Essay

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说话人1：

文学课程介绍与阅读观念探讨
Through this term, what would make the right ending.
So it has a sort of intellectual purpose to it.
But I will tell you, the students I had in that seminar did amazing things to push their choice of novel.
For one group, nominate Geoffrey Jennings.
Middlesex.
There was a huge art installation that I walked into on that day of class.
It covered the ceiling and the walls and the floors.
They had done original photography for it.
It was really spectacular.
There was a theatrical skit for Dave Egger’s How We Are Hungry.
There was campaign literature, pamphlets and so on.
So people were very creative with it and it was really lots of fun.
And for me, it’s fun because I may not know the novel that you end up picking, and so it is a kind of challenge for me to take a novel that you’ve chosen and come to grips with it myself.
It may be one that I know.

Now, let me just say in a technical way, if you decide to volunteer to nominate a novel, you’ll get no extra credit.
It’ll do nothing for your grade, but you will get glory, whatever glory there is to be had at the front of this room.
Maybe that’s like miniscule, but maybe it’s gonna be fun for you, especially if you have a sort of theatrical bent or if you like getting up in front of people or if you’re just really passionate about a novel that you want everyone to read.
So that’s something that we will do and I will tell you more about at mid semester.
So that’s the piece of the syllabus that I can’t tell you about.
I don’t know what that dream we’re going to dream together is when we read that novel.
I don’t know what that’ll be.

I want to just go over the requirements of the course that really are required, not the optional piece, just so that you understand what my purpose is pedagogically.
This course is very much open to English majors and to non-English majors.
It’s essentially a reading course.
That’s what I want you to take away from this is the knowledge of these novels.
I want you to read them.
I want you to think about them.
I want you to talk about them.
But I don’t expect you to become an English major in order to do that if you’re not already one.
However, if you do happen to be an English or a literature major or someone who’s just very serious about reading at that level, you will find plenty to chew on here.
Not all of the novels aspire to or have as their purpose that kind of difficulty that sometimes English majors really want.
They wanna have to work incredibly hard at the formal level.
Some of the novels have that, but not all of them.
The challenge for you is to figure out: what do we do with those novels?
What is the aim of a novel that isn’t all about formal innovation?
What are those novels doing?
Are they just… Is it just inappropriate to call them literature?
Should we think about them in a different way?
How should we integrate that kind of novel with novels that have more formal ambitions?

So paper length: there are two papers required and there’s a final exam.
The paper length is designed to be quite large. It’s 5 to 8-page papers.
Now, a 5-page paper is very different from an 8-page paper if you’re actually thinking about the words you choose and how you write it. If you just sort of scribble the night before until you’re done, maybe there’s not that much difference between a 5 and an 8-page paper except for editing.
But substantively, if you’re using every sentence in that paper to say something substantive, to move an argument along, then you can write a lot more in an 8-page paper.
That’s for those people who really want to push themselves and want to advance a really significant piece of thinking about a novel.
Now, I will also say that a 5-page paper written well can trump an 8-page paper written poorly any day of the week.
So you don’t have to write long papers, but what I’m saying is the room is there for you to stretch out if you want to do that.
The final exam: if you read, come to lecture, and attend section, the process of doing those three things will have allowed you to already have thought quite a bit about these novels. You should remember them. I think they’re quite memorable. They’re quite distinct from each other, and you should be able to manage with that final exam without undue difficulty.

I will say that the reading load is heavy. I’ve made some adjustments every year. I’m trying to deal with the fact that there are so many novels I love written between, say, 1985 and the present that are over 400 pages a piece. So what do you do with those on a syllabus? Well, I guess it’s the problem that people who teach the 18th-century novel always have or the Victorian novel like the triple-decker (the three-volume novel). At least I don’t have those. But what I’ve done is to excerpt some of the texts earlier in the term, and actually, there’s a slightly heavier reading before break than there used to be so that it’s a little bit lighter after break when we’re doing those long novels.

