Writerly M-Type Thing

[dawn_felagund]

We got some of the snow from the storm to the south of us, just enough that schools were two hours delayed this morning. This meant that I missed teaching first and second periods, which were fully planned. Tomorrow is a half-day, so I only have to teach first and second periods. Which means that this is one of those rare moments in my life when I

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It's true and so upsetting

[heartofoshun]

I will probably post this somewhere else also. But I got annoyed thinking about that prejudice again, that I just took ten minutes and listed a very few of my well-respected first person novels as quickly as I could.

A Few Great first person novels (in no particular order):

The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Remains of the Day (sorry, forgot the author--great book)
I specialized in Henry James for a while early in my academic years- so The Ambassadors
How about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (not only first person but that unpopular form, A Novella!)
Someone else mentioned somewhere recently, maybe on my LJ comments on this topic, Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy (fantastic unreliable narrator!); she also did others which I liked even better in the first person like Mask of Apollo and The Last of the Wine (greatly influenced my Maitimo and Findekano in both style and content)
Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (if not great, then very, very good)
Great Expectations and David Copperfield
I cannot forget Marcel Proust! Crap I liked it so much that I read hundreds of pages of it in French (a labor of love; although most of it in translation-not only did he write in first person, but the sentences long enough to rival Faulkner, if not surpass him. So powerful that every time I eat one of those tiny Mexican sponge cakes (which are endemic to this neighborhood) I think of Remembrance of Things Past and him eating Madelines).
Moby Dick!! Who doesn’t know the first line: "Call me Ishmael.”

Re: It's true and so upsetting

[dawn_felagund]

Clearly, the body of English literature (and French!) would be better if those works had been rejected right off the bat simply for being done in first person.