(Untitled)

[richenda]

People are saying that HP7 has been "spoiled" by some shop supplying the book early/someone putting extracts on the Net - but how can they be sure that the supposed early supply or the stuff on the net is/are genuine? Methinks it's a deep dark plot

Comments

[smellingbottle]

I agree with you, but rather less generously - I have very little interest in narrative suspense of any kind, and generally don't quite get the obsession with remaining unaware of the ending. I get impatient every year with students who appear to think that I should, in lectures, avoid any reference to the ending of novels or plays on my courses, because that somehow removes the point of reading them. I blame the net, and the concept of 'spoiling' for this. It's a significant choice of term, no? As though once you know, say that Snape turns out to be a reincarnation of Lily Potter, Hagrid's slavering hound is a Horcrux, and Professor Sprout, not Harry, saves the world, the novel itself would be somehow unecessary.

[richenda]

>>>>>I get impatient every year with students who appear to think that I should, in lectures, avoid any reference to the ending of novels or plays on my courses, because that somehow removes the point of reading them

It's many years since I read as a student, but in my day the principal object of those who hadn't read something was to conceal the fact from everyone except close friends - and most especially to conceal the fact from tutors, who had every right to expect that the set authors had been read before the lectures began. Even if you mean references in lectures to books outside those set, I can't begin to imagine a student objecting on those grounds.
I'm old - I'm very old.

[smellingbottle]

I'm afraid that at least in my institution, the pendulum has swung the other way - many of my undergraduates have a horror of looking as though they are trying too hard, and go to great lengths to conceal the amount of work they are doing, on the rare occasions they do any. And certainly the notion of reading the texts before the lecture is regarded as generally eccentric.

[mrs_redboots]

But isn't this actually rather an old phenomenon - it seems to have been current in Lord Peter Wimsey's/Dorothy L Sayers' Oxford!

Nevertheless, they did work; they just pretended not to!

[smellingbottle]

I always mean to read these - I am among the tiny number of those who've only read a single Dorothy L Sayers...

Yes, I know the phenomenon of concealment of one's own efforts isn't new - though I remember being baffled as a newly-arrived Oxford graduate student by undergraduate boasts about all-nighters, as boasting about the amount of work one did seems to have been in the ascendant at the time. I remember reported incidents of mods students leaving their desk light burning near the window for maximum midnight-oil effects, while going to bed in sleep-masks etc. However, it's a step further to regard reading, in advance of the lectures, the set texts for a post-Christmas fiction course, on a reading list you've had since August, as evidence of severe teacher's pet syndrome. Do I sound bitter yet?

[mrs_redboots]

Yes, that would be seriously infuriating!

The journey, not the destination, matters

[oursin]

I do agree about the over-rated value of narrative suspense: because if the writing is any good, suspense in particular episodes should be evoked even after multiple rereads (was it you, or someone else, to whom I recounted the thoughts of a character in a book - I've forgotten the book, but not her thoughts - about reading Emma, or possibly listening to the audio book, and hoping that this time Emma would stop and think before being rude to Miss Bates).

But given that so many people do feel so intensely about this, I think there's something spiteful and malicious about the people who have been posting spoilers in all sorts of places totally unconnected with Potter fandom (loltheorists was one, and also the libraries community, on lj, and in both cases people commented that the post had been extensively cross-posted).

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[richenda]

I now show how little I deserve smellinbottle's compliment by wondering whether the socalled "spoilers" (I haven't seen any of them yet) might actually be part of the publicity hype?
After all, there is n o way of knowing who started this off.

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[smellingbottle]

Oh, I agree. Deliberately attempting a mass ruination of narrative pleasure is indubitably unpleasant - and clearly many people view it as an absolute violation, even if I tend to roll my eyes at that approach to reading. And in my own cabbage-patch, I find student expectations (as expressed in the occasional end of semester questionnaire) that I should not discuss in a lecture, say, the end of Rebecca - 1938, let us remember! - because it constitutes a 'spoiler', absolutely outrageous.

No, I don't think the Emma conversation was with me - though that moment is an extraordinarily good piece of writing, and in some ways Emma's first fall into moral adulthood: other people actually exist, and feel, even the ones you think are a running joke. It's crashing.

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[mrs_redboots]

Am I alone in finding Emma the most irritating of all Austin's heroines? It's the one book I have never succeeded in reading all the way through - she irritates me so much I can't bear it! Even Marianne Dashwood isn't quite so bad.

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[smellingbottle]

Oh, she is maddening. I tend to read her insufferably wrong-headed mis-readings of others as part of the later Austen novels' push to move beyond the more simplistic forms of identification with the heroine that we find in Elizabeth Bennet in P and P, and Elinor Dashwood in S and S. Emma - Austen herself said that in E. she had written a heroine no one but herself would like - and Fanny Price are far more problematic propositions, deluded and priggish respectively. But they make the novels, I think, far more interesting as ensemble pieces - we know Emma misreads everything, so we have to put together a composite moral point of view from lots of the characters (and there's also the fact that she's a kind of self-portrait in terms of making up fictions of romance all over the place?) In MF, despite knowing Fanny is the moral touchstone, we are also attracted to the witty, sexy Crawfords with their amoral ways. Whereas Elizabeth Bennet is witty, sexy, and unproblematically right about everything apart from a misreading of Darcy and

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[mrs_redboots]

And, of course Catherine Morland is so caught up in her trashy bonkbusters that she doesn't really experience real life.... I think I know one or two folk rather like her, now I come to think of it!

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[richenda]

I've only read NA once, and it bored me so much that I don't even own it.
I suppose that I should try again, because I love all the others, so perhaps I missed the humour in NA

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[mrs_redboots]

It was a set book when I was at school, which rather ruined it for me, but I did re-read it a few years ago and found it amusing! Not as funny as Sense and Sensibility, though, which I still think quite the funniest book, even more so than Pride and Prejudice.

Re: The journey, not the destination, matters

[richenda]

Wrongheaded, yes, but I don't find her totally insufferable.
On the occasions when she's openly malicious towards Miss Bates and jane Fairfax, I'm inclined to blame Frank Churchill for rousing her out of her rather tedious life and surroundings. I'm not even very sure that marriage to Knightley will give her the positive stimulation that she needs. I worry a bit about whether she will feel as trapped by that as she did previously.
After all, she has until then (as far as we know) treated the Bates household with reasonable courtesy, and her motivation over Harriet is surely kind in its intention?