Ricks – författare

Most people most of the time want to live for ever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humour, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition, an age of transplants and life-support.But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not-simply-unwelcome encroachments of death? After all, it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers. As a young man, Beckett himself praised Joyce's words. `They are alive'.Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death. In clichés, which are dead but won't lie down. In a dead language and its memento mori. In words which mean their own opposites, cleaving and cleaving. In the self-stultifying or even suicidal turn dubbed the Irish bull. In what Beckett called a syntax of weakness.This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

The successor to the highly-praised collection of Christopher Rickss The Force of Poetry, this collection of critical essays still attends to poets and poetry: to John Donnes farewells to love, George Crabbes constraints, Hardys readings of history, and Robert Lowell as translator of Racine. But other literary worlds are also appreciated in Essays in Appreciation. Drama: Marlowes Doctor Faustus and the plague. History: the Earl of Clarendon and composition. The novel: Jane Austen and mothering. Victorian lives: E. C. Gaskells Charlotte Bronte, Froudes Carlyle, Hallam Tennysons Tennyson, and George Eliot and her age. Philosophy: J. L. Austin and his art of allusion. Finally, critical questions: literature and the matter of fact, and literary principles against theory; plus two notes on current critical issuesone on talk of the canon, and the other on Empson and political criticism. literary criticism of an intellectual zestfulness which makes everyone else in the field look half asleep The Spectator Ricks's grasp of literary detail is unequalled he has a microscopic eye for distinguishment of shades of meaning, with their bearings on emotional definition Anyone who has a feeling for literature will enjoy Essays in Appreciation.If you have none, here are good reasons to cultivate it. Times Literary Supplement