http://debashishbanerji.com/category/consciousnesswriting/ “I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem […]
Category Archives: Essays on Literature
‘The Nympholepsy of a Fond Despair.’
21-Dec-09Helen Luke and Dante.
15-Oct-09http://ornamentalpeanut.com/Lux.php Time spent among people reveals just how difficult it is, even for the most worthy and competent, to be capable of real love and relationship. Developing this capacity is in truth the sole bifocal commandment of the Christian religion, all others being mere ancillae; and it is also the goal of Jung’s school of psychoanalysis, […]
All’s Well That Ends Well.
10-Sep-09All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” those plays whose resolution is most unsatisfactory; the poet’s justice seeming to us injustice. The Count Roussillon, whose father died when he was a minor, became a ward of the French king, who thereupon had the power to bestow him in marriage; and the […]
Rousseau begins his Confessions with a most daring preface, which it is well to offer here to the reader: I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the […]
A.J. Liebling and the Gret Stet.
08-Apr-09In writing there are only two things, matter and treatment. In Abbott Joseph Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana we have matter so interesting that it still holds the attention fifty years later in itself, and treatment so virtuosic one is tempted to proclaim Liebling a literary figure rather than a journalist. As far as matter […]
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
17-Jan-09The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy from any but the publisher’s perspective: the story fits into three volumes, but it is not in three parts. Tolkien divided it into six “books,” and each book does have a unified field of vision, but none of them can stand on their own and none […]
Augustus Hare.
15-Dec-08Travel literature, like portraiture, is one of the peculiar glories of Western culture, and the tendency towards it is so strong that there is hardly a western writer who does not incorporate an appreciation for landscape and travel into his works. And much like portraiture, travel-writing constituted a tradition which lent some of its […]
Steinbeck in Salinas.
24-Sep-08Upon a wall in the National Steinbeck Center is a map of the Salinas valley, over which are inscribed the following words of the author: “… the valley I have known and never loved.” When presented thus with this map, the first thing that strikes you is the simple fact that Steinbeck did, in fact, […]