Literary Criticism
Contemporary Literature
Faith Hahn and
Literary Criticism
She has said she is against “the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be...” Thus, she continues to absent herself from the marketing of her work. While acknowledging her position is extreme, she maintains “that a book has to absolutely make it on... See more
GD Dess • “Good books are stunning charges of vital energy” —Elena Ferrante
Apropos of nothing.
Houellebecq wore his biography, professional identity, marital status, and psychiatric condition – everything modern society considers intrinsic and defining of the individual – as an amusing costume to be played with and discarded. He frees himself through his work from the straitjacket of ‘identity politics’ which placates its prisoners, like a... See more
Alexander • Poseur
Culture and Imperialism
An exploration of the cultural and literary manifestations of imperialism in 19th and early 20th century Britain and France, and its relationship with the formation of national identity.
oldemc.english.ucsb.eduCulture and Imperialism, Edward Said.
There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more
In Defense … of the Ellipsis
I’ve been mainlining Le Guin’s non-fiction writing. It strikes me reading this passage again that she’s bumping up against Harry Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit.” To paraphrase, that bullshit doesn’t concern itself with the truth—it’s objective is outside the realm of information. I don’t think fiction is bullshit, obviously. But now I’m curious about the qualities of fiction as they relate to the qualities of bullshit.
Literary texts tend to distort the linearity of narrative sequence, and to reproduce the coexistence and simultaneity of interiorized events that resist conventional linear chronology. The narrative thread unravels freely between past and present, between different temporal planes, combining high and low registers, erudite literary references,... See more
Translation as a Practice of Acceptance - Asymptote
Alina Stefanescu's personal library of writing, essays, literary criticism.