The Modernist Papers by Fredric Jameson Close reading with Fredric Jameson A review by Eric Bulson Close reading. These are not words that usually come to mind when one hears the name Fredric Jameson. He has a reputation for being the kind of theorist who deals only in abstractions. The text, be it architectural, cinematic, literary, urban, so his critics claim, is more of an occasion, something that his master theory, Marxism, can gobble up and spit out. The same critics who complain about Jameson's reading habits are usually the first to attack his complicated style. The term Jamesonian is, in some hands, the derisive shorthand for opaque academic prose (a happy coincidence perhaps that it sounds a lot like "Jamesian"), and it sounds better than the other options (Spivakian, Butlerian, or Bhabhaian). In 1996, Jameson won the third annual Bad Writing Contest (sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature) for "the most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book". When issuing their verdict, the judges explained that Jameson "finds it difficult to write... Read the entire review More reviews from Times Literary Supplement

Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg and Monica Scott

"Nobody wants to be a second wife . . . . It's like moving into a new house that still has half the previous owner's furniture in it. You'd like to get rid of the all-plaid living-room set, but somehow you're stuck with it, forever. "In my case, the plaid living-room set is called Theresa...

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By the year 2100, many linguists estimate, half of the world's 6,912 distinct languages will be extinct. At present, 548 of them retain fewer than ninety-nine speakers. We can expect to lose a language every ten days; and behind each of these disappearances lies a story of cultural loss, sadness...

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Richard Dawkins's new collection of delectable prose, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, is less an anthology of set pieces than a treasury: a series of short titbits designed to pique the reader's appetite, helping him to decide which science writers to investigate more deeply. It enables...

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In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his team of investigators selected twenty-four young men to participate in their study of the psychology of imprisonment. The men, only a few of whom were students, had answered an ad placed in both the student newspaper and...

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The Russian expression "eto yozhu yasno" -- which broadly means "clear-cut", "straightforward" -- is a particularly appropriate description for the prose of Andrey Kurkov, who specializes in deceptively simplistic tales of the Ukrainian absurd. As something of a bonus, the phrase literally means...

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There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists ("Of...

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One of the heart-warming things about the Victorians is how generous they were in their choice of heroes. The same bourgeois philistine could find himself one week worshipping an exotic Oriental dandy such as Benjamin Disraeli, and the next a manly Christian gentleman such as David Livingstone. In...

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Helon Habila set his first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2002), in the mid 1990s, in the Nigeria of Sani Abacha, the military dictator whose brutality led to his country's being suspended from the Commonwealth. The book's artful back-to front narrative begins when the journalist Lomba, imprisoned on ...

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Bernard-Henri Levy is the model of a modern French intellectual. He made his name in the 1970s by showing a nation of philosophers how trendy and relevant philosophy could be. His boldness (he almost single-handedly broke the stranglehold of Marxism on French thought), talent for self-promotion...

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[Ed. Note. This review discusses the contents and context of two books: The Caged Virgin and Shattering the Stereotypes.] In 1992, the Somali-born author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, arrived in Holland as a refugee. She was granted citizenship in 1997, and in 2003 was elected to...

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Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown

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