Plots

Stephen Bann, 4 November 1982

The Prince buys the Manor 
by Elspeth Huxley.
Chatto, 216 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 0 7011 2651 5
Show More
Faultline 
by Sheila Ortiz Taylor.
Women’s Press, 120 pp., £2.50, October 1982, 0 7043 3900 5
Show More
Scenes from Metropolitan Life 
by William Cooper.
Macmillan, 214 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 0 333 34203 8
Show More
Constance, or Solitary Practices 
by Lawrence Durrell.
Faber, 394 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 571 11757 0
Show More
Mickelsson’s Ghosts 
by John Gardner.
Secker, 566 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 17251 8
Show More
Beware of pity 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Phyllis Blewitt and Trevor Blewitt.
Cape, 354 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 224 02057 9
Show More
Show More
... makes Faultline rather more than a frantic exercise in the picaresque (and what accounts for the prior appearance of certain sections in magazines with titles like Lesbian Voices) is the almost didactic tone of advocacy which runs through it. The San Andreas fault promises eventual chaos, and the motif of the rabbits economically combines the idea of ...

Derridas’s Axioms

E.D. Hirsch, 21 July 1983

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism 
by Jonathan Culler.
Routledge, 307 pp., £16.95, February 1983, 0 7100 9502 3
Show More
Show More
... of ‘phenomenon’ – the given that is not given. In still other writers – Blake, William James – this collapse into the contrary is conceived as a cyclical process within intellectual history. Certainly, in this central feature of his philosophy, Derrida has not broken with ‘Western Metaphysics’. 3. The Textuality of Thought. ‘The collapse ...

Outside the text

Marilyn Butler, 19 December 1985

The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 352 pp., £19.50, May 1985, 0 19 811730 2
Show More
The Politics of Language: 1791-1819 
by Olivia Smith.
Oxford, 269 pp., £19.50, December 1984, 0 19 812817 7
Show More
Show More
... But Smith’s book is one of those pint pots that holds a quart, several quarts, and many prior conceptions should be changed by reading it. Her central objective is to represent late 18th-century theories of language and practices of writing in a political light. Her book develops the subject and historical method of ...

The Club and the Mob

James Meek: The Shock of the News, 6 December 2018

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now 
by Alan Rusbridger.
Canongate, 464 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 78689 093 1
Show More
Show More
... being journalists. ‘Expert reporter’ was always a contradiction in terms. A certain amount of prior knowledge in technical areas won’t hurt, but the journalist who starts on a story believing they already know what it is cannot, by definition, be working on ‘news’. The confession of ignorance is always implicit: an event occurs, or the journalist ...

Irangate

Edward Said, 7 May 1987

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 
by Salman Rushdie.
Picador, 171 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 330 29990 5
Show More
Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 298 pp., £5.95, September 1986, 0 7453 0184 3
Show More
Show More
... Report of 1955 is cited for its ‘chilling’ prose. President Eisenhower had commissioned James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at ...

Madnesses

John Kerr, 23 March 1995

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement 
by Richard Noll.
Princeton, 387 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 691 03724 8
Show More
Show More
... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we are just ...

One Long Scream

Jacqueline Rose: Trauma and Justice in South Africa, 23 May 2019

... Calata devotes a significant part of My Father Died for This to his great-grandfather Canon James Calata, secretary general of the ANC from 1936 to 1949, who brought his politics to the pulpit and was central in making Cradock the politically conscious and active community for which it was still being punished in the early 1990s. Fort, ...

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 18 December 1986

... Rex v. Edmonds and ensuing appeal (1820, 1821), and to several Chartist cases in 1848. Father James O’Coigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishman who, sometimes disguised as ‘Captain Jones’ was travelling in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was ...

Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

Peter Porter: Collected Poems 
Oxford, 335 pp., £12.50, March 1983, 0 19 211948 6Show More
Show More
... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...

Diary

Edward Said: My Encounter with Sartre, 1 June 2000

... to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the ...

Scentless Murder

Michael Wood: Billy Wilder, 2 March 2000

Conversations with Wilder 
by Cameron Crowe.
Faber, 373 pp., £20, December 1999, 0 571 20162 8
Show More
Show More
... of the sentences seem tackier than it would in a Chandler story. Somewhere in the background is James M. Cain, the author of the novel on which the film is based. And the actual writer here, the one who finally approved the words even if he didn’t compose them, is Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and co-author of the script. ‘He was a ...

The Contingency of Community

Richard Rorty, 24 July 1986

... remained faithful to those consciences. I have been claiming that figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust and Wittgenstein illustrate what I called ‘freedom as the recognition of contingency’. Such freedom, I would now claim, is integral to the idea of a liberal society. In order to show how the charge of relativism looks against this ...

Philip Roth talks about his work

Philip Roth, 5 March 1987

... to or falling back upon the established conventions of seriousness, be they the realism of James or the modernism of Joyce?That’s a problem for every generation. Ambitious young writers are always tempted to imitate those verified by authority; the influence of an established writer upon a beginning writer has almost entirely to do with the search ...

Dysfunctional Troglodytes with Mail-Order Weaponry

Iain Sinclair: Edward Dorn, 11 April 2013

Collected Poems 
by Edward Dorn.
Carcanet, 995 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84777 126 1
Show More
Show More
... comfortably into the world of the TV series Breaking Bad (celebrated in the LRB of 3 January by James Meek). Dorn, forty years ahead of the game, exploited that clarity of light, where bad things have a hyper-real outline and the borders between countries and states of consciousness are dangerously porous. As a former high school quarter-miler, he was alert ...

The Tangible Page

Leah Price: Books as Things, 31 October 2002

The Book History Reader 
edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.
Routledge, 390 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 415 22658 9
Show More
Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays 
by D.F. McKenzie, edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez.
Massachusetts, 296 pp., £20.95, June 2002, 1 55849 336 0
Show More
Show More
... the codex freed the reader to write. The ‘book’ in the sense of folded pages, then, is both prior to and distinguishable from print: inaccuracy meets tautology in Finkelstein and McCleery’s claim that ‘since the invention of the printing press, books and print culture have been central to the shaping of culture.’ At the same time, the Reader’s ...