MetaFilter posts tagged with litcrit

Light Ahead for the Negro...

artof.mulata — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:35:19 -0800

Author and librarian, Jess Nevins, offers The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction. Excellent introductory compilations of Black speculative SF and Fantasy: So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy; Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora; Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Mr. Nevins so often previously...

ISAAAAAC? ISAAAAAC!

empath — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 08:05:42 -0800

Grotesque Body Horror in the Binding of Isaac.

The crying of x^2 + xy + y^2 = 49

escabeche — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:00:24 -0800

"Pynchon, postmodern author, is commonly said to have a non-linear narrative style. No one seems to have taken seriously the possibility, to be explored in this essay, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic." Number theorist Michael Harris on Pynchon and conic sections.

this is the post title

kenko — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:37:32 -0800

Semiotics for beginners. via Michael Bérubé

He said "valve".

kenko — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:31:09 -0800

The Valve, "a literary organ", is a new group blog devoted to literary studies and modelled on little magazines gone by.

Hunting snark

Prospero — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:09:27 -0800

Snark. In the newest issue of Bookforum, critic Sven Birkerts ruminates on what he considers to be the regrettable rise of the snarky book review, taking as his starting example Dale Peck's hatchet job on Rick Moody, written in 2002. "Psychologically [the literary] landscape [is one that is] subtly demoralized by the slash-and-burn of bottom-line economics; the modernist/humanist assumption of art and social criticism marching forward, leading the way, has not recovered from the wholesale flight of academia into theory; the publishing world remains tyrannized in acquisition, marketing, and sales by the mentality of the blockbuster; the confident authority of print journalism has been challenged by the proliferation of online alternatives. [...] All of this leads, and not all that circuitously, to the question of snark, the spirit of negativity, the personal animus pushing ahead of the intellectual or critical agenda. Snark is, I believe, prompted by the terrible vacuum feeling of not mattering, not connecting, not being heard; it is fueled by rage at the same."

Fact, Fiction And Memoirs Masquerading As Novels

MiguelCardoso — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 21:14:58 -0800

Is It Fiction If It Says "Fiction" On The Cover? Jorge Luis Borges brilliantly obscured fact and fiction presenting fiction as fact. Things seem to have swung round 180º and fact is now increasingly being sold as fiction. This certainly seems to be the case with Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. She's Paul Auster's second wife and... Well... now even critics, like The New York Observer's Joe Hagan have joined the fun, as Slate's Katie Roiphe duly noted. Fact is now presented as fiction, without the traditional disguise of the roman à clef. I think it's sad. In fact, it's an attempt on the life of imagination itself. Perhaps these authors who write memoirs masquerading as novels could be sued under the Trade Description Act? [With thanks to the always excellent Literary Salon weblog. Thanks to ColdChef for pointing it out to me.]