Remember when literary criticism was a frightening discipline, austere and combative? Its devotees were in the grip of implacable theory, or buried deep in the “text”—that sunless realm where books are forgotten, readers irrelevant and authors dead. Split into feuding factions, the high priests of lit crit were imposing figures who spoke in tongues, made Read More
Remember when literary criticism was a frightening discipline, austere and combative? Its devotees were in the grip of implacable theory, or buried deep in the “text”—that sunless realm where books are forgotten, readers irrelevant and authors dead. Split into feuding factions, the high priests of lit crit were imposing figures who spoke in tongues, made Read More
Later Auden , by Edward Mendelson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pages, $30.
In the late 1940′s, W.H. Auden became enamored of the idea that every writer’s mind is a household containing three personalities. T.S. Eliot’s, he wrote, included an archdeacon, an old peasant grandmother and a young boy who liked to play practical jokes. Read More
