luka

Well-known member
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"The ascetic has tried to withhold all his sperm, the lure, the ignis fatuus perhaps, of wanting to super-think"
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Mvuent reacted to one of my posts in here.

I was reading Christopher Ricks on Prufrock last night and he goes in on Kenner.

This is what a lot of lit crit is: academic point scoring. Scoring points either making some ingenious point about a novel/poem that the author probably would be surprised/bemused/annoyed by or by picking apart some other critic's argument.

Usually when I read this stuff though it makes me feel too dumb/lazy to have bothered reading anything properly.

Like the amount of material they can get out of the title of Prufrock suggests they've sat there and thought about it at length when I would just have skimmed over it as totally unimportant.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I reckon it would have been fun once upon a time but from what I hear now being an academic absolutely sucks
 

entertainment

Well-known member
read a good one recently that qualifies somewhat as dissensian: A sense of an ending by Frank Kermode. About the relationship between eschatology and literary fiction. Says that we tell stories to invoke beginnings and ends, which, in concord, give meaning to our time "in the middle."
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
I think I've only ever read some criticism from Updike and Mailer. And then when I was really into Erich Auerbach but I forget why.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Ricks points out lots of stuff that only the diligent and clever would notice bout poetry, like how "Under" and "London" lead to "Undone" in: "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many". Perhaps that's obvious to you brainiacs, but it would have passed me by completely otherwise.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just been reading Empson doing a Prynne-line forensic examination of the use of a single word - 'sense' -in the Prelude. I really like it, he's no nonsense and quite harsh on the writer, but the depth he goes into is really impressive. I suppose he must have been a big influence on Prynne's essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats where he breaks down every single word of a poem, but he seems a lot more judgemental than Prynne. Would be terrifying for the poet, I would imagine, to have him write an essay on you!
 
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