Shopping cart (0 items)
From the August 19, 2010 issue

The Beats: Pictures of a Legend

Edmund White

white_1-081910.jpg

Gift of Gary S. Davis, National Gallery of Art, Washingon

Allen Ginsberg’s snapshots of friends—the subject of the exhibition at the National Gallery, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg—are fascinating since few of them are well-known and they often show their subjects in their youth—a fresh-faced, toothy, nerdy Ginsberg, for instance, long before he became the bearded guru, and a melancholy, poetic William Burroughs before he became the saurian undertaker seen in familiar portraits.

More »

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’

Frank Rich

The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. Only Hollywood might have the power to create a superhero who could fulfill the messianic dreams kindled by his presence and rhetoric, maintain the riveting drama of his unlikely ascent, and sustain the national mood of deliverance that greeted his victory. As soon as Inauguration Day turned to night, the real Obama was destined to depreciate like the shiny new luxury car that starts to lose its book value the moment it’s driven off the lot.

More »
Newsletter Sign Up
News of upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, more.
From the Archive: May 9, 1996

Confessions of a Literary Man

David Lodge

In my opinion, and that of many others, Frank Kermode is the finest English critic of his generation. There is a semantic flaw in that statement, since Kermode was born and brought up on the Isle of Man, a small, mountainous island moored in the choppy Irish Sea halfway between Liverpool and Belfast; and Man is not a part of England, or indeed of the United Kingdom, but a British dependency, with its own parliament, laws, and language (now almost extinct). However, to call Kermode the finest Manx critic of his generation would be a paltry compliment, since not many of its population of approximately 70,000 are professionally engaged in literary criticism; and in any case he has made his distinguished career as a teacher and scholar in the English departments of English universities.

More »
Exchange

‘The Decline & Fall of Literature’: An Exchange

Andrew Delbanco, Bruce Robbins, Robert Oliphant, and Michael P. Clark, reply by Andrew Delbanco

To the Editors:

As a member and former chair of a department that has contributed significantly to the rise and triumph of theory in the US, I cannot let Andrew Delbanco’s smug vilification of theory in the name of literature pass without comment [“The Decline and Fall of Literature,” NYR, November 4, 1999]. While it is true that literary study is often practiced without any explicit theoretical self-consciousness at ...

More »