literary criticism | literary criticism
Jan.28.2013
Having read my stats and discovered that people actually look at my page occasionally, I really am going to try to check in more often. This time I have a plug to make, but I'll try to disguise it with a general consideration of ebooks. If I really thought they were going to replace...
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Oct.21.2012
I am a scribbler. I love writing but, I confess, I seldom read articles or blogs about writing. Barring the usual exceptions, of course, I confess I find reading about writing tedious. I would far rather read a story than a piece on how to write a story. Just like I love food but...
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Aug.29.2012
So, what was the truth about her missing name?
I attribute no particular thematic or plot significance to her lack of name, nor do I assign it any sexist implication. Her lack of a name is rooted in realism. It's the way workers referred to married women whose name they didn't know. That and that...
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Aug.16.2012
There's an interesting piece about literary criticism in the Aug. 15, 2012 New York Times, written by literary critic Dwight Garner, called "A Critic's Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical." It's a fun article to read, peppered as it is with just the sorts of anecdotes that make us...
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Jul.25.2012
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
image via sc.edu
Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise was given a tentative thumbs-down by the literati of the day, most not understanding what Fitzgerald was trying to accomplish. And even today it’s not a...
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Jan.19.2012
In his 1956 New York Times review of Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room, Granville Hicks wrote:
"Mr. Baldwin writes of these matters with an unusual degree of candor and yet with such dignity and intensity that he is saved from sensationalism."
The 'matters' he was...
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Nov.05.2011
How often have you seen people go up to a baby in the street and say to its young mother, “That baby should never have been born’, or worse, “That baby should be put down’, or even, ‘That baby is incredibly ugly‘.
Maybe these things were said with a racial slant years ago, maybe they were said to...
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Oct.13.2011
What Is American About Modern American Poetry—A Primer with Poems
(First presented as a talk at Fudan University, Shanghai, and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunication, Nanjing, April 19 & 21, 2011, co-sponsored by the New York Institute of Technology’s “Crossing Borders...
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Jul.05.2011
If you have read VS Naipaul’s recent interview posted in The Guardian, you are aware and likely perplexed, annoyed, outraged or amused by his banal comments regarding women writers, their lack of mastery in the home and in the world of letters, and the sentimental “feminine tosh” they inevitably...
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Jun.25.2011
T.S. Eliot – Selected Essays, 1917-1932
Eliot was born in the U.S., but following grad work at the Sorbonne and Oxford, Europe must have seemed more comfortable, because he stayed there for years. During that time, he began to make his mark as a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. This book...
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