When you consider how the work of bloggers echoes the more-or-less personal essays of Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion, you can see how the individual act of reckoning the world through writing poses many of the same challenges as literary creation, and also provides a foundation for substantial political and philosophical debates.Joseph Kugelmass expresses something I've long suspected. His post is part of a series on academic blogging, mentioning me along the way. He says I write "in a style reminiscent of the great literary reviews of the 20s and 30s". Which is nice. I've not yet read any reviews from that era! And I'm not quite sure if it is understood that I am not an academic. But I'm open to job offers ...
Friday, November 02, 2007
Individual acts of reckoning
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I very much remember leaving you a comment when I first found your blog, along the lines of "what a great academic blog" or "what great literary criticism" or something, to which you responded by writing that the Ivory Tower didn't have you...
ReplyDeleteHave you read any of T. S. Eliot's critical essays? Those are the sort of pieces I had in mind, which he published (among other places) in the journal Criterion that he founded with Pound.
Oh, er, "Kugelmass."
Sorry about the misspelling. Corrected now. And yes, d'oh, of course I've read and admired TS Eliot's essays.
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