A celebrated professor of literature and criticism presents a representative gathering of his work, some of the pieces previously uncollected. Hartman, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Yale, has distinguished himself as a literary critic and commentator over 40 productive years. Here he offers selections from, or perhaps even summation of, his life’s work, highlighting both the theoretical (Freud, Heidegger, Derrida) and the practical criticism (on Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth) as well as forays into film (Hitchcock’s North by Northwest), detective fiction (Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald), and the current sorry state of the humanities in American universities. What links all these interests is Hartman’s abiding commitment to reading and interpreting literature and not (as his many detractors have often accused) his supposed identity as a deconstructive nihilist. This collection makes clear that Hartman’s association with deconstruction is merely a piece of a much larger and more interesting picture. It’s a picture of a man trying honestly and in a workmanlike way to understand the full complexity of literature’s relationship to reality. Now, an upshot of his thinking in this regard is that criticism should not necessarily simplify literature. He rejects emphatically the genteel Anglo-American tradition of literary criticism as polite conversation in simple, elegant language. If literature is dynamic, manifold, and complicated, then criticism must rise to meet that truth and not mask or diminish it. Consequently, Hartman can be rough going for any reader, which leads him into a paradox of sorts. He also emphasizes the public nature of literature and criticism, yet his own writing sometimes—often—makes him seem esoteric, academic, just another expert in a culture of specializations. The paradox creates an interesting struggle in his language, which is alternately pithy (public) and dense (esoteric). The result is a kind of writing that challenges the reader to think creatively, both with and against the critic. Hartman cultivates the form of the literary essay with great intellectual integrity, raising important questions along the way.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-08043-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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