Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici is an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His books include The Lessons of Modernism and Forgetting, as well as many novels, including Contre-Jour, Goldberg: Variations and Hotel Andromeda.

Letter

Impersonality

10 November 1988

Barbara Everett’s thoughtful, often profound review of Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island (LRB, 10 November) prompts a few comments. When one reads Kenner or Hartman one longs for the earthiness of an Everett or a Bayley. Conversely, though, when one reads Barbara Everett or John Bayley on the ‘thinginess’ of the greatest literature something seems to be missing and one longs for Kenner or Hartman....
Letter

Out of Egypt

3 July 1986

SIR: I was delighted to read Ahdaf Soueif’s fine piece on Wagih Ghali (LRB, 3 July), though the story she has to tell is a sad one. Beer in the Snooker Club is the best book ever written about Egypt (better even than my grandfather’s Goha le simple) and it is a crying shame that it should be out of print.
Letter

Faculty at War

17 June 1982

SIR: May I endorse Joseph Bristow’s remarks about the Methuen ‘New Accents’ series (Letters, 5 August)? The Government, as we all know, is doing its best to destroy the universities as centres of serious scholarship and learning: but for some time now publishers have also been lending a helping hand, with, I am afraid, the complicity of many academics as well. The proliferation of ‘series’,...
Letter

Roads to Rome

4 February 1982

Gabriel Josipovici writes: As a Classicist, Charles Martindale ought to be familiar with the uses of rhetoric. When I spoke of ‘our Rome-centred, Classics-centred view of the past’, I did not do so after taking an opinion poll. I was generalising from my own impressions of that vague and fluid thing, the ‘cultural Establishment’ as it exists in England even today, enshrined in universities,...

Jews’ Harps

Gabriel Josipovici, 4 February 1982

It is not often that a reviewer can say that the book under review has altered his entire conception of the past. Yet that is what I have to say about this book.

Buckets of Empathy

James Wood, 30 March 2000

If innocence were a family business, a terraced saga like Buddenbrooks, our age would be the sickly generation that abandons the firm and takes up the piano. We would seem to have nothing left in...

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Bible Stories

John Barton, 16 February 1989

Hegel, says Kierkegaard, presents us with history seen in terms of its ends, as a story which we, from our privileged vantage-point, can decipher. But, says Kierkegaard, that leaves out of...

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Yak Sandwiches

Christopher Burns, 31 March 1988

John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed...

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Afro-Fictions

Graham Hough, 3 July 1986

Three African writers, from very different parts of the continent – Saro-Wiwa from Nigeria, Ndebele from South Africa, Macgoye from Kenya. My ignorance of all three regions being deep and...

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The Great Exhibition

John Sutherland, 6 September 1984

A prefatory note testifies that Empire of the Sun draws on its author’s observations as a young boy swept up by the Japanese capture of Shanghai, and his subsequent internment in Lunghua...

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As I begin to write this, innumerable other reviews are being born. Some are being word-processed in paper-free offices, others handwritten in the Club lounges of intercontinental jets and others...

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Mortal Scripts

Christopher Norris, 21 April 1983

In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make...

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Words about Music

Hans Keller, 30 December 1982

My fairly extensive – and, analytically, intensive – writings about Stravinsky confine themselves to his music and the psychology of his creativity – to the products and the...

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On the Verge of Collapse

John Sturrock, 19 August 1982

The Siren’s Song is the first chance English readers have had to experience Maurice Blanchot. If it is the case, as Gabriel Josipovici pre-emptively asserts in his introduction, that...

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Doomed

Graham Hough, 3 December 1981

It is a curious thing that while so many critics are busy telling each other that literature is a linguistic game, that novels are purely formal structures and that their pretensions to represent...

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Character References

Robert Taubman, 15 May 1980

‘Yvonne dear,’ his Aunt said, ‘won’t you do the introduction?’ ‘This is Nancy,’ Yvonne said. ‘This is Andy. This is Mildred. This is George....

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