REASONABLE TASTE – Aesthetics & Literary Criticism

A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Auerbach) Mimesis (originally published 1946) still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. Auerbach’s aim was […]

The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilocus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”). In Erasmus Rotterdamus’s Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same idea.

‘Literature as a way of life’ is the theme of this 1973 work by the self-assured Harold Bloom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom and http://english.yale.edu/faculty-staff/harold-bloom). It is also an on-going conversation across the generations and between authors. Bloom traces out the strands of influence which connect all these authors of poetry. His take on the concept of influence is that

Many attempts have been made to define exactly what makes us uniquely human. The use of tools? The use of language? A sense of morality? The practice of religion? But one of them has always been that humans tell stories. There is no known culture that does not possess sets of narratives which are handed

This book is a classic exploration of the short story with readings of Chekhov, Hemingway, Kipling, Joyce, and others. Published by Frank O’Connor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O%27Connor) in 1962. Frank O’Connor 211 pages in Melville House Publishing paperback edition. ISBN 978-1935554424

The Sense of an Ending (1967) is a book which seeks to establish a connection between fiction, time and apocalyptic modes of thought. Frank Kermode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kermode) sees in the apocalyptic certain features which, he suggests, provide a useful analogy with the process of reading and writing fiction. The author tells us that in imagining an end

The language that would become English arrived in these islands in the fifth century with Germanic tribes as the Roman empire began collapsing. Bragg describes it in almost Darwinian terms, a “subtle and ruthless” survivor that defeated competing tongues over the next three centuries, refusing to marry with the indigenous Celtic language (which has left us

This book by Cleanth Brooks is a classic ‘must read’ study in the criticism of poetry for reasons adequately given here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_Wrought_Urn:_Studies_in_the_Structure_of_Poetry 324 pages in Mariner Books paperback edition. ISBN 978-0156957052

Fiction and The Reading Public provoked fierce controversy when first published in 1932, and it has since come to be recognised as a classic in its field. In her fascinating study, Q D Leavis (http://mypages.surrey.ac.uk/eds1cj/qd-leavis-life-and-work.htm#lifeandwork) investigates what has happened to the public taste in the last three centuries and what effect this has had on both