Recently I posted this quote from Julian Barnes:
You do often feel when you read academic criticism, not that I do it much, or when you hear academics talking about their books, that they forget that theirs is a secondary activity. They forget that however important a critic is, a first-rate critic is always less important, and less interesting, than a second-rate writer. Their job is, firstly, to explain, but secondly to celebrate rather than diminish.
I’m mostly behind Barnes’s opinion but some literary criticism is first-rate writing. When I feel like reading criticism I want erudition, something cultured, digressive and preferably tendentious. This list comprises ten favourite books that stand proudly alongside first-rate fiction:
- Hugh Kenner – The Counterfeiters: An Historical Novel
- Maurice Blanchot – The Space of Literature
- Harold Bloom – The Western Canon
- Guy Davenport – The Geography of the Imagination
- Cynthia Ozick – Metaphor & Memory
- Denis Donoghue – The Practise of Reading
- William H. Gass – A Temple of Texts
- D. J. Enright – The Alluring Problem: an Essay on Irony
- Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation
- Vladimir Nabokov – Lectures on Literature
The list is in no particular order. It could have easily grown to twenty and included work of Cyril Connolly, William Empson, Joseph Brodsky or Viktor Shlovsky.
>This is a very useful list! I love good literary criticism. I'll have to put some of the titles you name on my TBR list. The Nabokov is the one book I've read so far, and I have the Gass on my shelves. I'd also like to read some Ozick and Blanchot.
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>Thank you. Ozick is exceptional. I would read and enjoy her shopping lists.
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