November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
October 19, 2012
Now or Never: The Writer and the Age
One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have […]
October 15, 2012
Albert Speer and the Berghof Omen
In Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, in a chapter detailing the autumn of 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, we find the following passage. In the course of […]
September 9, 2012
Riddle me This
The riddle is wrongly considered a “lesser” or “lighter” kind of verse (“light” verse is implicitly considered “lesser” poetry, in contemporary literary convention). The riddle, in fact, is at […]
August 27, 2012
The Two Gandhis
Takes on Mahatma Gandhi tend to focus either on the Mahatma or on the Gandhi: That is, they either consider him a holy man whose politics emerged from an inner “truth” […]
August 21, 2012
Parricide/Regicide/Deicide: A Few Notes on The Brothers Karamazov
First, a passage from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, regarding Comedy. “The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them […]
August 16, 2012
Three Tendencies in English Language Poetry
A broad characterization of three tendencies in English language poetry, by no means exhaustive. The Asian tendency. Specifically, the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry. Imagery without commentary. Meaning […]
August 12, 2012
What is Truth?
Let us conceive of the mind as a weave of two fibers, as we consider muscle a weave of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. The relative composition of a muscle is genetically […]
August 8, 2012
Secret Credos of the Godless
Notice how scientists are always talking about laws. Laws with a capital L, no less. Einstein’s Laws, Poiseuille’s Law, Hooke’s Law, Fourier’s Law, etc., etc. This endless law-giving reveals something […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
July 22, 2012
American Poetry Critics and Literary Memory
The poetry critic of the New York Times, David Orr, gives us a capsule overview of “novelist-poets” in a July 20th article: “The club of novelist-poets is distinguished but […]