Updates

I’ll be on vacation for a few days. Here are a some updates on recent topics and questions that I have raised in this blog:
On blogging as “criticism,” see Nigel Beale vs. Ronan McDonald, and the thoughtful Oronte.
On Laurie Fendrich’s taste, be sure to see the last of her posts here.
On Jonathan Gotschall’s enthusiasms, [...]

Nicely Turned

Political scientist David Runciman pens an essay on American political commentary for the London Review of Books. Here are some reactions from the very commentators in question at The Atlantic, TNR, Politico, and Pollster.com. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of Runciman’s rhetorical choices, and also respond to his pessimistic view [...]

Slowhand

Scholar and critic David Bordwell responds to a controversy about the sudden decline in the number of professional film critics while amateur film blogs simultaneously burgeon. Bordwell doesn’t join this conversation as a complainer, but instead shrewdly uses the controversy as a “teaching moment,” writing a post on the nature of criticism as a [...]

Printemps

The first actual letter in my series on handwriting: a note to Gertrude Stein squeezed onto a page by Pablo Picasso in the spring of 1918. From the collection of Stein papers at Yale.

Grist

I’m out from under my rock thanks to this interesting article about crime fiction by Gregory Beyer in today’s New York Times, which raises a set of questions about an issue that has become a little passe: the value of verisimilitude. Here I’d like to use the article to begin building a field of questions [...]

Hiatus

Now that I’ve got the DaD blog up and running, I’ll be unplugging for the next week or so. The plan is to do some old-fashioned writing, the kind with footnotes and pagination.
Bored?
Tremble in awe at the mighty mightiness of The Mighty Red Pen,
Inquire into books at Books, Inq.,
Confess to your spouse about Chekhov’s [...]

Ingratitude

The fourth installment in my series on handwriting: an affidavit signed July 16, 1881 by Charles Julius Guiteau, who had shot President James Garfield two weeks earlier at the Baltimore and Potomac Rail Road Station.
Prior to assassinating the President, Guiteau had been a journalist, blackmailer, preacher and spousal abuser. He was probably insane; a plea [...]

Substance, Part III

This is the third and last in my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s essay “Measure for Measure,” in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward – firmness, stability, durability – even though [...]

Substance, Part II

In the last post, I examined Jonathan Gottschall’s recent essay about integrating the aims, techniques and rigors of the sciences into the study of literature. I pointed out that in order to stage his argument clearly, Gottschall built two constellations of adjectives. The first described poor literary criticism …

Theoretical, Speculative, Irrelevant, Wandering, Circuitous, [...]

Substance, Part I

Jonathan Gottschall makes what is bound to be a controversial contribution to the ongoing discussion about how to bring focus to the field of literary studies – its purposes, methods and aims. This is a set of questions with which many writers struggle, often on purpose.  In his article for the Boston Globe, Gottschall [...]

There is Something Behind This

More DaD handwriting. This page is a note passed between Franklin Roosevelt and his adviser Harry Hopkins at the Yalta conference, as reproduced in “Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History” by playwright and speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Both Roosevelt and Hopkins loved to doodle and pass notes like this one.  Both would be dead [...]

Gently Used

“What’s wrong with cliches?” asked John McIntyre’s reader. McIntyre cites Frank Kermode’s notion that a cliche is wrong because it is symptomatic of “used thinking.”
Well, sure it is.
But what’s wrong with that?

Elite

In a critique of developments in the election, Jonathan Chait takes time to discuss what he considers to be the key differences between liberal and conservative genres of populist rhetoric. Although clearly partisan and a little simplistic, this discussion is nonetheless marvelously succinct, accurate and well-illustrated, check it out.

Americans and the Airport

Lately, a number of writers have been using the airport as a metaphor, citing the indignities and inanities of air travel to articulate something definitive about American perception. The airport has long been a magical and overdetermined place – what Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” a place that seems to exist in relation to [...]

No Love

Prof. Fendrich’s series continues with a lot of judgment, some E. H. Gombrich, a little David Hume, but (Alas!) almost no love.

“Pushback”

This word caught my attention yesterday. I heard it about six times in five minutes on the news, referring to the cascade of objections and rejoinders volleying between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama through the media. Hyphenated, contracted or otherwise, the term seems to be equally useful as both a verb (“we’ve got to [...]

Love

Recently, artist and professor Laurie Fendrich has rekindled a smoldering pedagogical question by beginning a series of posts at the Chronicle of Higher Ed that proposes to “tackle the topic of aesthetic taste — what’s happened to it in the past couple of decades, whether or not we can, or ought, to teach it, and [...]

The Hortatory Subjunctive

Lurita A. Doan steps down as Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration. Language Log has a very interesting post concerning a debate about tense that Doan once had with members of the House Oversight Committee. Here is a real exchange between Doan and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), presided over by [...]