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A More Crocodile Crocodile

Lidija Haas: Machines That Feel, 23 February 2012

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other 
by Sherry Turkle.
Basic, 360 pp., £18.99, February 2011, 978 0 465 01021 9
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... were becoming commonplace in discussions about politics, education, the mind and the self. Alone Together is not the work of someone hostile to technology’s advances, but Turkle has described it as ‘a book of repentance’: she is atoning for the things she missed or got wrong in her earlier, sunnier work on computers and people.Turkle ...

Amused, Bored or Exasperated

Christopher Prendergast: Gustave Flaubert, 13 December 2001

Flaubert: A Life 
by Geoffrey Wall.
Faber, 413 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 571 19521 0
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... du Camp, ‘rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of ...

Maybe he made it up

Terry Eagleton: Faking It, 6 June 2002

The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature 
by Nick Groom.
Picador, 351 pp., £20, April 2002, 9780330374323
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... to the Other – to my linguistic community as a whole – before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. Who, then, wrote the first poem? If poetry, like potholing, is a practice governed by certain public conventions, then surely those conventions had to be always ...

Olallieberries

Stephanie Burt: D.A. Powell’s poems, 24 September 2009

Chronic: Poems 
by D.A. Powell.
Graywolf, 79 pp., $20, February 2009, 978 1 55597 516 6
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... I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be your boy, just ask me to spread my legs, I’ll spread’ The self as teenage prostitute, as body for sale, physically open for inspection, becomes the self-appeasing, self-delighting soul who finally writes the poem, and delights in its internal ...

Impotent Revenge

Nicole Flattery: Patrick deWitt’s Dioramas, 25 April 2024

The Librarianist 
by Patrick deWitt.
Bloomsbury, 342 pp., £9.99, April, 978 1 5266 4692 7
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... If Connie is lying to herself (and she is) we shouldn’t be surprised: deWitt has made self-delusion his stock in trade.Ablutions, like many books in which people are depicted as disgusting, dangerous, self-serving and beyond redemption, didn’t sell well. In an interview with the Guardian, deWitt expressed his ...

An Epiphany of Footnotes

Claude Rawson, 16 March 1989

Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work 
by Jerome McGann.
Harvard, 279 pp., £21.95, April 1988, 0 674 81495 9
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... object pleasure not truth’, and his particular conception of Imagination as an internal and self-enclosed harmonisation, ‘extends and elaborates the Kantian analyses of the aesthetic experience’. McGann favours poets with a more activist or ‘illocutionary’ conception of their art: Blake rather than Wordsworth, or the Language poets rather than ...

Prajapati

Tim Parks: Hugging a fraud, 19 February 1998

... just people! Yet I still feel the solution ‘something crucial’ was the right one. My son’s self-confidence is perhaps inherited. At which point the sunlight enters the room and falls across my computer screen. This is always infuriating. I can’t see anything. Since this room has no curtains I will have to pull the shutters to and work in artificial ...

In the Waiting-Room of History

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’, 24 June 2004

Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference 
by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Princeton, 320 pp., £42.95, October 2000, 0 691 04908 4
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... genealogy. But instead of Said’s relentless polemic, Chakrabarty’s book features critique and self-criticism in equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the edge here, because for Said the Orient is a Western construct, an instrument of domination: he doesn’t – and never went on to – explore the profound ways in which modern Orientals ...

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1
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Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics 
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January 2023, 978 1 80085 462 8
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Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century 
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June 2023, 978 1 009 36623 6
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... and misunderstood. Form is part of the problem. Don Juan’s playfulness and extreme self-consciousness endear it to ambiguity-inclined, sophisticated modern readings; the Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold (Auden called it a ‘disastrous choice’) required of Byron a sometimes off-putting dignity. Other charges go beyond form. Taking Childe ...

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the ...

With a Da bin ich!

Seamus Perry: Properly Lawrentian, 9 September 2021

Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 488 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 4088 9362 3
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... of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and people less self-acquainted than you might think.But Lawrence was referring to something more mysterious than that. He was saying that the tale and its artist are intrinsically opposed to each other, that the conscious artist is a sort of necessary evil who sets out (in ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... in movies of the 1950s, after a bad stumble in the postwar years, was as carefully planned, self-disciplined and sustained as such a major shift of direction in an artist’s work can be. It led from the enviable lustre of a sentimental star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns ...

Where Does He Come From?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Placing V.S. Naipaul, 1 November 2007

A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Picador, 193 pp., £16.99, September 2007, 978 0 330 48524 1
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... or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers – those who might see Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a major intellectual figure – who celebrate Naipaul as an original voice, a writer ...

Colette

Angela Carter, 2 October 1980

... strange one and necessarily full of contradictions, of which her uncompromising zeal for self-exploitation is one. Madame Colette, though never quite Madame Colette de l’Académie Française – one game she couldn’t crack – was accorded a state funeral by the French government: this was the woman who was dismissed by her second husband’s ...

Porky-Talky

Frank Cioffi, 22 September 1994

A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying 
by J.A. Barnes.
Cambridge, 200 pp., £35, June 1994, 0 521 45376 3
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... try to avoid deceiving ourselves’. He cites the conclusion of the editors of a symposium on self-deception, that though ‘it promotes short-run psychological health ... Long-run psychological health is thereby constrained.’ He seems unaware of the research which suggests that the mentally healthy are more likely to have a deficient perception of ...

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