David Trotter is emeritus professor of literature at Cambridge. Brute Meaning, a book of essays, some of which were first published in the LRB, came out in 2020.
The problem with Garbo is that she rapidly became, and still remains, iconically iconic. It isn’t just that when we talk about Garbo we’re talking about what it means to be talked about – to the extent that the person she was and the films she made now seem almost beside the point. It is rather that, to judge by the tone of much of the commentary, the person and the films were never the point in the first place.
There are more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family...
Agimmick is a gadget that flatters to deceive. It reminds us of the difference between what we need and what we can be persuaded to want. Raspberry mojitos hint at arcadia, but they’re never going to taste as good as the ones nobody thought to add raspberries to. An ironing board is a plank with a collapsible undercarriage right up until the moment you try to replace the one you have...
What most distinguishes Dickens’s novels from those by almost any other writer, and from life, is that hardly anything in them ever recedes entirely into the background. Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation. His often anodyne protagonists have to compete for our attention with the...
Charlie Chaplin had already starred in 41 films before he became an icon, universally recognisable by his appearance, mannerisms and pattern of behaviour. A lot happens in these films, mostly having to do with the hero’s pursuit of basic needs (food, money, sex, status) through the exercise of a kind of flighty, Zen belligerence. In Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), a cameraman’s...
David Trotter talks to Joanne O’Leary about the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen, from her weird families and idiosyncrasies of style, to her mastery of atmospherics and prescient use of technology...
What is now called trauma theory informs contemporary biography as much as it does the academic practice of literary history. Belief in trauma as a kind of agency, as a cultural force – in...
Once, recycling was a way of life, conducted without civic ordinances, highway beautification statutes, adopt-a-motorway programmes or special bins for paper, glass and metal. Until the mid-19th...
The Wellesley Index originated in its founding editor Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties....
‘Fit audience, though few,’ said Milton; and thereupon declared the terms in which the issue of reader-response would be considered by poets from his day to ours. The widely-read...
So Pope wrote in 1737, since which time Cowley has passed almost entirely into the hands of academic literary historians, whose chief service to him has been the rediscovery of his unfinished...
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