Saturday Special: Leonard Bernstein performs Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – Finale

The Novel as Parody (Tristam Shandy)

By Viktor Shklovsky
I do not intend to analyze Laurence Sterne’s novel. Rather, I shall use it in order to illustrate the general laws governing plot structure. Sterne was a radical revolutionary as far as form is concerned. It was typical of him to lay bare the device. The aesthetic form is presented without any motivation [...]

2007: a year in Guardian Unlimited Books

With 2007 fading fast into the mists of memory and the new year already hoving into view like a dodgy Mediterranean ferry, listing alarmingly as it reverses towards harbour in a dangerous and possibly illegal manoeuvre, it’s time to descend into the engine room, wipe away the grease and sweat of the last 12 months [...]

Gandhi (On Hearing the News from Pakistan Today)

Gandhi (1982) is a multi-award-winning biopic film about the life of Mahatma Gandhi, who was leader of the nonviolent resistance movement against British colonial rule in India during the first half of the 20th century. The film was directed by Richard Attenborough and stars Ben Kingsley as Gandhi; both won Academy Awards for their work [...]

Crossing Borders in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, the “Ladder of Dependance” Revisited

by Dachez, Hélène
“As the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli’d / Subjection …”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
One of the most striking images Henry Fielding offers in Joseph Andrews (1742) is that of the “Ladder of Dependance” (137), up and down which “High People and Low People” (136) move. In that digression, which explains why Slipslop refuses [...]

British Essayists: George Orwell: Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels

IN Gulliver’s Travels humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I he is the typical eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely outlook skilfully impressed on the reader by the biographical details at the beginning, [...]

Paradise Lost

By Robert P. Baird in Slate
Dante’s Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno’s nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur’s choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, “One finds few who [...]

Perry Como’s Christmas In Austria (1976) – Stille Nacht (Silent Night)

 Merry Christmas to you!

Perry sings ‘Stille Nacht (Silent Night)’ and ‘O Holy Night’ to conclude his 1976 Christmas Show in Austria. Guests: Sid Caesar, Senta Berger, Vienna Boys Choir, Karl Schranz and Vienna Waltz Champions. Originally Aired on: December 13, 1976.

Two volumes offer 30 years of literary criticism from Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & ’30s: The Shores of Light, Axel’s Castle, Uncollected Reviews
Edited by Lewis M. Dabney
LIBRARY OF AMERICA; 958 PAGES; $40
Edmund Wilson
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & ’40s: The Triple Thinkers, the Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials, Uncollected Reviews
Edited by Lewis M. Dabney
LIBRARY OF AMERICA; [...]

Film on Wednesday – Battleship Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatised version of the Battleship Potemkin uprising that occurred in 1905 when the crew of a Russian battleship rebelled against their oppressive officers of the Tsarist regime.Potemkin has been called one of the most influential films [...]