Showing Results for
- Literature Criticism (46)
Search Results
- 46
Literature Criticism
- 46
-
From:The Southern Review (Vol. 45, Issue 4) Peer-ReviewedInteresting and important as it is to think about how fiction works, it is maybe even more interesting and important to ask why it matters in the first place. I mean serious fiction, the kind that may entertain but is...
-
From:The American Scholar (Vol. 70, Issue 4)When I was growing up in Michigan, my mother was the great reader in my family, and my father, though deeply creative in his professional life, did not read at all. I worked out a big part of my Oedipal conflict, if...
-
From:The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Vol. 16, Issue 1) Peer-ReviewedIt has been previously stated that the novel does not reflect the present culture and that the novelists are unable to present the reality made highly mutative and fragmented by fast-changing technology. On the other...
-
From:Harvard Review (Issue 45)I WAKE EARLY when I travel. I wake early even when I don't travel, but the coming-to in a strange bed is a whole other business, starting with the almost visceral gyroscoping that for some seconds has me flailing...
-
From:The New Yorker (Vol. 78, Issue 42)In some artists--James Merrill and Milan Kundera, for instance--the inborn human structure-making impulse heats to fever, yielding works that reflect intense private struggles for equilibrium. Among our younger...
-
From:Chicago Review (Vol. 42, Issue 2) Peer-ReviewedTechnology affects the meaning of literature. The medium through which a piece is transmitted changes the essence of the literature, in the same way that the invention of automobiles changed the world. A piece taken from...
-
From:Harvard Review (Issue 45)MY PARENTS HAVE just come back from a trip to Latvia, a trip they still make several times a year, though they are, after not seeming to for so very long, feeling their age, as was confirmed by this latest going, which...
-
From:The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Vol. 14, Issue 1) Peer-ReviewedPaul Auster's 'In the Country of Last Things' can be read as a modernist account of the soul's dread of existence. The story of Anna Blume's entrapment in a disappearing civilization is an analogy for everybody's plight...
-
From:Ploughshares (Vol. 26, Issue 1)I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien--as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near--and confided that his somewhat...
-
From:Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing (Vol. 8, Issue 2)Seamus Heaney, the public poet, my friend--what could I say here that could not be said as well by anyone who knew and loved the man? Already I feel the prickle of possessiveness, the territorial sideways look. Getting...
-
From:The Wilson Quarterly (Vol. 25, Issue 4)Ours is the great era of infotainment, of the much lamented migration away from serious reading. The communications revolution -- everything from e-mail to the ubiquitous cell phone - has spawned what seems to many an...
-
From:The American Scholar (Vol. 79, Issue 2)The nature of transition, how change works its way through a system, how people acclimate to the new--all these questions. So much of the change is driven by technologies that are elusive if not altogether invisible in...
-
From:The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Vol. 20, Issue 1) Peer-ReviewedThis is not really an essay about Brad Morrow or his projected trilogy so much as it is a reflection on the nature of linked works of fiction as inspired--and constrained--by a reading of Morrow's Trinity Fields and a...
-
From: New York Times Book Review[(review date 3 November 1996) Birkerts is a noted critic and author of several books, including The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1995). In the following review, he offers a negative...
-
From: Parnassus: Poetry in Review[(essay date 1991) In the following essay, Birkerts examines Helen Vendler's assertion that Jarrell "put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry." Birkerts ultimately agrees with Vendler's statement,...
-
From: Michigan Quarterly Review[(essay date Fall 1983) In the following essay, Birkerts ponders the role of television in contemporary society, describing its "consciousness" with respect to the social implications of "watching" it.] No one who has...
-
From: The New RepublicThe precision-minded Swiss have never been famous for grand gesture or passionate utterance. It is as if exposure to the mighty contours of the land has over generations pruned back the national soul and turned its...
-
From: New Republic[(review date 2 November 1992) In the following review, Birkerts praises the premise of Before and After, but believes the characters lack depth and dimension and that Brown doesn't follow up on some of the novel's...
-
From: The New Republic[(review date 11 July 1994) In the following review, The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses, and comments on the differences between these two works and previous novels.] The myth of Cormac McCarthy is the myth of hard...
-
From: Chicago Tribune Books[(review date 11 January 1987) In the following review, Birkerts offers a positive evaluation of Anywhere but Here.] In the opening scene of Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here, 12-year-old Ann August stands at the edge...