Now that he's set down once and for all time a system of literary structural analysis (S/Z, 1974), what can Barthes possibly do for an encore? What but undercut his own scientific vision with the pleasure principle, showing off the text "in something like the way in which psychoanalysis has exhibited man's erotic body." It's the most basic of aesthetic questions—why is literature pleasure-giving? and what is the source of the pleasure? The originality of his rapid-fire answers is dizzying, exhausting. No critic is more perverse or more fecund than Barthes—this essay leaps from one illumination to the next with no more continuity than any other contemporary avant-garde display. But because of his stylistic commitment to modernity, he is the only critic who can meet Sade, Robbe-Grillet and Sarduy (as well as Zola and Proust) on their own subversive ground. Not an explication: a striptease revealing what is absolutely new in the art of narrative.
Pub Date: May 27, 1975
ISBN: 0374521603
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1975
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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