September 16, 2019
What Makes a Character Human?
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary […]
July 26, 2019
On the Importance of the Authorial Voice
In his book The Art of Perspective, part of Graywolf Press’s series of craft books on writing (which I’ve written about a few times before on this blog), Christopher Castellani […]
March 15, 2019
In Defense of Walter Scott, Part 2
Back in December, I wrote a post about Walter Scott in which I analyzed his 1818 novel The Antiquary and argued that the work demonstrated that Scott was anything but […]
December 3, 2018
Should Writers Be Conscious of the Artistic Movements of Their Time?
There’s a scene towards the middle of At Eternity’s Gate, the new biopic about Vincent van Gogh, in which Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) and Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) discuss in […]
November 29, 2018
In Defense of Walter Scott
In E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a book made up of a series of lectures the author gave at Cambridge in 1927 and which I’ve discussed on this blog […]
September 5, 2018
Derrida and Deconstruction Simplified
There is a lot of antipathy towards Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction both in and outside of academia. In the interest of furthering the dialogue, I add my most basic view […]
June 11, 2018
Against the Nineteenth-Century Novel
In a negative review last fall of Nathan Hill’s The Nix, Brianna Rennix of the leftist magazine Current Affairs critiqued what she described as the novel’s “postmodern” elements and argued […]
May 2, 2018
Omniscience, Paranoia, and Postmodern Fiction
Broadly, there are two diverging traditions evident in contemporary fiction. The first is often called “realism” and is today most notably evangelized by the critic James Wood, who in his […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]