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[...] Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I'm glad I'm not the reader I was in college anymore, and I'll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author a…

[...] No matter how I try to slot them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes but no further. Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.

In The Pleasure of the Text and "S/Z", meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the "readerly" and the "writerly" text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smoot…

[...] Russell has debated philosophy with Wittgenstein and fiction with Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, he has argued economics with Keynes and civil disobedience with Gandhi, his open letters have provoked Stalin to a reply and Lyndon Johnson to exasperation. [...]

[...] By comparison, Ezra Pound's cracker-barrel Fascism, the deeply incised anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden's call for "the necessary urder" (this time at behest of the left) are thin stuff. It is the sheer weight of Céline's racist vituperations [...]