Said (Orientalism, Covering Islam) presents his more strictly academic/literary side here—in a dozen more-or-less-related essays, most of which derive from lectures and academic-journal pieces. The primary point: Said argues, though rarely very concretely, for an "affiliative" sort of criticism—for seeing literary texts as "dynamic fields." ("A certain range of reference, a system of tentacles. . . partly potential, partly actual: to the author, to the reader, to a historical situation, to the other texts, to the past and present.") And, on even more slippery ground, Said also argues against the deconstructionists—envisioning a criticism which will determine the "intention" (social, mostly) behind any work. Thus, in two thoughtful essays on Swift, Said defends the satirist against the pigeonholing of Orwell and others (who dismiss Swift as a "reactionary"); Said insists that Swift be viewed in the context of his era's "sociopolitical and economic realities"—and that "not enough claims are made for Swift as a kind of local activist. . . ." With Conrad, too, a world outside the text—here a psychological, Freudian one—is brought into the discussion of craft and intent: "Conrad's writing was a way of repeatedly confirming his authorship by refracting it in a variety of often contradictory and negative narrative and quasi-narrative contingencies. . . . He did this in preference to a direct representation of his neuroses." But the considerations of both Swift and Conrad end up rather murkily, with little sense of a freshly illuminating critical approach. And when Said attempts to delineate his ideal brand of criticism, with examples from his work on Islam, a lot of it seems like slightly coy but unstartling Marxist criticism—as in references to "the network binding writers to the State and to a worldwide 'metropolitan' imperialism that, at the moment they were writing, furnished them in the novelistic techniques of narration and description with implicit models of accumulation, discipline, and normalization." Still, Said does, in one essay, superbly digest the divergent revisionist/revolutionary ideas of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (a valuable service); and if he fails to present a strong case for the originality or coherence of his own approach to criticism, he touches on a wide spectrum of lit-crit schools with erudition and balance—making this a quietly provocative collection for specialists in critical theory.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0674961870
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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