Sunday, November 21, 2004

I found a number of New and Practical Criticism books today, which isn't surprising as Marshall McLuhan brought the tradition to SLU when he taught here. They include 3 books by F.R. Leavis, which also isn't surprising considering that Leavis was McLuhan's teacher. What is interesting is that while books by Cleanth Brooks, Wayne Booth, T.S. Eliot, and I.A. Richards all have annotations and/or bookmarks in them, the Leavis books are unmarked.

Ong seems to have really liked Fouler's Linguistics and the Novel (part of the Routledge's New Accents series which also published Orality & Literacy) and he appears to have taught with it at least once.

I also came across Ong's heavily annotated edition of Klæber's Beowulf, the standard scholarly edition that I used inthe Beowulf class I took with Dr. Shippey.

And there's an interesting connection between the first and last item above. The reason I'm amused by the fact Ong hasn't annotated the Leavis books mainly stems from Shippey's reports of Leavis as an instructor: Shippey found Leavis so bad he went into philology/Medieval Studies track because it was the one section of the department at Cambridge that Leavis didn't have influence over.

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