Literary Criticism
Contemporary Literature
Faith Hahn and
Literary Criticism
"Prose-forward,” though, goes a long way toward explaining what books are counted as literary in the real world. Not just as a term that explains what unites the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, the Kmart realism of Ann Beattie, the lush prose of Toni Morrison, and [insert infinite other examples here]. But also what genre authors are counted among... See more
Lincoln Michel • On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
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
Apropos of nothing.
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
Poetry is an essential part of society—but only as itself and not as a vehicle for something else.
Micah Mattix • The Integrity of Poetry | Micah Mattix
Apropos of nothing.
In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more
Brandon • emotional support trauma plot
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.
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