Now that's a descriptive title \😀/ "Escapism" is fascinating as a subject. I never really thought it could even be a subject. All of a sudden the humanities are more intersting. That mention of Bovarism is great too, I've never made the link between that and Foster Wallace.
New subscriber. Thanks, I appreciate your gists of the novels you share with us. A few comments on English pronunciation. So many words are not said how they're spelled, or you have to choose from several possible pronunciations. "Gist": say it as if it is spelled "Jist", almost like "just". "Paradigm", a great word, by the way, but the "g" is silent, making it sound like "para-dime". In fact, whenever you see an ending "-igm", the "g" is silent. On your "day in the life" video, when you say "Eat", it sounded more like "It". Try "Eete" - of course the final "e" is silent, just to make sure the "E" sound is long, like "Elope". This is all from the American perspective. I couldn't pronounce "Goethe", until long into adulthood, when a European (Swiss) friend heard me try to say it!! My favorite book I read in 2020 was "All the Light We Cannot See", by Anthony Doerr. Such a compassionate depth in these 2 children. I loved the model the father made for the blind girl of the block of her town, and the boy's knowledge of radios. And then how they inevitably meet at the end. My book club read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and we quite enjoyed it. It helps that you align (another silent "g") it with escapist fiction. Thanks again.
I'm really looking forward to /finally/ graduating from undergrad and [after a short break to recover my love of education... so. burned. out.] going for a comparative lit PhD. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to study right now, but I'm thinking Ancient Greek and Sanskrit epic poetry and their tragic, verse drama. If I can, I'd like to tie in Continental Philosophy and Contemporary English Speculative Fiction... but that seems like a bit of a stretch. I dunno. Guess that's why I'm not yet a graduate student haha. It's just so hard to pin down my interests, which are so vast and varied :O
That's great man! Your research interests are way beyond my understanding but I'm curious about the way you'd mix speculative fiction with all that heavy stuff :) best of luck with your research and keep me updated about it!
Congrats on this achievement bro, I'm currently trying to not drop out of my final undergrad year after already taking a year out to try and recuperate myself. Completing a PhD and and being an academic would be my dream, guess we can't have everything. Anyway good luck with the rest of your PhD and, again, major congratulations to you, I hope it's everything you want
Was in Hawaii and left my iPhone on the dash of my rental van where it overheated. Waited a few hours, and it was still acting weird, so I took it to the nearby Apple store. A woman started working on it at the genius bar, and she noticed my address near Cambridge and said she had read some philosophy there. I said I had my PhD in political philosophy, and she was getting her PhD in eastern philosophy. We ended up talking about philosophy and PhD studies for like a half hour having completely forgotten about the phone. PhD and philosophy are funny things and are not for everybody, but sometimes it can be a magical combination.
"Continuity of Parks" is very interesting! I'm not very familiar with very much postmodern literature, so when you described a narrative technique where a character and a person from the character's book interact, I thought, "My God, that's ridiculous. What does he do, Blue-Skidoo out of the book and teach the character about shapes?" But the short story does it so elegantly and effectively -- it makes me think that just about any concept, if applied with enough logic and imagination, can be compelling and original. I'd never heard of writers like Thomas Pynchon before coming to your channel. Thank you for educating me!
The literary terms I know used for a self-conscious narrative are: metafictional, self-referential, and self-reflexive. Coincidently, Im reading Don Quixote.
Hey! I'm really late into this My undergraduate architectural thesis was based on Magical Realism in escapism, and the role of architecture and space-making in these worlds depicted. More specifically, an inquiry into principles of architecture that remain steadfast at the threshold of transience between what's real and what's technically here, unreal/ imaginary.
Sounds really interesting! I'm guessing there's a fine line between escapism in U.S. lit and the (potentially) sinister suggestion of fiction as 'inescapable' - obviously Pynchon wrestles with this a lot. Elsewhere, Borges is probably the master of this double-bind (Pynchon's nod to him in Gravity's Rainbow is very suggestive in this respect).
Exactly! Most recently, Chabon's Moonglow plays with that ambiguity in a very subtle way, without much of the paranoia often associated with the discovery of the fictionality - say, in Pynchon.
I love steinbeck 1.grapes of wrath 2.east of eden 3.of mice and men 4. The Pearl 5.the pastures of heaven I love Cormac mccarthy 1.suttree 2. No country for old men 3. The road (on monday i ll start blood meridian) 4. The trilogy I love DFW 1.infinite jest (read 3 times) 2. The broom of the System 3. La ragazza dai capelli strani 4. Considera l'aragosta 5. The pale king Projects: read 5 Faulkner' s books 1.as i lay dying 2.the sound and the fury 3.light of august 4. Absalom, Absalom 5. Mosquitos Read pynchon i've just read the crying of lot 49. Now i want to try GR, V. vineland and Mason & Dixon. In this year i read afroamerican novels such as baldwin ( giovanni's room, go tell it on the mountain and if beale street could talk ), zora neale hurston (their eyes are watching god), the color purple, maya angelou( i know why the caged bird sings) and toni morrison( 1. The bluest eye 2.beloved 3.song of Solomon 4. Sula).
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Other than the novels I know you're already familiar with, the most recent example of this that I can think of would be The Nix. It dealt with escapism -- both its pros and cons -- largely through MMORPGs (and there's lots of choose your own adventure stuff too).
Well, there is, for sure, an historical element to it, but while I hesitate to use academic terms I'm fuzzy on, I'm tempted to call it post-postmodern. I'm not a literary scholar, though, so take that with a fist-full of salt. It initially caught my attention because critics were drawing comparisons to Franzen, Wallace, Chabon and Pynchon, and I see elements of of them all -- the first three especially. Either way, escapism is prevalent throughout. Basically every character is trying to escape from something by getting lost in other "worlds."
Fascinating topic. I wish you luck with your work. I would also encourage you to check out The Kugelmass Episode by Woody Allen from his short story collection Side Effects (first published in the New Yorker in 1977) if you haven’t had the pleasure yet. It’s a wonderful example of intertextuality and a hilarious read.
It’s almost like when people jumped out of the window thinking a magical cloud would come to transport them somewhere else like they had seen in the Dragon Ball cartoon.
I'm hoping to do a PhD exploring the relationship between place and identity in Australian magical realist and gothic literature. Particularly looking at how the setting of Australian novels in remote regions, such as the desert or wilderness is related to the identity of marginalised groups, like Indigenous Australians. Also, looking at how this relates to the confusion of imperialists on encountering a foreign place, where characters often become trapped in a dark landscape that symbolises uncertainty.
Sounds very interesting, promising and original! Best of luck my friend :) I know absolutely nothing about the topic and would not want to pretend otherwise - the one book I will mention, and you may well be familiar with it, is Ocar & Lucinda. It's neither magical realism nor Gothic per se but does alternate between a first half that is rather lighthearted and a much darker last section when the characters travel through the Australian wildnerness and encounter the brutality of colonialism and exploitation. Again, best of luck!
I did my honour's thesis on Asian and Australian magical realism, but it seems to be more difficult to get into a PhD program, even though I got high marks for honours. When I was doing honours I intended to analyse Oscar & Lucinda but didn't because the thesis was becoming too broad from focusing on too many novels. Other Australian novelists I looked at were Richard Flanagan and Alexis Wright. Also, I hope your PhD goes well, it sounds like a fascinating topic!
I graduated from my MA in literature before the summer, and after some long needed rest, I have finally taken up my research again. I have an idea for what I would like to do for a PhD but am struggling with finding the good point where I can stop reading previous research, and critical text in the field, and start formulate what I want to do. Do you have a tip for how to deal with the uncertain feeling, thinking you do not know enough yet to try and apply? Thanks a lot for your videos! They are funny and most helpful!
