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That Shakespearean Rag

A Blog About Books and Reading

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Criticism

CanLitCriticismPoetryThe Colophon

Flight paths: Susan Glickman’s selected essays address poetry, criticism, and taking up art study in her sixties

March 3, 2022June 14, 2022

Glickman’s focus on technique on a granular level reveals her to be a deeply knowledgeable and highly erudite reader of a wide range of poets.

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CriticismThe Colophon

“Trauma-creep” and literature: does a single minded focus on trauma diminish literary characters?

February 4, 2022June 14, 2022

The reduction of literary characters to a history of trauma is too often used as convenient shorthand, robbing us of the pleasure found in complexity and ambiguity.

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CriticismFilmThe Colophon

“Seriously flawed and morally questionable”: Guillermo del Toro, German expressionism, and the nature of noir

December 16, 2021June 14, 2022

A noir sensibility finds its origins in German expressionism and creates a neurotic environment in which the borderline between good and evil is nonexistent.

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CanLitCriticismNon-fictionThe Colophon

The subtle art of selling out: Adam Hammond investigates DIY gaming culture in his new book The Far Shore

December 3, 2021June 14, 2022

Hammond has written a text that is frankly unclassifiable: part biography, part critical exegesis, part hipster manifesto.

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CriticismThe Colophon

Critiquing the critics: Parul Sehgal on 125 years of the New York Times Book Review

March 3, 2021June 14, 2022

The New York Times literary critic surveys the history of the newspaper’s book review to discover what has, and what hasn’t, changed in the last century.

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CriticismThe Colophon

Situation critical: a justification for robust literary criticism

March 1, 2021June 14, 2022

The dearth of serious literary critique in contemporary society is concerning, because a robust literature depends on robust criticism.

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CriticismThe Horror ShowWriters and Writing

Joyce Carol Oates on “the psyche’s deepest and most profound revelations”

October 18, 2020June 14, 2022

In a brief survey of some core Western texts, Oates asks the key question, why do we want to experience fear in an aesthetic context?

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CriticismThe Colophon

No, the novel is not dead

April 29, 2020June 14, 2022

Arguments that insist on the centrality of the western canon are most frequently a veil for the politics of exclusion.

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CriticismInternational LiteratureThe Colophon

Harold Bloom, proponent of the literary sublime, dies at age 89

October 15, 2019June 14, 2022

Harold Bloom antagonized academics and cultural theorists, but remained a staunch advocate of transcendence through literature.

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