Search Results

“... elision and odd juxtapositions are hallmarks of visual artists like Picasso, and of writers like Joyce and Eliot, who created stream-of-consciousness narratives akin to Nijinsky’s.’ She even suggests that the diary is a kind of prose cubism, capturing a real, fragmented, multi-dimensional world of simultaneous conflicting emotions. Of course, there has ...”

“... is that which argues that Moore found a middle way between realism and aestheticism, influencing Joyce and therefore the course of the 20th-century novel. The most amusing and informative sections of Frazier’s biography are those which outline Moore’s flirtation with the Irish Literary Renaissance. Increasingly dissatisfied with the naturalistic novel ...”

“... some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of Books did? Or how much Martin Amis drinks these days, and where? These scenarios seem ...”

“... For a writer who several years ago published a ‘Manifesto Against Manifestoes’, James Fenton has published his fair share of manifestoes, including a disguised one for a ‘Martian school’ to which he did not belong. The latest, ‘Manila Manifesto’, comes as part of a package with his new book Manila Envelope ...”

“... Manley Hopkins and John Millington Synge, whose work he would defend vehemently; he met the young James Joyce, who declared him ‘very loquacious’. If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too bothered if they did not pay. ‘I painted for nothing when I could not get the money,’ he said years later. ‘In ...”

“... the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this ...”

“... be disquieting for a creative writer. In this respect Naipaul is more like Solzhenitsyn than, say, Joyce, whose appeal can transcend (or confound) traditional political divides. In the case of Naipaul, those on the left, especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael ...”

“... a relation which usually turns out to be frustratingly oblique, or, as the ironic form of Joyce’s Ulysses would suggest, flagrantly artificial. The Criterion, like all such mandarin Kulturkritik, strikes a pose of serene disinterestedness where politics are concerned, committed only to an Arnoldian free play of critical intelligence. A literary ...”

“... be expected to do too much. No Country for Young Men is simultaneously about 1979 and 1921. James Duffy has come to Dublin to make a programme about Sparky Driscoll, a fellow American killed long ago in the Troubles. Another way back to the death of Driscoll is through the scattered wits of Sister Judith, a nun who has been buried in a convent all these ...”

“... cows. But the book’s fractured descriptions of the New York landscape, heavily influenced by Joyce and Eliot, are resourcefully done. David’s fraught transactions with other children are brilliantly dramatised, and despite the solemn treatment of his terrors and coming of age, there’s more than a touch of black farce in the novel’s stage ...”

“... as nation-builders, constructing an intellectually plausible lineage for the nation state. As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob demonstrate, a particular version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of ...”

“... she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry James, for example, are full of a sexual desire he has ‘forgotten’ in this sense, that is, neither shouted out nor encrypted nor entirely repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to Women ...”

“... experiment with an unlimited, flowing style, almost a form of stream-of-consciousness (he admired Joyce, Céline and Beckett) in which characters associate and soliloquise madly. He called it pabeni, to which the closest approximation, according to Skvorecky, is ‘palavering’. This palavering is really anecdote without end. The lovely truancy with which ...”

“... of Ireland appeals, in every sense and whatever its troubles, to Seamus Heaney. Some writers – Joyce, Milosz, Stevenson – have to stand well back from the native canvas in order to see the composition, but others dwell inside the painting, loving the paint, the smell of oils and the fine smear of themselves. This new book – written ‘for both with ...”