Nancy Drew, the timeless teenage girl’s classic, has gone digital. Will the Famous Five be joining her in the 21st Century? Time’s Techland column reports:
‘The Nancy Drew series might have been around for 80 years, but that doesn’t mean that the art of the mystery novel is outdated. Her Interactive has updated the fan favorite female detective’s adventures with the Nancy Drew Mobile Mysteries app. Using text inspired by the original books, the app creates an interactive story for readers. You don’t have to imagine you’re on the case with Nancy Drew, now you can be part of it as well.’
At the moment of The King’s Speech’s Oscars triumph, Mary Beard considers the history and art of public speaking. What is “great oratory”?
‘Part of the problem is that for all the classic pieces of oratory before the early 20th century we have only a written version. Sometimes, thanks to the valiant stenographers of Hansard, there
is a good chance that this reflects, more or less accurately, the words as spoken. But often it doesn’t. Virginia Woolf entirely rewrote her Cambridge speech before it was published. 2000 years
earlier Cicero also liked to “improve” on what he had said. In fact, some of his best-known “speeches”, the models for future generations of orators, were never actually
delivered at all, but were published as what he would have said on the occasion if he had got the chance. We really have no clue what listening to one of these masters of ancient oratory would have
been like, and no idea how “great” they would have sounded.
But there is a moral question too. How far do we think that “great” oratory should also be, politically and morally, “good” oratory? How far can it be counted “great” if it fails to bring about a worthy end, or if it aims at a positively bad one? Ancient writers debated exactly this question. The comic playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century BC pointed the finger at those clever rhetoricians whose weasel, winning words made what was in fact bad seem good, and vice versa. And, in the end, everyone knew that Demosthenes had cured himself of his stammer only to give a storming series of speeches, so brilliantly advocating a foolish policy that they brought disaster on Athens in its conflict with Philip of Macedon, and led to his own suicide. Even now, we feel squeamish about powerful oratory directed towards unpalatable ends. The Guardian’s selection of “great speeches” exposed this very nicely. There was a snippet from De Gaulle, but nothing from Hitler. No Oswald Mosley, no Ian Paisley, and no Enoch Powell. We are all presumably happier to count those as “demagogues” or “rabble rousers”. But isn’t the difference between a “demagogue” and a “great orator” simply whether we like their politics or not – and nothing much to do with the oratorical power?’
The New Yorker reviews Professor Craig Munson’s account of nuns behaving impiously in music, lyric and song.
‘Clerical outsiders with pious bones to pick could speak as if convents housed all the whores of Babylon. Insider sources (such as convent necrologies) tend to single out the paradigmatically religious, though they also recognize other positive contributions to convent culture (administrative, artistic, philanthropic, musical). Nuns who err in the direction of spiritual negligence only enter the historical record when their lapses are egregious enough to catch the church hierarchy’s attention.
My suspicion is that outward conformity masked as wide a range of religious commitment within the convent as one might discover behind the conformity at any American church on Christmas or
Easter—though intense sanctity had its own rewards within the cloister. What differs between then and now is the enhanced ability of the seventeenth-century church (protestant as well as
Catholic) to enforce religious conformity (a loss that some of today’s true believers still pine for). Most interesting in this regard is convent culture’s common aptitude for
accommodating various levels of religious inclination, as long as they did not disrupt the good order of the house, as defined within its walls.’
The Guardian’s John Mullan introduces 12 of the most promising first time novelists and in doing so asks: what is ‘literary fiction’.
‘What is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historical novel. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the leading British prize for science fiction. Yet you only have to think about these two examples to see how they escape their genres. Mantel’s novel revisits the favourite stamping ground of historical fiction – Henry VIII and his wives – in order to rethink what it might be to see events filtered through the consciousness of a person from a distant age. Ishiguro takes a dystopian hypothesis – human clones being bred for their organs – and then declines to put in place any of the sci-fi framework that would allow us to understand how this could be. Indeed, the whole interest of his story is in the limits placed upon its narrator. These are both “literary” novels because they ask us to attend to the manner of their telling. And, despite their narrative demands, they have both found hundreds of thousands of readers willing to do so.’
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