I bypassed taking literature courses in college, so I thought this book would bump up my analytical ability for my independent classic literature challenge. Instead, I gave up after a few entries. The entries reminded me of why I hated literature in my secondary schooling--it's classical high-brow writing. I'm not impressed by the author's attempt to sound like an elite literature intellectual. A primer defining technical words shouldn't be vague. It shouldn't have a convoluted sentence structure, rarely used vocabulary, and opinion. I'm sure I can look up online to get concise explanations. After 36 pages I realized the book was too watered down to learn anything, and I stopped.

I have one bonus point: I can use the entry terms to systematically Google the "literature ideas [I] really need to know" for analytical fun. ( )

I didn't really need an introduction to literary criticism, but I thought it would be a quick read that might refresh me on some terms I haven't used since school. It wasn't.

I should explain that I don't expect much from an introductory text. Writing one of these, you can't explain every little detail. Abstraction is the purpose in writing such an introduction in the first place, and quibbling over details misses the point entirely. Simplification, however, does not excuse the number and type of errors in this book.

There are three sorts of mistakes here:
1) QUIBBLING: e.g. the author calls Francis Fukuyama a historian, and refers to Aristotle's 'love' of contradiction. At this level, there are details that I happen to know via philosophy that I might have phrased differently or corrected slightly. This is the sort of mistake that is not relevant in an introductory text. Differences in how best to simplify something are not really a problem related to content at all.
2) LAUGHABLE: To cite one example, the author repeated confuses 'ebooks' with 'ebook readers' ("ebooks, on which material could be downloaded...", pg198). Now, the author is an older man, and normally this sort of mistake isn't that funny--an older person not being familiar with some new(er) thing is usually more pitiable. Unlike the typical old man on the street, however, the author is writing a book where he purports to explain something with which he clearly has at best only a passing familiarity. This posturing, plus the sheer sloppiness of every editor, agent, copy-editor etc. involved with the production of this book, is what makes it funny.
3) BAFFLING: The mistake that I left me dumbfounded, and lead me to read the rest of the work with morbid curiosity was this "At it's simplest, irony is saying one thing and meaning another." The problem with this definition is that it leaves out any reference to 'opposition'. Defining irony as saying one thing and meaning 'another' (instead 'the opposite') overgeneralizes the definition to any figurative use of language whatsoever. This goes well beyond quibbling, to 'how can an experienced, well-respected literature professor not be able to explain WHAT IRONY MEANS?!' It's the sort of mistake that calls into question every other claim the author makes. The reason it's so baffling is not that it's such a stupid mistake, but that the author is clearly not a stupid person.
It's again just sloppy.

These are of course just a few examples. But they're representative of the attention to detail throughout, at least on those topics with which I happened to already have had prior knowledge. As far as I can tell, this book seems to have been written for the paycheck alone, with an absolute minimal level of thought being put into it by all concerned--a 'Michael Bay movie' of popular literary criticism.

That's not a compliment. ( )

Hamburg, Thalia Buecherei

Er: Guck was ich gerade gefunden habe. Ich dachte Du wuerdest...

Ich: Ja, hab's gesehen. Aber der Wal (I still haven't finished Moby Dick)....und dann noch Fuenfzig Ideen - muesste Alles jetzt immer mit Fuenfzig verbunden sein? Bin aber nicht sicher ob ich das Buch wirklich kaufen moechte.

Er: Es dauert eine Weile bevor wir hier fertig sind. Und die Warteschlange ist sehr lang. Lies einfach ein biss'l.

Ich: Naja....gut. Kann nichts schaden.

(Seated on a one of those cube couch things, around me hundreds of people in this massive, multi-level store mingle and gossip and complete their last minute present shopping, I gallop through fifty literature ideas and am glad I hadn't read this little gem before ploughing through the fumes of [b:A Postmodern Belch|16076779|A Postmodern Belch|M.J. Nicholls|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349778632s/16076779.jpg|21872830] since I can now reminisce perspicaciously about the author's use of each one of those fifty ideas he must have imbibed during the long years of apprenticeship at a literary institution and which I have now absorbed in an hour.

But that is, perhaps, giving a false impression of the usefulness of [b:50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know|9978202|50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (Hardcover)|John Sutherland|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327983629s/9978202.jpg|14872673] or the audience for whom it is intended. I was recently listening to Michael Silverblatt interviewing [a:Rikki Ducornet|163891|Rikki Ducornet|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1329659176p2/163891.jpg] on youtube, compliments of Pumiceous (that name rings a bell, you know, I'm sure I've seen this personage somewhere before) in which Ms Ducornet interrupts Mr Silverblatt at one point with the words "Oh, you are a marvelous reader!" after he has made a particularly sagacious comment with respect to her novel [b:Gazelle|379258|Gazelle|Rikki Ducornet|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320464330s/379258.jpg|1361250].

While [b:50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know|9978202|50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (Hardcover)|John Sutherland|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327983629s/9978202.jpg|14872673] won't catapult you into the rarefied stratosphere of literary critics the likes of Michael Foucault etc, it is enough to codify and explicate the basics for understanding why we, as readers, like certain aspects of some books and not others, and it is one means to broaden the scope of what we read and potentially earn us the undying gratitude of a writer when we casually nod in the direction of his/her brilliant use of a literary conceit or other such device.)

Er: Wir sind fertig. Wollen wir los?

Ich: Ja.

Er: Kaufst Du es?

Ich: Nah. Hab's schon durch. Aber ich wuensche mir, dass alle es lesen wuerden. ( )

Ever wonder what the heck mimesis was? Or why you should ever use "hermeneutics" in a sentence? This is the book for you. I found parts of it to be very useful indeed, and other portions to be extremely ho-hum. I don't think that, really, it lives up to its rather grandiose title. It does at least try to accomplish an over view of important literary concepts. Where it really falls down, imo, is that the organization of the book did not, to me, make logical sense and some of the sections decided to prefer the quip over clarity. But still, but for this book, I wouldn't have a clue as to what mimesis was, or why it mattered. ( )