This new world of ours, structured by the internet, is unrelentingly violent, as it is inimical to human freedom and human thriving…
Read MoreWhether or not The Trespasser helped Woolf shape Night and Day, there may be glints of Lawrence’s novel in To the Lighthouse…
Read MoreSons and Lovers emerged with astonishing vividness, like an island from off which the mist has suddenly lifted…
Read MoreThe metaphor retains the paradoxical power to unveil the truth by veiling it…
Read MoreMany writers today are unapprehensive to name the source or sources and explain, through reason, why they have made up what they have. It makes good copy but it pushes the act of creativity into the numbing squalor of chic algorithm…
Read MoreNothing prevents us from using uchrony to look to the future…
Read MoreThis is the third in a weekly baking series dedicated to Leonora Carrington. This recipe fell into my hands on a day I don’t remember…
Read MoreWhen I think of technology, of thinking about technology, I recall Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan and John Cage. Jessica mentions none of them…
Read MoreFor it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded…
Read More“Mexico is a surrealist country”, my host tells me in the living room of his Centro Historico apartment as we ponder over his collection of works by Alan Glass. I’m in Mexico City…
Read MoreOne way of approaching Robinson Crusoe is through the development of the novel; but another immediately suggests itself–through the life of the author.
Read MoreGeorge Meredith as caricatured by Max Beerbohm in Vanity Fair, September 1896 by Andre Gerard I hope that, like me, you enjoy reading other people’s letters, as this essay depends heavily on personal correspondence. By means of letters I want to make a case that the conception of Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse owes…
Read MoreIt is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels.
Read MoreIn class today we were talking about the differences between Vergil and Homer. The difference between the deep administrative state that Vergil is describing, and the unchanging, contextualizing hierarchical background against which Homeric personal relations play out.
Read MoreIf Beckett’s “changing tense” was postmodernism’s last gasp then perhaps it first spluttered into life with the culmination of his great aesthetic transition.
Read MoreYou don’t get to choose when it’s over but, do you get a chance to recognize that it is? Americans have elected an accused child rapist. An accused rapist who is also accused of sexual assault he condones. And that’s just part of it as you know. Trump may go on trial for it and there are other things for which he won’t.
Read MoreDeWitt had her first sense of real academic or literary possibility after arriving at Smith College in 1975, and even that was a letdown.
Read MoreIt is a truth too often accepted, that a modernist writer with Virginia Woolf’s feminist and elitist tendencies, had no use for Victorians in general and for Charles Dickens in particular.
Read MoreVictor Hugo. Portrait by Edmond Bacot, 1862 From Verso Books: There are three kinds of conception of the novelistic. There is what we could call the official lineage, which the academy presents as the history of the French novel, proceeding by way of Stendhal and Flaubert. Here, the novel is the narrative, the capturing of the…
Read MoreDearest Max,
A letter. And fair warning—this is a letter about the afterlife, so read on only if you wish to contemplate such things.
Read More
