Literature & Criticism

Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.              Dream of the...

A man is fishing under the iron bridge.If I watch him watching the water, I see he is lostin thought. His morning dream came with him.His children are soft-voiced with pain; the dreamis a wheel...

The short time they have been together, they have shared sex, the house and garden! – food and drink! – what some would consider freedom! – although this is probably the last...

filled the fields. The way forward filled with the wayback. Are those humans out there orjust hollows filled with mercury & ash.When it comes into view the mountain is cleaved open.The silver...

In The Lesser Bohemians, sex is where the narrative sits, not where it goes from time to time. It’s shown as part of people’s lives, as sex is. Sex in The City Changes Its Face is a different thing....

What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature...

From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film, Boccaccio has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means...

A lot of contradictions are laid out in Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice, and one’s tolerance for graduate students – clearly infantilised by their milieu, despite being in their mid-twenties...

For many years, if asked about Hamlet’s poetic quality, I would have quoted not ‘To be, or not to be’ (which strikes me as grossly overrated in its importance), but Polonius’s casual words to the...

Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace come to mind as antecedents, though Tulathimutte has their wit without their warmth. He writes like a child holding a microscope over the ground, peering down at an...

To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of constantly multiplying targets would not be entirely wrong. The truly misanthropic,...

Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys...

All the revulsion in Jane DeLynn’s novel can seem antagonistic, but it’s driven by more complicated feelings. Unlike the teenage Lynn, we and the narrator know that disgust is not the only lens through...

Achille Mbembe is the pessimist’s optimist: he delivers a devastating analysis of the contemporary moment while never losing sight of the possibility for a better future. This explains his disdain for...

There is a world which is at times – and today even more – regressive and frightening; cultural analysis must never make the mistake of thinking either that it alone will redeem or can substitute for...

The crux of Daniel Kehlmann’s Director is whether it’s weakness or necessity that makes G.W. Pabst compromise. On the one hand, he’s disgusted by swastikas and Hitler salutes; on the other, his need...

The house style of the early Partisan Review was hard-headed, truculent, dismissive of religiosity (‘mystification’), academicism and ‘folk culture’, sceptical of the American weakness for self-serving...