What you refer to is actually very common and it's also a very healthy sign - better to overdo your research than to ignore what other are saying on your same topics! I know of some people with the same concerns, and my main suggestion is to start writing your research's aim, what your starting point is, and what you would like to achieve through your study NOW. The point (especially with as long a research project as a PhD) is not that you should have everything ready at the start; it's getting there in the course of some time. Put down a note or some bullet point about the purpose of your research, and you're ready to start - knowing, of course, that what you'll keep reading in the course of the next few years will change your starting points and influence your research process and conclusions. Finally, a very important point - if you're thinking about your PhD, the best thing to do is find a supervisor who's an expert in your field and would like to take you on, and follow her/his suggestions - both in terms of recommended reading, and more broadly speaking about everything :)
I am so much interested in the path of thinking leading your research and how (1)escapism, (2)narrative addiction and (3)the features/questions you posed on american fiction could be useful to study dystopias in american billboards. I would love to do a Phd, thank you for opening us a window to the Phd-level research world;) Abrazos, from Spain
I wonder, since you like Lovecraft so much, if you've read/heard of Alan Moore's Providence? I only mention it because I read it while reading the panel-by-panel notes of anonymous people online, explaining the references to quite a number of Lovecraft stories. I ended up reading the stories that Moore referenced and which the anons clarified, except those that were longer. (I only read the wiki summaries of the longer stories.) Anyway, I really enjoyed that kind of reading experience, and it helped me continue reading the book after a very disturbing incident happened to the main character in the middle. I only bring this up because of your discussion of intertextuality, and because you like Lovecraft. (Lovecraft himself appears in the story, but this meta device made the book more immersive instead of serving to break the immersion.) Finally, English is also not my first language, and I find some English words are just plain treacherous when it comes to their pronunciation. The word treachery is one such word. I'm tempted to borrow your pronunciation of paradigm, if for no other reason than "digm" is a cute sound.
Damn you, English ^^! And I do know Providence (there should be a review somewhere on my channel!) and while I respect it immensely, and it is clearly the work of a huge Lovecraft scholar and fan, I didn't fully enjoy it. Its intertextual game was solved a bit too neatly (I personally prefer intertextuality when it remains more mysterious, almost arcane), and I am too big a fan of the original material for Moore's narrative makeover. But again, by all means a great series.
Not sure if it constitutes escapist fiction, but I'd love to hear your take on My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh. It's a novel about a 2000's young woman sleeping for a whole year.
where do authors who deny the reader any escapism, who demand that you don't suspend your disbelief but remain conscious that you are reading their works of fiction sit?
That's complicated and they can sit in any of the three categories. Most metafictional works in postmodernism tend to suggest readers should be wary of escaping into dangerous fictions; but at the same time, Don Quixote too makes the reader conscious - especially in its second half - that what they are reading is a work of fiction :)
I feel like when it comes to escapist media books and video games tend to get the short end of the stick a lot Me and my online friends were discussing it once and we felt that alcoholism & stuff like cloths tend to have the same value we place on our hobbies to normal people
There's a beautiful song by an Italian rap group called Club Dogo, "La Testa Gira," which deals with precisely this idea - the fact we're all ready to criticize another person's choice of escapism without realizing we all need one. I agree with you and your friends :)
Interesting topic! Will you study any female author? Just saying :P I'm studying for my Master's degree thesis about the last novel by Rosario Castellanos, Rito de iniciación, I'm analyzing it as a bildungsroman, and looking for her influences mainly in female writers with female protagonists. I know there are great coming of an age novels wrote by men, but I get tired of being told about the same kind of experience and I think is necessary :)
Egan's The Keep and Atwood's Hag-Seed are the only works by women authors I read closely at this stage. It's a bit outside the scope of my thesis, but much could be said about the prominence of male writers when it comes to fiction that intertextualizes with nerd culture. Daniel Jose Ruiz wrote an article for The Millions called "Dragons Are for White Kids With Money," discussing how nerd culture is largely associated (in America at least) with wealthy, white males. Diaz, Chabon and Lethem have filtered nerd culture through a hispanic, Jewish, queer or lower-class perspective, and I am positive some great novel must exist (perhaps still in some aspiring writer's hard disk, but possibly on the bookshelves and I simply don't know it) that tackles the same topics from a female perspective.
hi, i am a MPhil student and currently looking for a topic. can u plz provide a little bit guidance that how can I choose a topic ??? and is it theoretical framework which should be explored earlier or is it the text we should first go for????
I haven't watched the movie; the book sort of does, but not quite: Ready Player One is more unapologetic escapism than self-conscious escapism. It has its subtleties though, and gets self-conscious about the nature and complexities of escapism in a few paragraphs toward its end; I couldn't say whether the movie preserved that nuance though.