OK, last thing: this course, as you may have noticed from our friends behind us, is being filmed as part of the Yale Open Yale Courses Initiative. It is an initiative funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This is one of eight courses being offered this year that are being videotaped. They will be made available free to the public via the internet. So this is a way of allowing the world to benefit from what we all do at Yale. That said, what we try to do — what I will try to do and what I hope you will try to do — is to forget about them. It’s sometimes hard for me, but I trust that you will be able to do that. So forget about that. The point is not to cater to that camera, but to do what we do and to show the world what it is that we do.

Now, I like to ask questions in lecture. I really am just not a fan of the sort of zone-out model of lecture audition. So I will ask you questions. The only annoying thing I will have to do is to repeat your answers. So I hope you will not object to that because you don’t have microphones on you, and it’s very cumbersome to get them back to you. So we’re not gonna mike you so that your answers can be heard.

All right. Any questions so far about what I’ve said?

Now I want to talk about the handout. Those of you who don’t have it, there are a couple more up front here. There should be the rest of the stack over here. Oh, no, these are my notes. Are we out? Yeah, a couple more. And if you don’t have one, you can share. What I have here for us to look at together today are two little texts. I’m going to read parts of them to you. And together, I think they give you the sort of snapshot I want you to have of where literature stands, where reading stands at the beginning, at the middle of the 20th century.

The first one is an advertisement for the Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and this appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1934. So I’m going to read just parts, and I’m going to skip around a little bit and stop and start.
How to enjoy James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, for those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it because they fear that it is obscure. The publishers offer this simple clue as to what the critical fuss is all about. Ulysses is no harder to understand than any other great classic. It is essentially a story and can be enjoyed as such. Do not let the critics confuse you. Ulysses is not difficult to read, and it richly rewards each reader in wisdom and pleasure. So thrilling an adventure into the soul and mind and heart of man has never before been charted. This is your opportunity to begin the exploration of one of the greatest novels of our time.

What I want you to notice, first of all, is the kind of reader that’s being invoked here for that modernist classic Ulysses: it is not the critic. Now, if you read down, if you sort of skim down, you’ll see that kind of language applied to critics. They seem fretful. They seem interested in obscure knowledge. That’s how this advertisement represents critics, even though it also invokes critics to describe what’s powerful about the novel. So there’s a sort of two-faced representation of the critic. But the important one, I think, is that dismissal of the critic. The point of this advertisement is to make you feel like you don’t have to know what the critic knows in order to read this novel. What you need is something like strength or bravery. Listen to that language: For those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it. The people already engrossed are the strong ones. And you can be that. This advertisement wants to say, you can be the strong reader. That hesitation, those who hesitate to begin it, it’s a kind of feminized, mincing approach to the novel. It’s sort of like those fussy critics. So this advertisement tells you that the great classic of modernism is something you stride into like a man. But you don’t have to be a particularly extraordinary man to do so. This monumental novel about 20 hours in the life of an average man can be read and appreciated like any other great novel once its framework and form are visualized. Just as we can enjoy Hamlet without solving all the problems which agitate the critics and scholars. There’s that agitation that I was talking about, the average man. This advertisement wants you to see Ulysses as a story about a man you can identify with, so you don’t have to be a critic. You have to be strong. But you know what? You can be the average man, because this is a story about the average man, with a plot furnished by Homer, against a setting by Dante, and with characters motivated by Shakespeare. Ulysses is really not as difficult to comprehend as critics like to pretend. This is like saying “dress by Prada, shoes by Ferragamo.” It’s as if there are brands — Dante, Shakespeare, Homer — that are identifiable. They’re familiar. And what’s more, they carry with it that sense of cultural capital. Well, what do I mean by cultural capital? It’s that knowledge that makes you one of the elite of your world. It’s also that knowledge that an educated, sort of belligerent reader of the Saturday Review of Literature would be very familiar with. So in a sense, it tells you this work of art is of a piece with what you already know. It’s familiar in those ways, and you shouldn’t be afraid of it. At the same time, it’s part and parcel of that elite body of knowledge. So again, there’s this kind of two-facedness to the advertisement. It’s both every man and the elite who will best read this book.

