type of academic left-wing politics. I emphasize works from various lists of canonical books. I used to mention this to that colleague, who more than once responded not with affection for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, but with remarks about teaching the patriarchal influence on the canon or something like that. This reminds me strongly of the attitude of a hypothetical old American businessman, let's say, to Europe. He stands before some glorious, intricate cathedral, glances at a statue here, a tower there, notices how big the thing is, and muses, "Yeah, you know the Cathlic Church used to scare the poor peasants into giving their money to build these old churches." The beauty, the fascination, the capacity of the church to feed and elevate the imagination -- these remain unknown to him. He gets his picture taken by the cathedral but brings from the experience little that he didn't already think......
I teach a Shakespeare class. Mostly, I think it's good for the students to read as many of the plays as they can manage in the semester. Reading the works themselves, whether Shakespeare or someone else, is almost always a better investment of time than reading commentary, except if there is a need to clear away misleading assumptions. If they are going to read something other than Shakespeare in a Shakespeare course, it might well be a short book about the intellectual background (such as Tillyard's Elizabethan World-Picture) or the way the plays were written and performed (such as S. L. Bethell's very fine Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, which can be read in a couple of days). The students would do well to read standard, and readable, critical commentary such as Dover Wilson, J. Wilson Knight, Derek Traversi, E. E. Stoll, and even good old A. C. Bradley (who is now in black Penguin Classics!) before they ever attempt the raceclassandgender mavens. And if they are going to read them, they ought to be equipped with Brian Vicker's Appropriating Shakespeare and Tom McAlindon's Shakespeare Minus "Theory."
As for Balzac... does one need more than the intro in one's old Penguin Classic? If that?
Bick, your "self-taught" appreciation is probably a much better grounding in genuine literary knowledge and enjoyment than the rubbish emitted by most academic folks in recent times.
Also Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Colonel Chabert, Black sheep. Most of them I don't remember much. Now this thread makes me want to re discover - this time savour - Balzac.