I recognize that you might have changed your opinion on this, but in previous videos you've essentially described Infinite Jest as what I understand meta-escapism to be. I'm wondering what you consider the distinction between meta-escapism and self conscious escapism, and whether or not you consider IJ to be escapist/why?
Meta-escapism and self conscious escapism are the same thing in my book (I'm still undecided over which term to choose and stick with, but I'll probably go with the latter). As for IJ, when I first read it I mistakenly took it for self-conscious escapism (a Don Quixote sort of book, criticizing a problem while romanticizing it), but upon studying it I realized it is much closer to a cautionary tale on escapism, engineered very attentively to drag the reader into its beautiful story only to frustrate them and show them how toxic their addiction was. By misreading it, I wasn't so different from those readers (described by Michael Chabon in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) who read Madame Bovary and, rather than recognizing it is a cautionary tale, romanticize the figure of Emma Bovary as supposedly worth imitating. Mind: this is just my interpretation and reading of the novel, and I am well aware that to other readers IJ may seem like self-conscious escapism. These things are always arguable and never fixed in stone :)
I guess to me that's what makes it (and Madame Bovary, though I haven't read it) meta-escapist, that the escape offered by the book works as the main mechanic the criticism of the escape itself is delivered through. Ultimately though, this is just semantics and I think we overall agree with each other.
Sto facendo un phd in letteratura e sono l'unica nel dipartimento, praticamente. Ogni volta un "pain di the ass" a spiegare cosa faccio, e gli altri colleghi sembrano non capire perché cambio traiettoria così spesso.
Are you still writing your thesis these days ? I've seen a lot of your reviews but I haven't heard any news about it. I'm starting my first year of a Phd comparative litterature and I really enjoy watching your videos during my breaks ;)
Compelling subject. As a fellow English grad student (beginning my PhD in creative writing this fall), I think about this a lot, and I wonder if we might identify two different kinds of escapism--first, escapism as the extent to which an author allows the reader to forget the real world and all its social issues, and second, the extent to which an author allows the reader to forget he/she is reading a text. Perfectly traditional literary fiction (i.e. non-meta) can resist escapism by drawing attention to real-world issues; metafiction resists escapism by drawing attention to text qua text. A related issue I think about is the author's decision to grant/deny the reader pleasure, specifically via narrative structure. Freytag's pyramid, by manufacturing and then sating desire, is an inherently pleasurable structure (I'm thinking here of Peter Brook's description of the narrative drive as erotic). But I've read texts that explicitly resist catharsis and emotional closure, that force readers to sit with lingering pain, which is uncomfortable in a powerful way. On the other hand, writers like George Saunders talk about pleasure being an "okay goal" for fiction--so it's something I think about a lot. Great video, as always--thank you!
Thanks - very interesting stuff! The first point you make is bound to get complicated by whatever way you approach it. There's a case to be made for how the deepest of escapism inevitably makes a political point about the world, best expressed in the Apology to William Morris' Earthly Paradise: what you are going to read is a fantasy, entirely disconnected from the problems of the world and with no power to do anything about them - and by being one it points precisely at those problems. Also while what you say about metafiction is absolutely true (it is the point expressed most notably by Marie-Laure Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality) one also ecounters the occasional book, I'm thinking most notably of Danielewski's House of Leaves and Dorst & Abrams S., which gains its immersive potential precisely from reminding readers time and again they are reading a text. I also like your second point very much - the one thing I want to say about that is that frustrating fiction, which denies readers their pleasure, is a perversion and an exception in the world of literature (coinciding largely with David Foster Wallace) more than any sort of general trend. Lots of people think of postmodernism as a genre that denies closure and catharsis, and that is true of many of its texts, but even apparently frustrating books (Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse) are very much celebrations of the immersive, life-changing power of books, even though they themselves are not necessarily the breeziest reads. Fascinating stuff, right??
Hello fellow student! English isnt my first language either. Im wondering what exactly you do in creative writing. Do they teach you how to write well and what to write about (which I dont think can be taught)? Or are you free to write what you like?
