Author: Matthew Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
The Hall of Uselessness
Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176383
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577
Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176383
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577
Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.
Classics and Commercials
Author: Edmund Wilson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374600260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson's supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374600260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson's supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.
Masscult and Midcult
Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Image and Imagination
Author: C. S. Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107639271
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
New collection of literary-critical essays and reviews of C. S. Lewis, including previously unpublished and long-unavailable works.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107639271
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
New collection of literary-critical essays and reviews of C. S. Lewis, including previously unpublished and long-unavailable works.
A Temple of Texts
Author: William H. Gass
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307498247
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of “healthy dissidents,” among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez. In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“A lightning bolt,” Gass writes. “Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.”) . . . Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (“A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much.”) . . . Gustave Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gass writes “I began to eat books like an alien worm.” In the concluding essay, “Evil,” Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best. As Gass writes, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.” A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307498247
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of “healthy dissidents,” among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez. In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“A lightning bolt,” Gass writes. “Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.”) . . . Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (“A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much.”) . . . Gustave Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gass writes “I began to eat books like an alien worm.” In the concluding essay, “Evil,” Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best. As Gass writes, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.” A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical.
Writings on Glass
Author: Richard Kostelanetz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520214910
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition. Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520214910
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition. Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition.
The Broken Estate
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0804151903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo- lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is. In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0804151903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo- lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is. In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.
See What Can Be Done
Author: Lorrie Moore
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524732494
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
A remarkable collection of essays and reviews on everything from Philip Roth to Margaret Atwood, from race in America to the shocking state of the GOP—from the national bestselling author of Birds of America and a master of contemporary American fiction. “The kind of book, and the kind of human, you’d want to guide you through the past few decades in letters and culture.... Moore is one of our best documentarians of everyday amazement.” —The New Yorker This essential, enlightening, truly delightful collection shows one of our greatest writers parsing the political, artistic, and media landscape of the past three decades. These sixty-six essays and reviews, culled from the pages of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others, find Lorrie Moore turning her discerning eye on everything from celebrity culture to the wilds of television, from Stephen Sondheim to Barack Obama. See What Can Be Done is a perfect blend of craft, brains, and a knowing, singular take on life, liberty, and the pursuit of (some kind of) happiness.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524732494
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
A remarkable collection of essays and reviews on everything from Philip Roth to Margaret Atwood, from race in America to the shocking state of the GOP—from the national bestselling author of Birds of America and a master of contemporary American fiction. “The kind of book, and the kind of human, you’d want to guide you through the past few decades in letters and culture.... Moore is one of our best documentarians of everyday amazement.” —The New Yorker This essential, enlightening, truly delightful collection shows one of our greatest writers parsing the political, artistic, and media landscape of the past three decades. These sixty-six essays and reviews, culled from the pages of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others, find Lorrie Moore turning her discerning eye on everything from celebrity culture to the wilds of television, from Stephen Sondheim to Barack Obama. See What Can Be Done is a perfect blend of craft, brains, and a knowing, singular take on life, liberty, and the pursuit of (some kind of) happiness.
Through the Window
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345805518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career. • "[A] blissfully intelligent gathering of literary essays." —Financial Times In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling’s view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345805518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career. • "[A] blissfully intelligent gathering of literary essays." —Financial Times In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling’s view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”
Time, History, and Literature
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.