background preloader

Writers

Facebook Twitter

Exclusive Clip: Philip Roth on His Writing Process (Video) Walter Benjamin and Critical Theory. Walter Benjamin is one of the most influential critical theorists of the early twentieth century. His writings include original theories of the state, fascism and revolution. In the first instalment of a new eight-part series, Andrew Robinson introduces Benjamin's approach, and outlines his methodology. By Andrew Robinson Walter Benjamin stands out as one of the leading theorists of the 1920s-30s wave of Marxist-inspired critical theorists. Benjamin worked at the intersection of Marxist cultural theory with qabalah, a mystical variety of Jewish theology.

Scholars and students are most likely to have come across Benjamin via one of his short works, such as “On the Concept of History”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, “Critique of Violence”, or “The Task of the Translator”. Many of Benjamin’s works take the form of travelogues, in which he recounts his impressions of particular places. In politics, he frequently focuses on the issue of sovereign violence.

Dana Gioia. Essays by Dana Gioia. By DANA GIOIA One hundred years after her birth in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second-half of the 20th century. She is admired in every critical camp—from feminists to formalists—who agree on little else. Her work also attracts a wide general readership. Taught and studied in high schools and universities, Bishop is, for the time being at least, the most popular woman poet in American literature after Emily Dickinson. Such immense regard would have astounded the author. Bishop (1911–79) had a high regard for her own work, which she crafted with scrupulous care, but she never courted a broad public. She wrote slowly and published little.

What makes her pre-eminence particularly remarkable is that she wrote so little. But what poems! Critics have a hard time describing the special quality of Bishop's poetry. 'Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? —Mr. John Leonard. Sontag In Which We Experience The Pain Of Susan Sontag. Photo by annie leibovitz Frantically Impure by ALEX CARNEVALE The problem for me is to transfer a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious all-around living.

-Aldous Huxley Susan Sontag's father died when she was four, and her mother Mildred moved the sad family to Tucson. Mildred was not very motherly, at least not in the way Susan thought she should be, having read a biography of Madame Curie and Little Women. Descendants of European Jews, Susan's parents had met in the Catskills, where Mildred Rosenblatt worked as a waitress. Her mother remarried. She wrote in her journal: I believe: (a) That there is no personal god or life after death (b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e. (c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence (d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy (e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life "drag" photo by Irving Penn Ms.

Susan Sontag on the Creative Purpose of Boredom. Susan Sontag: Notes On "Camp" Published in 1964. Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp.

" A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.

And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Taste has no system and no proofs. These notes are for Oscar Wilde. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947) German poet, playwright, and theoretician, Bertolt Brecht—author of such famous works as The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Mother Courage and Her Children (1938)—was a committed Marxist who proposed a new theater to shatter what he saw as the comfortable middle-class conventions of both tragic and realist drama.

His theory of “epic theater” underlay his practice, an attempt to shock audiences out of complacency through what he called Verfremdungseffekt (“defamiliarization” or “distancing effect”). Brecht’s enormous influence was felt not only throughout Europe, but also in the United States, where he settled for a short time along with many other German artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1943, Brecht collaborated with fellow exiles Fritz Lang and composer Hanns Eisler on the film Hangmen Also Die! , his only Hollywood script, loosely based on the assassination of number-two leader of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich.

Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin (1936) Source: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television;Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005. “Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy.

When I Stop Believing in Fiction. Like a late victorian clergyman sweating in the dark over his Doubts, I have moments when my faith in fiction falters and then comes to the edge of collapse. I find myself asking, “Am I really a believer?” And then, “Was I ever?” First to go are the disjointed, upended narratives of experimental fiction. When the god of fiction deserts you, everything must go. This is when I think I will go to my grave and not read Anna Karenina a fifth time, or Madame Bovary a fourth. Such apostasy creeps into the wide gap that separates the finishing of one novel and the start of the next. A recent reversion to faith started with the rereading of two short stories. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or know at the end of yet another novel?

The second was John Updike’s “Twin Beds in Rome.” I have a memory of myself as a child, caressing a detail in a novel. Virginia Woolf on Happiness and the Limits of Psychotherapy. Virginia Woolf spitting some hot fire: Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd and end, some sound, some sight. She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. (To the Lighthouse, p. 38.) In thinking about this passage, I found that it ties in nicely to something I've been thinking a lot about ever since reading Ernest Becker's Denial of Death (in particular the chapter entitled "The Present Outcome of Psychotherapy").

Here's where Becker gets contraversial: Becker uses these observations to argue that psychotherapy is a poor road to happiness. A large part of To the Lighthouse deals with these questions. In other words, maybe psychotherapy is a poor substitute for religion. De Beauvoir In Which We Prefer To Be Simone De Beauvoir. Paris Girl by ELLEN COPPERFIELD What is an adult? A child blown up by age. Young Simone de Beauvoir shared her room with the maid. At her usual table in the Café de Flore, 1945 Her parents spoke to her only in a reproving tone during those difficult years. She wrote of Hélène that "she was my accomplice, my subject, my creature. The sisters aged three and five Although Simone's father was engaged in the slow process of falling out of the upper class, he would not send his children to the public lycée, fearing contamination.