Man, where are you from? Italy? I m italian but i love anglo-american literature. My dream will be graduating in A- M literature but because of my age (44), maybe it's too late. Is it possible PHDing without graduation? In what part of england are you living? In my free time I read lots of novel. I'd like to make a video with you about some books
Technically, all books could be seen as kind of escapism, the bible can be seen as a means to escape the reality. I’d love to read your phd thesis :)) is it available anywhere? If you still are writing on it, have you read about maladaptive daydreaming?
@@TheBookchemist great, thanks a lot! When getting into those books, I will put your thesis on the side. Since I suffered/suffer from escapism a lot, I try to always see books as a way to do it with more positive side effects, than other means :) those books that made me think the most about escapism make me sleep the worst (l‘education sentimental, tolstoys‘ resurrection, also now 100years of solitude)😅😅 while books like Proust give me more comfort and calm me down, but they are much much harder to go through at the same time… I drift away a bit, all I want to say: it’s great that you tackle this topic and I stepped on your RU-vid channel :)
@@TheBookchemist Can I have some time to discuss my topic with you! I really need someone like you to enrich my understanding. Please give me a chance to discuss via WhatsApp or Instagram or whenever you want
First of all I want to wish you the best. I got you very clearly. Your research topic is very amazing and unique. I am from India and I want to pursue Ph.D in English poetry. The problem I have been facing is what topic I have to select.I am very much interested in British Poetry. Could you suggest me some research topics? Even I don't deny research topics based on fiction....
Unfortunately I can't - it's something you have to feel very deeply about, to be able to sustain a three-year commitment! Go with the poets you like to read the most!
What about intense meta-fiction as a form itself of escapism, you know, like a mathematician who gets so involve in an utterly impossible problem with no implications o aplication what so ever with reality, what can be any more escapist than that?
I think all fiction is sort of by definition a form of escapism, it's just that a line gets drawn between fiction that exists purely as a form of escape ("entertainment") versus fiction that through this escape forces you to confront a deeper emotional reality ("art/literature"). I think that what he's talking about in his thesis is a sort of escapism specific meta-mechanicality (a term I just made up) wherein the escapism inherent to fiction is used as a tool within the work of fiction to talk about escapism (meta-escapism), or novels which attempt to create an immersive escapist experience while talking about deeper emotional realities but in doing so are forced to acknowledge their escapist tendencies (self-conscious escapism), or both. As far as I see it though, much of the purpose of metafiction as a device is to deny escape (regardless of whether or not it succeeds at that).
Christopher Brown maybe you right, maybe the reader implicit in escapist literature is a pasive reader (a "female" reader), wich is a kind of reader incompatible with the idea of meta-fiction (or interactive fiction), fiction that demands an active-reader, maybe is there where we should draw the line, but then we have something like The Name of The Rose wich can be enjoyed as a detective/mistery/period novel (proven by its massive commercial success) and/or as a book about books about books... So it's complicated.
It's complicated indeed - Christopher is right in pointing at the fact that metafiction, theoretically, should deny rather than reinforce escape (this is Marie-Laure Ryan's thesis in her seminal Narrative as Virtual Reality, an excellent read); but at the same time it's true that certain books (and The Name of the Rose is a prominent example I mention in my thesis) stage precisely that kind of impossible "metafictional immersion" you talk about. The same can be said of stuff such as House of Leaves, which founds its immersive potential precisely on being constantly and insistently interactive and metafictional.
No. Sono fermamente convinto della necessità di distaccare la letteratura dalle persone che la scrivono. Sui nostri due euro (ipotizzo sia anche tu italiano!) c'è la faccia del più grande scrittore di tutti i tempi, ma non è che le sue idee o modo di vedere il mondo siano poi così condivisibili oggigiorno. Idem per Lovecraft, probabilmente l'autore che ho più caro. Capisco e rispetto chi la pensa diversamente ma io personalmente approccio i libri per cercare di trarre il massimo da quel che hanno da offrire (divertimento, insegnamenti, o chi per loro), non perché mi aspetto che siano scritti da belle persone ;)
I coped with it relatively well (although it's very lonely work, which is never easy, not even for introverted people), but I know lots of people who struggled a lot with it. It's a very complicated topic, and relates to the difficulties of keeping motivated for a very long time on something that's entirely in your hands, and that you have to plan/organize/write almost exclusively independently.
