Harold Bloom: 1930-2019 “Harold Bloom.” Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2018. The Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Harold Bloom is perhaps the best-known literary critic in America today, as well as one of the most controversial. Describing the influence of the past upon poetry as a relationship of conflict, Bloom’s writings have consistently contradicted mainstream…
My chum and technical philosopher par excellence, Andrew Irvine, has just had this massive project come to fruition. What a generous and substantive act of community service for CanLit scholars that even the regressive whiners (you know, the “grievance studies” shit-puppets) will benefit from. Here is Andrew explaining the rationale behind the project. …
A travel article (who in N.O. talks of “the Big Easy”?) . . . and realized, once again, that there’s no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I’d fallen in love with years ago. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy TooleLiteratureLouisiananew orleansphilosophical literatureTennessee Williamsthe moviegoerTruman CapoteWalker Percywilliam…
I’ve been thinking a lot about my instinctive predilection for writers whose life and work bleed into each other, an attraction I felt long before I was fully aware of their biographical details. The first was Kafka; the second Rolfe; the third Musil; the fourth Mishima and the fifth, Toole. I’ve come to the conclusion that these philosophical novelists…
Having just viewed Brideshead Revisited again after 30 some years here is the infamous and deliciously obstreperous John Freeman-Waugh interview. Brideshead RevisitedCatholic ChurchEvelyn WaughHandful of Dustjohn freemanWaugh
Here’s a recent article referring to Joshua Landy’s very interesting work. Check out his just released book How to Do Things with Fictions. This blurb alone is recommendation enough: Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real…
I never knew that a film had been made of these most famous love birds so here it. I can’t vouch for the quality since I haven’t seen it. See if you can access Melvyn Bragg’s podcast with among others Anthony Grayling. Héloïse d’ArgenteuilMelvyn BraggPeter Abelard
Staying with the literature theme of a few days ago and earlier today, here is another write up on Jonathan Gottschall’s new book and an article by JG himself here and a related review article of another book by John Gray here. E. O. WilsonJonathan GottschallJonathan HaidtLiteratureNew AtheismSolzhenitsynStorytelling
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed…
From time to time I’m asked to recommend a novel that has consciousness as its central concern. Two that I’ve read are David Lodge’s Thinks . . . and Dan Lloyd’s Radiant Cool. The former is light entertaining fluff (the “new” university setting will be especially resonant for British readers; most readers will recognise the…
manwithoutqualities 