Tag: A.D. Nuttall
Biographer David Minter relays a fitting anecdote about Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, when Faulkner was less than ten years old. Young William and his grandmother, who he called “Damuddy,” liked to build “miniature villages in the family’s front yard,” Minter writes, “using sticks, grass, stones, and glass.” As an adult, Faulkner carried on building imaginary … Read More
A.D. Nuttall is a god damn genius. As of May 6, 2011, I am his only Goodreads “fan” (as well as the only “fan” of supreme literary critic Robert Alter) and that’s a testament both to the meaninglessness of literary fandom and to the intellectually backwards times we live in. But at least this Nuttall … Read More
A.D. Nuttall, the Oxford literature professor, has observed that ancient philosophy falls into two periods–the first being that of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the second being the generation that followed: Epicurus, Zeno (father of Stoicism), skeptics like Pyrrho, and others. Socrates died in 399 B.C.E., but the rest lived and wrote mostly in the 4th … Read More
On September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka stayed up all night writing a highly autobiographical, somewhat fantastical, short story called “The Judgment.” Twelve years later he was dead. He had published little, but what he’d written in that decade—including “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and The Trial—was a thunderbolt staked in the heart of literature … Read More
Somewhere, in the last ten or twenty years or so, Dale Peck wrote that the development of the novel in English took a wrong turn somewhere in the middle of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His attack was really on post-modernism, and all literature that appears complex and self-referential … Read More