Word: book
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...never been easy to understand the connection between—let alone the mass market success of—a band made up of Britpop star Damon Albarn, comic book artist Jamie Hewlett, and a series of featuring artists that now includes hip-hop producer Danger Mouse, rock legend Lou Reed, and the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. It is even more surprising that these disparate figures, who collectively form Gorillaz, have built a reputation as a hip-hop group. In fact, Gorillaz has always been more influenced by comparatively esoteric genres...
...James Wood’s popular class “Postwar British and American Fiction,” the first half of a lecture is invariably devoted to Wood reading aloud his favorite excerpts from the book under discussion. “Flip to page twenty-nine where Nabokov writes, ‘The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag.’” Wood grins, before eagerly pushing forward, “Ah, yes, yes! There’s a great bit four pages earlier when Pnin gets dentures and Nabokov describes...
...professor’s unusual approach to lecturing immediately immerses his students in the milieu of the novel through short, funny excerpts, but more importantly it gives students permission to enjoy reading a book. Many students, who often feel afraid to laugh while reading, find his method liberating. Yet, initially I was more annoyed than charmed by these recitations. I felt these comic details contributed very little to the analytical understanding of a novel; the excerpts gave a sense of a writer’s prose style, but ultimately they were nothing more than amusing diversions to give the class...
...complexities. An author can often reveal invaluable insights into a character’s personality through humorous details about his comic foibles or silly idiosyncrasies. Humor can be used equally well to humanize or ironize a character. But while the specific literary effects of humor vary from book to book, comedy serves as a surprisingly perceptive avenue to examine many novels...
William Faulkner’s modernist classic “The Sound and the Fury” has the reputation as one of the most formidable and tragic novels in the American canon. Surprisingly, appreciating Faulkner’s comedy has drastically changed my perception of the book. “The Sound and the Fury” concerns the disintegration of the Compson family, a declining aristocratic Southern clan living on a once-prosperous plantation. The first three sections are written from the point of view of the three Compson brothers: the mentally retarded Benjy, the suicidal Harvard student...