Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 48 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

All your walkmans fizz in tune

Adam Mars-Jones: Eimear McBride, 8 August 2013

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing 
by Eimear McBride.
Galley Beggar, 203 pp., £11, June 2013, 978 0 9571853 2 6
Show More
Show More
... head’, though the mother, choosing not to see, has ‘turned her good eyes blind’. The word Hugh Kenner chose in The Stoic Comedians to describe the style of phrasemaking in Ulysses was ‘unmortared’. Joyce brought together words that seemed to have no affinity and made them fit flush against each other, leaving no gap. He built dry-stone walls ...

Why am I so fucked up?

Christian Lorentzen: 37 Shades of Zadie, 8 November 2012

NW 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 295 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 0 241 14414 5
Show More
Show More
... if not Forrest Gump. But then again the modernists had no aversion to pop culture ephemera. As Hugh Kenner showed in A Sinking Island, we might not have had Ulysses without Tit-Bits. The internet turns out to be Natalie’s undoing. She takes to visiting a website (it might be the one Leah tells her about during an instant-message ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
Show More
Show More
... were praised as skilful, though Kenneth Tynan ventured to call the latter play ‘banal’. Hugh Kenner complained that the characters in them speak English English, rather than American English, though why he expected otherwise of a writer who had been listening to English talk for half a century is a question. So the story ends on the familiar ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
Show More
Show More
... of admiring scholars, and a certain amount of courage for the critic to resist the urge to please. Hugh Kenner, an adept in the art of winning friends and influencing people, recalls in his preface to The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1960) that ‘at my one meeting with Mr Eliot, I offered to complete a book on his literary career without pestering ...

The Ultimate Novel

William Empson, 2 September 1982

Ulysses 
by Hugh Kenner.
Allen and Unwin, 182 pp., £10, March 1982, 0 00 480003 6
Show More
A Starchamber Quiry: A James Joyce Centennial Volume 1882-1982 
edited by E.L. Epstein.
Methuen, 164 pp., £9.50, February 1982, 0 416 31560 7
Show More
Show More
... talk in the Library, at about 3.30, and he is with the party of medical students by about 10.00. Kenner thinks he has been boozing and standing drinks all the time, which proves he has gone rotten, and he does seem to have lost 13 shillings – but surely this includes the outlay for the student party itself. He notices, earlier in the day, that he needs to ...

Space Wars

Fredric Jameson, 4 April 1996

The Invisible in Architecture 
edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn.
Academy, 516 pp., $115, February 1994, 1 85490 285 7
Show More
The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism 
by Roger Scruton.
Carcanet, 158 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 1 85754 054 9
Show More
Show More
... that way, by the stimulation and vigorous reactivation of its own internal relations and circuits. Hugh Kenner once observed the not-so-subterranean formal influence on books like Ulysses of the existence of dictionaries and encyclopedias as proudly linear modes of organisation. Mallarmé imagined in vain a book that would remodel itself perpetually, like ...

Flann O’Brien’s Lies

Colm Tóibín, 5 January 2012

... and deep deconstruction would win tenure for making serious. In his book A Colder Eye, Hugh Kenner asked how O’Brien dared to try ‘to suppress his own great book’, The Third Policeman, which Kenner thought ‘a unique mature minor novel’ (whatever that is) compared to At Swim-Two-Birds, which he ...

Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

The World, the Text and the Critic 
by Edward Said.
Faber, 327 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 571 13264 2
Show More
The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 201 pp., £4.95, December 1983, 0 416 36140 4
Show More
The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. VIII: The Present 
edited by Boris Ford.
Penguin, 619 pp., £3.50, October 1983, 0 14 022271 5
Show More
Show More
... years since Yeats’s Introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t ...

Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
Show More
Show More
... as Carey reminds us it was in A Little History, as ‘a “triumph of philistinism”’.Hugh Kenner, who devotedly attended the monuments of high modernism from the other side of the Atlantic, once wrote a spirited book called A Sinking Island, all about the dismal effects that an endemic philistinism had wrought in England, encompassing ...

Tell me what you talked

James Wood: V.S. Naipaul, 11 November 1999

Letters between a Father and Son 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Little, Brown, 333 pp., £18.50, October 1999, 0 316 63988 5
Show More
Show More
... keep fizzing even as Epictetus sedates. Above all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating ...

Post-Modern Vanguard

Edward Mendelson, 3 September 1981

After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde 
by Christopher Butler.
Oxford, 177 pp., £7.95, November 1980, 0 19 815766 5
Show More
Show More
... obligations of citizenship. Normally invisible, traces of it surface in the work of a critic like Hugh Kenner, pillar of the reactionary National Review, who gives equal praise to the joking despair of Beckett and the regimented utopianism of Buckminster Fuller. The alliance, in one form or another, is of long standing. Baudelaire understood its nature ...

Pound’s Friends

Donald Davie, 23 May 1985

Pound’s Cantos 
by Peter Makin.
Allen and Unwin, 349 pp., £20, March 1985, 0 04 811001 9
Show More
To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos 
by Christine Froula.
Yale, 208 pp., £18.50, February 1985, 0 300 02512 2
Show More
Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing 
by Peter Nicholls.
Macmillan, 263 pp., £25, September 1984, 0 333 36159 8
Show More
Show More
... is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young Hugh Kenner from whom I would guess Makin learned it. But someone who so dashingly cuts his corners – he does so at one point about the iambic pentameter, and elsewhere (really rather deplorably) about the British Great War poets – has to be watched, all ...

The Twin Sister’s Twin Sister

Adam Mars-Jones: Dag Solstad, 9 May 2019

Armand V.: Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel 
by Dag Solstad, translated by Steven Murray.
Vintage, 256 pp., £11.99, May 2018, 978 1 78470 846 7
Show More
T. Singer 
by Dag Solstad, translated by Tiina Nunnally.
Vintage, 272 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78470 306 6
Show More
Show More
... about Everyman’). The conscious disintegration of technique can be a productive process, as Hugh Kenner argues apropos of Beckett, whom he sees as having made a long journey towards an ideal incapacity: The early Murphy is at least something like a novel. It has even a timetable, and one would have expected practice to increase its author’s ...

Will to Literature

David Trotter: Modernism plc, 13 May 1999

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 227 pp., £16.95, January 1999, 0 300 07050 0
Show More
Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study 
by Tim Armstrong.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £14.95, March 1998, 0 521 59997 0
Show More
Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative 
by Harold Segel.
Johns Hopkins, 282 pp., £30, September 1998, 0 8018 5821 6
Show More
Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production 
by Douglas Mao.
Princeton, 308 pp., £32.50, November 1998, 0 691 05926 8
Show More
Show More
... critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
Show More
Show More
... it all in train, like the butterfly whose wings started the storm. In his 1980 book on Ulysses, Hugh Kenner wrote that there was a rumour that Griffith had a ‘Jewish adviser-ghostwriter’, but the annotators here state that they ‘have been unable to substantiate the existence of such a rumour’. Unless, of course, the rumour is in Ulysses ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences