David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "literature"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "literature".
David Quint on Structuralism and New Historicism and Theory in General
David Quint, in his estimable book Epic and Empire, argues against the totalizing tendency of much literary theory and criticism of the 20th century. He speaks of poststructuralism and New Historicism but the general argument ...
Euripides’ Bacchae: Two Boys at Play
The Bacchae has a reputation as Euripides’ greatest play. It’s hard for me to say. Even for a wildly eccentric and subversive playwright like Euripides, it is very odd. It was one of his very last plays, ...
S. Yizhar: Khirbet Khizeh
Yizhar was an Israeli soldier in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and it is evident that this novella was based heavily on his own experience. It is the story of a soldier expelling Palestinians from the ...
Gregor von Rezzori: An Ermine in Czernopol
I’m coming to believe that Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was one of the greatest postwar German-language writers. His work has a sensitivity and more significantly an intelligence stronger than so many of his contemporaries. His ...
Robert Musil: from the Diaries
13 August 1910. Before I went to sleep, one or two other things occurred to me about my way of working (in the novellas). What matters to me is the passionate energy of the idea. ...
Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada
1. The Riddle I loathe Van Veen. Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor (1969) (full text available here) is Nabokov’s very long novel about brother-sister incest in an alternate reality. Most people don’t consider it one of ...
R.P. Blackmur on James Joyce
They say the best criticism articulates what you sensed but couldn’t conceptualize, and I think Blackmur hits a very major nail on the head here, identifying the ever-growing problem of literature for the last 200 ...