In one of his late essays in Speech Genres, Bakhtin traces the secularization of literature to the solvent effects of irony:“Irony has penetrated all languages of modern times (especially French); it has penetrated into all words and forms . . . Irony is everywhere - from the . . . . Continue Reading »
“Clothes gave us individuality, social polity; clothes have made men of us, they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us.” All our earthly interests are “hooked and buttoned together and held up by clothes . . . . Society is founded upon cloth.” This is one of the . . . . Continue Reading »
“It is not true that every writer isthe teller of one tale,” writes Adam Kirsch in his TNR review of Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books , “but it is close to being true of Roth. Again and again he stages the rebellion of desire against duty: sexual desire, most famously in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Menand and Rainey ( The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 7-8) trace the influence of TS Eliot on the rise of New Criticism, ultimately of structuralism: “There was the inventive body of criticism that Eliot wrotebetween 1917 and 1924; the ways . . . . Continue Reading »
In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , Luis Menand and Lawrence Rainey comment on the increasing speed in the changeover of critical fashion fads: “as deconstructionis assimilated to various currents of feminist, . . . . Continue Reading »
Samuel Johnson had scarcely finished his preface to Shakespeare when a new enthusiasm for Shakespeare gripped Germany. Herder led the charge, and Herder inspired Goethe: “Goethe, whose Gtz von Berlichingen (1771) was a history playclearly inspired by Shakespeare, but Goethes Shakespeare was . . . . Continue Reading »
My only, very slight, complaint about Jane Austen’s England is its somewhat misleading title. Roy and Lesley Adkins mention Austen regularly throughout the book, using her letters and novels as sources for sketching the social life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But . . . . Continue Reading »
A third of the way through John Grisham’s Pelican Brief many years ago, I recognizedDarby Sharp, the novel’s protagonist: She was Julia Roberts. Sure nuff, Roberts played the role in the film, no doubt just as Grisham had hoped she would. As it turns out, Grisham has some tradition . . . . Continue Reading »
In an essay on university bureaucracy , Tim Parks quotes a length passage from Little Dorrit , where Dickens describes the work of the Office of Circumlocution: “The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public . . . . Continue Reading »
In the New Yorker , James Wood retraces the steps from his youthful secret atheism in a devoutly Christian home to his discovery of the pure freedom of fiction: “My anguish about death was keen, because two members of my parents congregation died at an early age, of cancer. One of them was a . . . . Continue Reading »
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