Category: Reading

Dedication

Nathalie Vanderlinden takes a passion for Proust to a new, public level! Though Proust had a Jewish mother, he seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. His wisdom is his own, and though it has…

Reading Roth on Writing and Reading

George Searles, editor, Conversations with Philip Roth Literary Conversation Series University Press of Mississippi 1992 I settled in this morning with a collection of interviews with Philip Roth, from the bright beginning of his career…

What Is Vaster

In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…

What Is Vaster

In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…

Neither Conformism Nor Eccentricity

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…

Her Vivacity Gladdened Life

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Knopf: Everyman’s Library,  1992  I’ve acknowledged previously the importance of Reinaldo Arenas and Eduardo Galeano  during the late 1990s into 2000 as I was trying to figure out…