'Invisible Listeners': Overheard Speech [US]:
When did you last read a book of literary criticism? Not recently, most people who do not write criticism themselves will answer. Criticism today is impenetrable and irrelevant, since it is jargon-ridden and no longer interested in literature. Or so people have said. There may have been some truth in this caricature a few years ago, but the Age of Theory is over in America, for better or worse, and plenty of literary critics go on with their work. Take Helen Vendler, who has been writing about literature in lucid prose for more than 40 years. Her "Invisible Listeners," a compact study of "lyric intimacy" in three poets, demonstrates, if you have forgotten, some of the best reasons to read literary criticism. [...]
Vendler's cases are the disarmingly human Jesus in George Herbert's 17th-century devotional lyrics, the imagined future "you" in Walt Whitman's long-lined democratic chants, and Francesco Parmigianino, the Mannerist painter invoked in John Ashbery's long poem from 1975, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." [...]
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Sunday, October 16, 2005 at 7:06 AM.
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At 7:56 AM,Yes, yes. The critics and often those who read them are woefully caught up in themselves. These types of things ought to be more livable...accessible and yes, MUCH less boring. Because that is what they are!
Try this out though...refreshing criticism, poetry and not the 'usual'.
http://p072.ezboard.com/ftheforbiddenstoryfrm7
At 9:28 AM,
I tried a little of it, lilac, and it doesn't look very interesting to me so far. Fill me in: who hangs out at that web address and what are they doing there.
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