Earl Miner

Earl Miner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is co-author of the forthcoming Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature.

Letter

Give us a break

7 January 1993

Reviewing M.B. Parkes on Punctuation in the West (LRB, 7 January), Danny Karlin earns our gratitude by opening the subject in arresting ways. He also leaves me feeling (such is readerly ingratitude) that his apertures need enlarging. He quotes with approval Parkes’s remark: ‘the merit of scriptio continua was that it presented the reader with a neutral text.’ After it has left the author, every...
Letter

Majesty

17 August 1989

There is no mystery about the ‘extract from a Japanese poem’ that Daniel Kevles (LRB, 17 August) reports Max Delbrück modestly sending friends who congratulated him on his Nobel Prize. It is taken from the opening and closing 16 lines leading off The Tale of the Heike, the third and by far the handsomest translation of which, by Helen McCullough, has recently been published by the Stanford University...
Letter

Onomasticon

21 February 1985

SIR: Marilyn Butler’s handsome and just review of Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs (LRB, 21 February) touches on many matters, three of which I should like to speak of (reversing her order). Butler says that Lurie ‘seems to insist … on the existence outside the world of her fiction, not of a proliferating series of fictions, but of a stable and real world’. Butler also mentions Lurie’s ‘acts...

In Praise of History

Earl Miner, 1 March 1984

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Letter

Pepys’s Place

16 June 1983

SIR: No doubt other readers besides myself were impressed by Pat Rogers’s article on the Pepys Diary, (LRB, 16 June) which extends far beyond the last two volumes (Companion and Index). Two or three matters seem a bit weak. His preference for Evelyn over Pepys is personal (and well illustrated by Evelyn on the deaths of his children), although I doubt that the wicked world will share his choice....

Michi and Meiji

Nobuko Albery, 24 July 1986

I once received this stern admonition from an English editor: ‘If you intend to be a Japanese novelist whom we are translating into English, okay – I accept your manuscript as it is...

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