Now, I want to contrast that with what we see from Nabokov in this essay, Good Readers and Good Writers. This is from 1950. Now, the part of the essay just prior to this explains that he gave this little quiz that you see to some college students when he was giving a lecture. So this is what he asked them to do: Select four answers to the question, “What should a reader be to be a good reader?”

• The reader should belong to a book club.
• The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
• The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
• The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
• The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
• The reader should be a budding author.
• The reader should have imagination.
• The reader should have memory.
• The reader should have a dictionary.
• The reader should have some artistic sense.

And Nabokov says the students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social, economic, and historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is the one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense, which sense I propose to develop in myself and others whenever I have the chance. There are at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case. So let us see which of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind, which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or the reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. What a crime. How many of you are guilty of this kind of reading ever? OK. Nabokov be gone. But he wants to get at something here. And I think it’s helpful to put it next to that advertisement for Ulysses. He wants you to think about reading on his terms, very much informed by a modernist sensibility of what literature is all about. I’m going to say more about what that is when I lecture on Lolita, but it’s very much in contrast with that Ulysses ad. Don’t identify. It’s not about you. It’s about something else. But what is it about? So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? Is it impersonal imagination and artistic delight? What should be established, I think, is an artistic, harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness, while at the same time we keenly enjoy, with tears and shivers, the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in this matter is, of course, impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. Some of you might think that after Lolita, but what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to contribute his imagination, and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. There’s a balance of power between the writer and the reader in this little vignette. The power really, I think, finally resides with the writer. It is the writer whose world the reader is here asked to get clear. You are asked to use your imagination to enter a world made by the writer, a world of imagination. And so it’s the writer who directs you in that way. You are not asked to imagine a place you knew, something from your history, something from your knowledge of yourself. It is not about finding the average man, which you are also in the novel. They’re staring back at you. It’s about finding some other dream world. Maybe it’s a nightmare world. So for Nabokov, he wants to imagine a kind of literary encounter that’s very much separate from those other things he talks about: other media, the movies, having seen the book in the movie, from the life that…

说话人2：

别提这个人，我挺羡慕你。

说明：

1. 保留了口语化表达（如重复、断句、语气词）及未完整语句（如“还有一个淡定神曲我没看完”可能为口误或未完成内容）。

2. 斜体书名对应原文提及的作品名（如Ulysses《尤利西斯》、Lolita《洛丽塔》）。

3. 部分逻辑衔接语（如“OK”“All right”）直接呈现，符合课堂场景。

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1. 文学课程介绍与阅读观念探讨（20250427_083420.m4a）

