Volume 40, Number 21 · December 16, 1993
Writing on Life Support
By John Banville
Beckett's Dying Words
by Christopher Ricks
Oxford University Press, 218 pp., $25.00
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
by Samuel Beckett
Arcade, 241 pp., $21.95
Christopher Ricks, one of a number of English academics who abandoned Britain during the Thatcher years, is now professor of English at Boston University. He is quintessentially English, in the critical line of Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, and Empson; an anti-theorist with eclectic tastes (Philip Larkin, Bob Dylan), and a master of the art of close reading, whose books The Force of Poetry, Milton's Grand Style, and the hectic and illuminating Keats and Embarrassment, are of great originality. Beckett's Dying Words is the text of his Clarendon Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1990.
Review, 3446 words
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