Category Archives: literary criticism
New Reviews and “Right” Reviewers
Launch day never comes but what I am surprised at what we’ve pulled off, thanks to the talent, perseverance, and generosity of our contributors and the diligence, enthusiasm, and contributions of our editors! Our May issue seems to me to exemplify what we want Open Letters to be. It covers a wide range of material — [...]
Diana Athill, Stet: On Angela Thirkell, Virginia Woolf, and the Embarrassment of Caste
This month’s reading for the Slaves of Golconda group was Diana Athill’s briskly evocative memoir Stet, about her decades-long career in publishing. Other folks have been putting up their smart and detailed posts, and you should hop on over and read them if you haven’t visited already. Partly because I’m tired and busy, and partly because [...]
Latter-Day Dorotheas? Renunciation in Trollope and Tyler
From the Novel Readings archives (originally posted June 15, 2007) When I decided to take a break from more “serious” reading with Joanna Trollope’s A Village Affair, I wasn’t really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which [...]
This Week in My Classes: Feminism and Fatality
This week in my section of Intro to Literature we’re starting a unit organized around women writers and feminism. We’re starting this week with some poetry — Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Diving Into the Wreck,” Margaret Atwood’s “You fit into me,” Marge Piercy’s “The Secretary Chant,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Next we’re working [...]
“Middlemarch in Six!” Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree
This is the first in what I plan as a regular series of re-posts from my archives. It seems appropriate to lead off with a review that was not only one of my earliest posts (it first went up on the blog in January 2007) but one that lays out some of my reasons for [...]
Margaret Kennedy, The Outlaws on Parnassus
Preparing for reading The Constant Nymph in my Somerville Novelists seminar, I was intrigued to learn that in her Times obituary Margaret Kennedy was accorded little significance as a novelist while her book on the novel, The Outlaws on Parnassus, was considered her greatest literary contribution. I promptly ordered it from interlibrary loan, and it arrived just in [...]
Blogging is Detrimental to Literature? Make Him Stop Saying That!
Just when you thought maybe, just maybe, the worst was over when it came to casually dismissive generalizations about blogging–you know, of the kind that used to get us all riled up way back in 2008, and that still irked us in 2010–we get this, from the editor of the TLS: The rise of blogging [...]
The Moral Continuum: Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown
Like The Once and Future King, The Jewel in the Crown is something I have gotten around to very belatedly. I have known about it for ages and always meant to read it, but hadn’t, until now. I haven’t even seen the old BBC adaptation–at least, not all of it. (I think I saw some episodes when [...]
The Worth of Our Work (with Some Thoughts on Jonah Lehrer)
Alas, alas! This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid The worth of our work, perhaps. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh The very smart and funny Adam Roberts has decided to put an end to his blog Punkadiddle. Iif you haven’t already had the pleasure, you should check out the archives – [...]
Open Letters Monthly: The Criticism Issue
The March issue of Open Letters Monthly went live this morning. It’s the journal’s 5th anniversary, and we’ve celebrated by paying tribute to some of the great critics of the last century–those who inspire, challenge, and provoke us as we try in our own ways to be the best critics we can be. The issue is [...]
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