The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

by Cecilia Konchar Farr

Overview

Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes, even at family reunions – they are persistently pressed to talk about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I mean when I say a book is "good"? Why do contemporary novels like these, conversations like these, matter to professors of literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and answers their call for more engaged conversations about books. Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess them so differently.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349716470
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	05/19/2018
Series:	American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Edition description:	1st ed. 2016
Pages:	199
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Cecilia Konchar Farr is Professor of English at St. Catherine University, USA.

Table of Contents

Preface: Ransoming a Reading Nation
PART I: THE CRIME
1. Come and Get it
2. Bring Money
PART II: INVESTIGATIONS
3. Reading Lolita at St. Kate's
4. Oprah's Book Club and the Summer of Faulkner
5. Lost in a Chick Lit Austenland
6. What I learned from The (Book) Group
7. Storytelling with Jodi Picoult
8. Re-Reading Rand
9. Writing Wizardry
PART III: THE DEAL
10. Redefining Excellence

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Ulysses Delusion is an engaging discussion of the contemporary literary marketplace and the tastemakers who have framed discussions of literary quality and served as the gatekeepers to popular success in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Konchar Farr's unapologetic championing of the accessible is both ideologically resonant with her thesis and admirable—she has truly produced a popular literary criticism that is both rigorous and readable." - Amy L. Blair, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, USA and author of Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Editorial Reviews

The author provides her readers with a new set of guidelines for judging literary works, specifically novels. … The ‘Ulysses’ Delusion is an ideal model of clear, thoughtful, balanced, witty, and well-written criticism—something I find in extremely short supply these days. … Konchar Farr’s own writing suc­ceeds admirably. This book really is a page-turner.” (Mallory Young, TSWL Tulsa Studies in Women's Literatur, Vol. 38 (2), 2019)

"The Ulysses Delusion is an engaging discussion of the contemporary literary marketplace and the tastemakers who have framed discussions of literary quality and served as the gatekeepers to popular success in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Konchar Farr's unapologetic championing of the accessible is both ideologically resonant with her thesis and admirable—she has truly produced a popular literary criticism that is both rigorous and readable." - Amy L. Blair, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, USA and author of Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

From the Publisher