In yesterday’s post I had quoted W. H. Auden‘s review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories in responding to his acid assessment of a reductionist impulse in art criticism. Today, I quote him again, on a topic that is of similarly perennial interest, the problem of conformism as a hallmark of non-conformity:Continue reading “The Conformist Non-Conformist”
Category Archives: Literature
The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses
In his review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories W. H. Auden wrote, Polar opposites as in appearance they look, the two literary doctrines of Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s-Sake, as propounded by Zola and Mallarmé, are really both expressions of the same megalomania. The aesthete is, at least, frank aboutContinue reading “The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses”
Reading Native Son
Partha Chatterjee describes his experience of first reading Edward Said‘s Orientalism: I will long remember the day I read Orientalism. It must have been in November or December of 1980. In India, this season is classically called Hemanta and assigned a slot between autumn and winter. In Calcutta, where nothing classical remains untarnished, all that thisContinue reading “Reading Native Son”
Unmasking our Self-Deception about Self-Improvement
In reviewing the incongruous medley of Dan Brown‘s Inferno and two new translations of Dante‘s classic (by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang), Robert Pogue Harrison writes: Much of the fascination of the Inferno revolves around Dante’s probing of the covert psychic recesses of his characters’ inner will. The sinners’ great soliloquies are self-serving andContinue reading “Unmasking our Self-Deception about Self-Improvement”
F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Consumer Society and its Foundations
The consumer society and the vast political economy it engenders and sustains has long been a subject of philosophical interest, of concern, attention, critique and satire. These acquire an added edge as the toll it exacts on the environment–via global warming–becomes increasingly clear. Novelists have not been immune to its fascinations either. For a longContinue reading “F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Consumer Society and its Foundations”
The Physical Dimensions of Writing
Writing is a physical activity. This fact is quite well known to schoolchildren who write–with pencils and pens–diligently, and at length on their notebooks. (It must have been known too, to Georges Simenon, whose fingers must have needed dousing in ice water after his daily ritual of prolific pencil-fueled writing.) But it is even commonContinue reading “The Physical Dimensions of Writing”
Beauvoir, Morrison and Gordimer on Sex
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that a conceptual inversion of the sexual act was possible: perhaps woman was not merely ‘penetrated’ or ‘entered into’ by man, perhaps she ‘enveloped’ or ‘engulfed’ him instead. Sex was not an ‘invasion’ of the woman, it was an active seeking out instead. The change in perspective engendered by consideringContinue reading “Beauvoir, Morrison and Gordimer on Sex”
John Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’: Bleak and Unsparing
John Hillcoat’s The Road is a faithful cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic world. It is almost unrelentingly grim because it is unsparing about the bitter truths of a world in which food and morality are both in short supply: existence is a mere step up from the eventual slow deathContinue reading “John Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’: Bleak and Unsparing”
The Never-Ending Angst Over the Nobel Prize In Literature
Ian Crouch asks why more Americans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature. (The last one to do so was Toni Morrison in 1993, an award I remember especially clearly because a) I had only recently started reading her and b) I was struck by the fact of an African-American woman writer being so recognized.)Continue reading “The Never-Ending Angst Over the Nobel Prize In Literature”
CLR James on the ‘Surprisingly Moderate’ Reprisals of the Haitian Revolution
Here are two very powerful passages from CLR James‘ classic The Black Jacobins: Touissant L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage Books, second edition revised, New York, 1962, pp. 88-89): The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knewContinue reading “CLR James on the ‘Surprisingly Moderate’ Reprisals of the Haitian Revolution”
Samir Chopra 