Although Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many journalists and writers to be the best translation of any foreign work into the English language, his choice of Remembrance of Things Past as the general title alarmed the seriously ill Proust and misled generations of readers as to the novelist’s true intent.
Read MoreIt’s been striking me how many parties there are in Shakespeare, how (as in Proust) they seem to occur mid-play…
Read MoreImre Kertész. Photograph by Csaba Segesvári by K. Thomas Kahn Dossier K: A Memoir, by Imre Kertész, Melville House, 224 pp. Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. His radical reconceptualization of the term “Holocaust” — in whose “unscrupulous employment” he locates “a cowardly and unimaginative glibness” — to extend beyond the…
Read Moreby Patrick Bray The Map and the Territory, by Michel Houellebecq, Vintage, 288 pp. When we read literature from the 19th century, we usually try to be vigilant in order not to project our contemporary ideas and obsessions onto the past for fear they might obscure the radical difference of another era. But what happens…
Read MoreThe Death Bed of Madame Bovary, Albert-Auguste Fourie, 1889 by Dylan J. Montanari Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On “Madame Bovary” and “Salammbo”, by Michael Fried, Yale University Press, 196 pp. Readers of contemporary art criticism may have come across the following story about Michael Fried. Fellow critic Rosalind Krauss was with Fried at a show in the…
Read MoreFrom Paradiso by Dante Alighieri. Illustration by Gustave Doré, 1868 by William Flesch When I was younger, in college and grad school, I’d read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their,…
Read Moreby Jeremy Fernando Dedicated to Hannes Charen and all at the Journal for Occupied Studies [1] A little over a year after the first tents were erected in Zuccotti Park, one is left with an overarching sense of futility. Almost as if the Occupy Movement had its moment in the sun—and now it is back…
Read Moreby Joe Linker Conversations With James Joyce, by Arthur Power, Phoenix edition, 1982. Edited with Foreword by Clive Hart. Reprint. Originally published London: Millington, 1974, 128 pp. “The important thing is not what we write,” Joyce tells Arthur Power in Conversations with James Joyce, “but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer…
Read MoreFranz Kafka From The Times Literary Supplement: Stanley Corngold seems to have established himself as the doyen of American Kafkaists. Ruth V. Gross’s preface to Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Corngold, sets the tone. The idea, she explains, was “to assemble a number of distinguished Kafka researchers from North America and Europe to…
Read Moreby Suzanne Ruta Picturing Algeria, by Pierre Bourdieu, forward by Craig Calhoun. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli, Columbia University Press, 230 pp. Algeria, by Dirk Alvermann, Facsimile edition of a work first published in 1960. Steidl, Germany 2011 In 2004, just around the time the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, an exhibition of photographs…
Read MorePortrait of Swinburne by William Scott Bell, painted in 1860 when Swinburne was just 23 years old, 6 years before he’d publish his first book of poems. by Julian Barnes Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. In the first half of the 19th century, the British began to discover Normandy. Previously, the point of…
Read MoreIain McGilchrist by Bharat Azad From the green wall on which they hang in London’s National Gallery, the two bearded men stare down their viewers with assured looks and satisfied demeanours. The two-tiered table, against which they lean languidly, contains the artefacts of Renaissance learning: a pair of dividers, a book on arithmetic, two globes…
Read Moreby Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Once again, we can see that almost the entire world is trembling with the expectation of change. It looks like the world is refusing to suffocate itself with the single philosophy and single ideology that is already there for the last 20 years. Events are taking a different turn – even…
Read MoreChorus, Jeffrey Michael Harp From The Threepenny Review: For such a heavyweight literary project, which might be expected to hedge its bets, Your Face Tomorrow gambles heavily on the narrator’s attraction for the reader. Its three volumes unfold with the searching, cherishing, recursive aimlessness of intimate talk. The style can appear lightly confiding and undefended,…
Read MoreThe Social Network, Columbia Pictures, 2010 by Justin E. H. Smith I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My ‘timeline’, when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, apparently, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts,…
Read MoreT. S. Eliot in 1923. Photography by Lady Ottoline Morrell From Poetry: In the summer of 1918, T.S. Eliot was alarmed by the news that the American armed forces in Europe, then engaged in the final campaign against Germany, would begin to conscript American citizens living in England. Eliot had arrived in England at the…
Read Moreby Gerard Bertrand Marcel Proust and Kafka, the meeting Marcel Proust, 44 rue Hamelin Marcel Proust in Normandy Marcel Proust in Venice Proust at war Marcel Proust and the Young Girls Marcel Proust at The Pré-Catelan Marcel Proust at the Ritz Marcel Proust in Combray At…
Read Moreby Patrick Riley I: Iustitia Caritas Sapientis It is worthwhile to try to recover a tradition of thinking about justice which, since the eighteenth century, has largely disappeared from view: the tradition which defines justice as positive love and benevolence and “charity” and generosity, not as merely following authoritative sovereign law (as in Hobbes’ “legal…
Read MoreFrom Macmillan: The first time my hand was kissed à la française was in the Napoléon III salon of the Élysée Palace. The one doing the kissing was the president of France. In the fall of 2002, Jacques Chirac was seven years into his twelve-year presidency. The Bush administration was moving toward war with Iraq, and the…
Read MoreWho Framed Roger Rabbit, Touchstone Pictures, 1988 From The Independent: From Donna Summer to Dante, everybody loves a “bad girl”. She is a social construct that runs the cultural gamut from classical to cartoonish and back again, wearing only high heels and a smirk. She is literary artifice and historical fact combined; she is both…
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