Middle Passage

Most “atrocity” writing—the literature of slavery, the literature of the Holocaust—makes for grim reading. The aim is to excite ideas of pai...

“Sixty Million and more”

In the annals of comparative martyrology, [Toni Morrison] appeared to suggest, the toll of the slave trade was ten times greater than the Na...

Extra-textual knowledge

In a comment to my post on difficulty, Jonathan confesses that he is puzzled by what seem to be contradictory claims that I have advanced r...

Happy birthday to me

A Commonplace Blog is one year old. To be accurate, it was a year old on Tuesday. I can’t believe that I missed my own birthday! (“Do you a...

Needless difficulty

In his interview yesterday with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal (many thanks to Dave Lull for bringing it to my notice)...

Difficulty

In attempting to account for “the complex feeling of delight” to be had from great poetry, Wordsworth enumerated five sources in the Prefac...

The most overrated novel ever

The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved . Upon its initial publication, it was rightly passed over for the 1988 National Book Aw...

Auto-da-fé

A Baptist church in Canton, North Carolina, a town “nestled among five hills along the banks of the Pigeon River in the mountains of Western...

Existence of the text

“As an object a book can sit around for years, resting comfortably on a library shelf, but as a text ,” I wrote a decade ago, summarizing t...

“Experience of the text”

The condition of literary texts—their mode of existence, to use a phrase from Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature —is treated by critic...

The Never-Ending Journey

“The Never-Ending Journey,” my review-essay on Lionel Trilling in the September issue of Commentary , leads the New Books list at Arts &...

Message and technique

Explaining why Madame Bovary was a scandal to French readers in 1857 but not to moderns, Kenneth Burke says that “we demand technique where...

Turning left

I have decided to become a Leftist. There really was no other choice. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. If you are publicly iden...

The Humbling

Philip Roth, The Humbling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 140 pp. $22.00. Has Philip Roth decided that The Plot against America ...

Concept of the unified text

As I observed in replying to Guy Pursey’s polite skepticism toward the parodic goof by which I pretended to make meaning out of the page br...

The genius of page breaks

Under the pressure of Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland for raping an underage girl thirty-two years ago in Los Angeles, I have been re...

Müller wins Nobel

In a surprise decision, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the German-language Romanian novelist Herta Müller. I must admit ...

Carver and authorial intention

The galleys for Carol Sklenicka’s forthcoming biography of Raymond Carver arrived yesterday. (Full disclosure: Carol and I are old friends.)...