September 11, 2004

Gopnik again...

I seem unable to resist this man's lambent prose. Here's more, from a review of a Shakespeare biography in the New Yorker of September 13 2004:

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life...
(of author Stephen Greenblatt) A fully postmodernized critic, he knows the barriers of rhetoric and artifice that make us write the poems and then have the feelings as often as we have the feelings first... Poets may often write things they do not feel, but they rarely feel things that they do not, sooner or later, write.

Posted by oook at September 11, 2004 06:52 AM
Comments

Wasn't it Emerson? who said that there is no such thing as (universal) history, just a bunch of biographies of individuals?
ron

Posted by: Ron at September 11, 2004 10:18 AM