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To this end, Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaub…

There is a final refinement of free indirect style--we should now just call it authorial irony--when the gap between an author's voice and a character's voice seems to collapse altogether; when a character's voice does indeed seem rebelliously to have taken over the narration altogether. 'The town …

Life Before Theory (or the Time of Tweed). Roughly 1930-1975. The scholar's life was predominantly male and upper-class (less so from the middle-sixties on). [...] Ideologically, the dominant was New Criticism and its modernist cult of the aesthetic. Literature as religion. There was also, signific…

[...] Many of the books currently being manufactured as part of a "Generation X" "movement" have at their dead cold centers the vacillating heart of the advertising executive. Kept aloft--that is, "relevant"--by a constant barrage of moronic platitudes concerning the meaninglessness of life (as if …

There's also the possibility that in a society as deracinated and stripped of tradition and continuity [...] as our own, the void that emptily exists where common experience would ordinarily repose is filled by elements of popular culture so anchored to a specific time that they become part of the …