April 1, 1950
The Understanding of Fiction
Philip Rahv’s book on modern fiction, Image and Idea1, has been instructive to me in the breadth of its critical ideas. Whatever the critical ideas, they have produced an estimate of […]
April 1, 1950
Jean-Louis Barrault
The phenomenon Barrault is complex, but two evenings in his theatre—the evening when he gives Le Procès and the evening when he gives La Seconde Surprise de l’Amour and Les […]
April 1, 1950
Levels of Meaning in Literature
The longer one has been familiar with a great work of literature, the more one’s understanding of it grows. It would be hard to formulate a more elementary principle of […]
April 1, 1950
Theatre Letter
We often hear that our age discourages heroism. Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Modern Temper, has gauged our loss of the heroic idea; in A Century of Hero-Worship, Eric Bentley […]
April 1, 1950
Existentialism and the Self
French existentialism is a complex and, to the critic, a disconcerting product of the European agony. How shall we treat it? As a philosophy in the sense of an attempt […]
April 1, 1950
Communication
SIRS: May I trespass on your space to correct two errors in my article “The Fetish of Form,” which appeared in your Winter issue? The first concerns the authorship of […]
April 1, 1950
Malraux’s Aesthetic
Undoubtedly there will be a great deal of critical effort exercised in assimilating this extraordinary book to André Malraux’s previous writing and to his career. It need only be said […]
April 1, 1950
Movie Letter: Novel Into Film: All the King’s Men
Above a line-cut of his signature, Robert Penn Warren wrote a statement about the film version of his Pulitzer Prize novel, All the King’s Men, which appeared in New York […]
April 1, 1950
An Explication of the Player’s Speech¹
(Hamlet, II, ii, 472-541) 1 The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, 2 Black as his purpose, did the night resemble 3 When he lay couched in the ominous horse, […]
January 1, 1950
Children of Narcissus: Some Themes of French Speculation
The legend of Narcissus has exercised upon the French an irresistible fascination. From the beginnings of modern thought in Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal to the poets and philosophers of our […]
January 1, 1950
On Herbert’s ‘Sacrifice’
A few years since, William Empson1 gave some nine pages to a treatment of George Herbert’s long poem “The Sacrifice,” as an example of the seventh of his Seven Types […]
January 1, 1950
The Fetish of Form: An Example from Music
More real harm has been done to art in recent years by indiscriminate talk about Form than has been due to any other type of philistinism. The habit belongs, to […]