The de Beauvoirs fled Paris in fear at the onset of the first World War, but soon returned. In her 1990 biography, Deirdre Bair recalls Simone's younger sister Hélène telling her, "In our games when she liked to play the saint, I think it must have given me pleasure to martyrize her even though she was so kind. Most of Simone and Hélène's classmates had left the city. She wrote in her memoirs that "I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Ten Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries from 2013. In 2013 we lost two Nobel laureates, a revered editor and teacher, plus writers of crime fiction, literary fiction, poetry, history, essays, biographies, screenplays, mega-bestsellers, movie criticism, and memoirs.

Here is a highly selective compendium: Evan S. Connell While it may not be accurate to pin Evan S. For many readers, Connell’s most indelible novels are Mrs. Mrs. She really intended to force a discussion on election eve. Connell never married, never owned a computer, never sought notoriety. Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe exploded on the world literary scene with the 1958 publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, which invoked Ibo voices from his native Nigeria, boldly challenged European concepts of Africans, and in a single stroke anointed Achebe the father of African fiction. Achebe, who died on March 21 at 82, produced five novels and many short stories over the next three decades. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Elmore Leonard In the matter of Alvin B. Seamus Heaney Tom Clancy. Arthur Rimbaud’s Brief Career. On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde.

As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? Beautiful Failures: Nabokov and Flaubert’s Early Attempts. A first novel is like spring lamb, tender and pink. Athenas that leap from the writer’s head armor-clad—Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” say—may not count.

Better to find a novel that requires indulgence—Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” or Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Débuts, even from much tougher writers, allow the reader to enjoy a guilty sense of paternalism: you protect débuts like Naipaul’s droll “Miguel Street,” or James’s thin “Daisy Miller,” or Coetzee’s compacted, miserable “Dusklands,” from the full force of your regular expectations. But then there are the real treasures, the rehearsals that never got published, the artifacts that invite you to reconstruct what an author wanted to do, before she did it.

Did Jane Austen know, sitting with “Elinor and Marianne” on her lap, that she would keep writing, that she would never stop, that the rudiments on her page would refine themselves into anything like “Pride and Prejudice”? Do you go to high school here? Speak, Butterfly - Issue 8: Home. The life and work of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov referenced many symbols, none so much as the butterfly. Butterflies prompted Nabokov’s travels across the United States, exposing him to the culture and physical environment that he would transform into his best-known novel, Lolita.

Butterflies motivated his parallel career in science, culminating in a then-ignored evolutionary hypothesis, which would be vindicated 34 years after his death using the tools of modern genetic analysis. And it was the butterfly around which some of Nabokov’s fondest childhood memories revolved. Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia to an aristocratic family, and spent much of his childhood at the family’s country estate in Vyra, 40 miles outside of the city.

The Nabokovs were forced to flee Russia in 1919 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. After moving between England, Germany, and France, Nabokov came to the U.S., returning for the final years of his life to Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Raymond Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder R Chandler. Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs.

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Raymond Carver. Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s. [citation needed] Early life[edit] Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington.[1] His father, a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943. Writing career[edit] Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963.

In the mid-1960s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. Raymond Carver’s OKCupid Profile, Edited by Gordon Lish. Gordon Lish. Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard. Kurt Vonnegut: You're Allowed To Be In Love Three Times In Your Life. Kurt Vonnegut term paper assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interview w DFW. THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AUDIO PROJECT | Audio archive of interviews with, profiles of, readings by, and eulogies to David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace. 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web. This Should Not Be A Love Story: Reading DT Max’s Biography Of David Foster Wallace. Teaching materials from the David Foster Wallace archive. A New Brilliant Start by Elaine Blair. ‘Both Flesh and Not’ by David Foster Wallace. Harper's Magazine: Tense Present. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE DEMOLISHED. Animations Revive Lost Interviews with David Foster Wallace, Jim Morrison & Dave Brubeck.

THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW - Pynchon on Marquez. Interview with Alan Moore. Interview with Maurice Sendak. The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Margaret Atwood. George Orwell - The Orwell Prize. George Orwell’s ‘Diaries’ Orwell's review of Mein Kampf. It Ain’t Easy: William Gaddis’s Life in Letters. Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson | Still Ahead of His Time | Arts & Culture.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Drag (1916) Ayn Rand is for children. The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Joyce Carol Oates. A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges. Thinkers, lifelong learning and informal education @ the informal education homepage. History's 100 Geniuses of Language and Literature, Visualized. When Respected Authors, from Goethe to Kerouac, Try Their Hand at Painting. The Bookstore Strikes Back - Ann Patchett. Nietzsche Is Dead.

Herta Muller calls Mo Yan's Nobel win 'a catastrophe' “That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident.... T. S. Eliot on Idea Incubation, Inhibition, and the Mystical Quality of Creativity + a Rare Recording. What Would Machiavelli Do? J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary Fame. Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds - Perla Sassón-Henry.