Oxhead's Obsession or Discussing Titles

I have written previously--at my defunct LiveJournal account--of the trend in book publishing to title works using a possessive noun, as in Mozart's Women or Ahab's Wife. I have to admit, this has really started to bug me. Of course there is also the annoying trend of two- or three-word titles, a gerund followed by a proper noun. Chasing Vermeer, for example. This trend has actually been around awhile and just kind of slipped in under the radar, mostly in movies: "Educating Rita," "Eating Raoul," "Finding Forrester," "Saving Private Ryan."

A friend of mine notes the frequent use of single-word titles for Broadway musicals, followed by an exclamation point. A holdover from the days of "Oklahoma!" Not being a fan of Broadway, I have no other examples to cite.

Longer titles tell us so much more about what to expect. Take The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, for example. Of course John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror gives little hint as to what's between the covers, but maybe that's normal for poetry. In any case, it seems publishers nowadays are loathe to use long titles without a colon in them somewhere.

As for my favorite titles, well, there are a whole host of candidates. Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is good. Robert Musil has an essay called "The German as Symptom" (which would have been a whole lot funnier if he himself weren't German). And let's not forget titles that started out serious, but got funny over the years, or just in translation, like The Golden Ass, The Fairey Queen and Moby Dick.