以下是课程音频的中文逐字稿翻译，保留口语化表达并符合中文表达习惯： 说话人1： 文学课程介绍与阅读观念探讨这一学期，怎样才算圆满结束呢？这门课带有一定的知识性目标。但我想说，之前参加研讨课的学生们在推荐小说时表现得非常出色。有一组学生推荐了杰弗里·詹宁斯的《米德尔塞克斯》。上课当天，我走进教室时看到一个巨大的艺术装置，它覆盖了天花板、墙壁和地板，学生们还为其拍摄了原创照片，非常壮观。还有一组为戴夫·埃格斯的《我们如何饥饿》编排了戏剧小品，甚至制作了竞选宣传册之类的材料。大家都很有创意，课程也充满乐趣。对我而言，有趣之处在于我可能并不了解你们最终选择的小说，因此理解你们所选的作品对我也是一种挑战——当然，也可能是我熟悉的作品。 先说明一点，从规则上来说，自愿推荐小说不会获得额外学分，对成绩也没有影响，但你会收获“荣耀”——尽管在这个教室前方的“荣耀”可能微不足道。不过如果你有表演天赋、喜欢在众人面前展示，或是对某部小说充满热情并希望大家共读，这可能会很有趣。相关安排我会在期中时详细说明，这也是教学大纲中尚未确定的部分。我不知道当我们共读某部小说时，会共同编织出怎样的梦想，一切都是未知。 接下来我想明确课程的硬性要求（非可选内容），让你们了解我的教学目的。这门课对英语专业和非英语专业学生均开放，本质上是一门阅读课。我希望你们通过课程掌握这些小说的内容——去阅读、思考、讨论它们。如果你原本不是英语专业，我不要求你因此转专业；但如果你是英语或文学专业，或是对深度阅读有浓厚兴趣，你会发现课程内容足够有挑战性。并非所有小说都追求英语专业学生期待的“高难度”——比如在形式层面需要下苦功钻研的类型，部分小说符合这一特点，但并非全部。你们的挑战在于思考：我们该如何解读这些小说？一部不以形式创新为目标的小说，其存在意义是什么？这些小说在表达什么？是否不宜将它们称为“文学”？我们是否需要用不同的视角看待它们？又该如何将这类小说与更注重形式的作品结合理解？ 作业要求：需完成两篇论文和一场期末考试。论文篇幅设定为5-8页。如果认真推敲用词和结构，5页纸与8页纸的内容会有很大差异；但如果只是在截止前夜草草写完，除了字数差异，可能仅需修改润色。实质上，若每句话都紧扣论点、推进论证，8页纸能承载更多内容，适合希望挑战自我、深入探讨小说的学生。当然，一篇结构精巧的5页论文，远比一篇潦草的8页论文更有价值。因此，字数并非强制要求，但若你愿意深入拓展，课程也提供了空间。关于期末考试：只要认真阅读、参加讲座和小组讨论，你自然会对这些小说有充分思考。这些作品各具特色、令人印象深刻，只要用心，应对考试不会过于困难。 需要提醒的是，课程阅读量较大。我每年都会调整安排，因为我热爱的小说大多创作于1985年至今，单本篇幅超过400页。如何在教学大纲中合理安排这些作品？这有点像教授18世纪小说或维多利亚时期三卷本小说的老师面临的难题——至少我不用处理三卷本。我的解决办法是：学期初安排部分文本选读，假期前的阅读量略大，以便假期后学习长篇小说时压力减轻。 最后一点：如你所见，本课程正在拍摄中，属于“耶鲁公开课计划”的一部分。该计划由威廉和弗洛拉·休利特基金会资助，今年共有八门课程录像并免费公开于网络，让全球观众受益于耶鲁的教学资源。不过，我希望大家忘记镜头的存在——对我来说有时也很困难，但相信你们可以做到。我们的重点不是迎合镜头，而是专注于教学本身，向世界展示我们的学习过程。 我喜欢在课堂上提问，不希望大家只是被动听讲。由于你们没有佩戴麦克风，我需要重复你们的回答，希望大家不要介意——这是确保声音清晰的无奈之举。 目前为止，大家有什么问题吗？ 接下来我想谈谈分发的材料。没拿到的同学，前面还有几份。哦，这些是我的笔记，发完了吗？还有少量剩余。如果没有，今天可以先共用。我们今天要共同探讨两份文本，我会朗读其中片段，它们能让你们快速了解20世纪中叶文学与阅读观念的现状。 第一份是兰登书屋1934年版詹姆斯·乔伊斯《尤利西斯》的广告，刊登于《星期六文学评论》。我会节选朗读，中间可能会跳过或停顿。如何享受詹姆斯·乔伊斯的伟大小说《尤利西斯》：致已沉浸于《尤利西斯》阅读的读者，以及因畏惧其晦涩而迟迟未翻开书页的人。出版商在此揭晓评论界热议的核心：《尤利西斯》并不比其他经典更难理解，它本质上是一个故事，读者可单纯享受故事本身。别让评论家误导你——《尤利西斯》不难读，且能给予读者智慧与愉悦的双重馈赠。如此震撼心灵、探索人性的冒险之旅，前所未有。这是你探索当代最伟大小说之一的契机。 请注意，这则广告塑造的《尤利西斯》读者形象不是评论家。若通读全文，会发现广告对评论家的描述带有贬义：他们焦虑不安，沉溺于晦涩的知识。尽管广告也借用评论家的评价凸显小说的力量，但核心是对评论家的否定。其意图在于让读者相信：无需像评论家那样博学，只需拥有“勇气”即可阅读此书。注意广告用语：“致已沉浸于阅读的人”与“犹豫不决的人”——前者是“强者”，而后者被暗示为“怯懦”“挑剔”，类似评论家的形象。广告暗示，这部现代主义经典需要读者以“男子汉”的姿态征服，且无需天赋异禀——毕竟这是一部关于“普通人”20小时生活的巨著，只要把握结构形式，即可像欣赏其他经典一样理解它。正如我们无需解决评论家与学者争论的所有问题，也能欣赏《哈姆雷特》。广告强调“普通人”视角，试图让读者将《尤利西斯》视为可产生共鸣的故事——你不必成为评论家，只需“强大”。而“强大”意味着：你可以是普通人，因为小说主角就是普通人，其情节源自荷马，背景源自但丁，人物动机源自莎士比亚。《尤利西斯》并不像评论家宣称的那样难懂。这就像炫耀“普拉达的时装，菲拉格慕的皮鞋”——但丁、莎士比亚、荷马的名字如同文化品牌，既耳熟能详，又象征着“文化资本”（即跻身精英阶层的知识标识），也是《星期六文学评论》的“博学读者”所熟知的符号。广告试图传达：这部作品与你已知的文化经典一脉相承，不必畏惧，同时又属于精英知识体系——这种矛盾的双重性贯穿始终。 接下来，我们对比纳博科夫1950年的文章《好读者与好作家》。文章前半部分提到，纳博科夫在讲座中向大学生提出一个问题：“成为好读者需要具备哪些特质？”请从以下选项中选出四项： – 加入读书俱乐部 – 将自己代入男女主角 – 关注社会经济角度 – 偏好有动作和对话的故事 – 看过改编电影 – 立志成为作家 – 具备想象力 – 具备记忆力 – 拥有字典 – 具备艺术感知力 纳博科夫指出，学生们倾向于选择“情感代入”“情节动作”“社会经济与历史角度”。当然，正确答案是：想象力、记忆力、字典、艺术感知力——这也是他希望自己及读者着力培养的能力。他认为，读者的想象力分为两种：第一种层次较低，依赖个人情感共鸣，因书中情节联想到自身经历、熟悉的人或事，或因小说唤起对故乡、风景、过往生活的怀念，甚至将自己代入角色。纳博科夫认为这是“阅读的大忌”。试问，你们中有多少人曾这样阅读？而他倡导的“高级想象力”，是超越个人情感的艺术感知——读者需在自身与作者的思维间达成和谐平衡，保持一定距离，同时全身心沉浸于杰作的内在脉络，在“疏离”与“共鸣”中获得审美愉悦。完全客观是不可能的，一切有价值的阅读都带有主观性（例如，你可能是我的梦境，我可能是你的噩梦——读过《洛丽塔》的人或许会有此感）。关键在于，读者需明确何时何地调动想象力，专注于理解作者构建的独特世界。在作者与读者的权力关系中，主导权最终属于作者——读者的任务是用想象力进入作者创造的虚构世界，而非投射个人经历或寻找“书中的自己”。这与《尤利西斯》广告的理念截然相反：纳博科夫反对“代入”，强调“超越自我，投身作者的梦境（或噩梦）世界”。关于这一点，我在讲解《洛丽塔》时会进一步展开。 说话人2： 别提这个人，我挺羡慕你。 翻译说明： 1. 保留课堂口语特点（如重复、设问、语气词“哦”“呢”等），符合教学场景。 2. 书名采用通用译法（如Middlesex《米德尔塞克斯》、How We Are Hungry《我们如何饥饿》），部分作品名保留英文原名（如Lolita《洛丽塔》）。 3. “cultural capital”译为“文化资本”，指布迪厄理论中的社会符号资本，符合学术语境。 4. 说话人2的简短回应直接呈现，保留对话的真实感。