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An Artificial Wilderness:Essays On 20th-Century Literature
If recent fiction consisted exclusively of American postmodernists, modern literature would be in deep trouble, contends Birkerts. In this latest gathering of brilliant essays, he examines the decline of humanist faith, a theme that links an international community of writers.
- GenresEssaysLiterary Criticism
431 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
Sven Birkerts
61 books82 followersSven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."
Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.
His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.
Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.
His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 22, 2012
An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-Century Literature (William Morrow and Company, New Yourk, 1987)
This book by Sven Birkerts -- whose fine essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere -- just may serve to keep the fine art of literary criticism alive after the ravages of post-modernism that have all but torn it to shreds. If this seems too harsh and extreme a judgment to render on the outcomes to which seemingly harmless elite intellectual matters can finally lead, then consider John Bayley's words in New York Review of Books back in June 4, 1981. "The reality of the thing , Structuralism and deconstruction . . . have banished physical realities from literature, replacing them with the abstract play of language, the game of the signifiers. They were on their way out anyway, they were leaving literature, and the critical process, as usual, found ways of explaining and rationalizing their departure, even of suggesting they had never been there."
Instead of falling into the trap of trying to survey the span of an entire century, Birkerts wisely chooses here to excavate the sites of some of its better-known prospectors in order to assay their findings -- thereby dealing in actual substance instead of sweep. What he finds is high-grade ore. Since Birkerts has to fend off his share of sharpshooting detractors sniping at him from the hills', who take him to task for being much too fond of foreign writers over those from our own shores, let us pick an American example to enter as evidence and make our case. Birkerts, who clearly understands that it takes a soul to sense the sickness, lostness, or absence of another one, excavates Malcolm Lowry's overwhelming achievement Under the Volcano, rightly recognized the world over as a masterpiece in depicting nothing less than the ruin of a soul -- which in his own life, Lowry certainly lived out. No empty, arid, ivory-tower, vacuous theorizing here. Every phrase is taut and terribly telling . . . Birkerts's just as much as Lowry's. But don't take my word for it. Read it and judge for yourself.
Because of how subtly his own mind works, Birkerts is able to discern the subtlety there in the mind of another. This is what brings forth in even a barren wilderness a bloom in the desert. Sven Birkerts
This book by Sven Birkerts -- whose fine essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere -- just may serve to keep the fine art of literary criticism alive after the ravages of post-modernism that have all but torn it to shreds. If this seems too harsh and extreme a judgment to render on the outcomes to which seemingly harmless elite intellectual matters can finally lead, then consider John Bayley's words in New York Review of Books back in June 4, 1981. "The reality of the thing , Structuralism and deconstruction . . . have banished physical realities from literature, replacing them with the abstract play of language, the game of the signifiers. They were on their way out anyway, they were leaving literature, and the critical process, as usual, found ways of explaining and rationalizing their departure, even of suggesting they had never been there."
Instead of falling into the trap of trying to survey the span of an entire century, Birkerts wisely chooses here to excavate the sites of some of its better-known prospectors in order to assay their findings -- thereby dealing in actual substance instead of sweep. What he finds is high-grade ore. Since Birkerts has to fend off his share of sharpshooting detractors sniping at him from the hills', who take him to task for being much too fond of foreign writers over those from our own shores, let us pick an American example to enter as evidence and make our case. Birkerts, who clearly understands that it takes a soul to sense the sickness, lostness, or absence of another one, excavates Malcolm Lowry's overwhelming achievement Under the Volcano, rightly recognized the world over as a masterpiece in depicting nothing less than the ruin of a soul -- which in his own life, Lowry certainly lived out. No empty, arid, ivory-tower, vacuous theorizing here. Every phrase is taut and terribly telling . . . Birkerts's just as much as Lowry's. But don't take my word for it. Read it and judge for yourself.
Because of how subtly his own mind works, Birkerts is able to discern the subtlety there in the mind of another. This is what brings forth in even a barren wilderness a bloom in the desert. Sven Birkerts
April 24, 2020
If you enjoy rereading your favorite novels from time to time, please read Birkerts essay “Rereading.” He is able to put the emotions of returning to a text into precise words. The most poignant statement for me is when he states that when rereading anything, “that it’s always a different river and always a different I stepping into it.”
May 19, 2010
"If recent fiction consisted exclusively of American postmodernists, modern literature would be in deep trouble, contends Birkerts. In this latest gathering of brilliant essays, he examines the decline of humanist faith, a theme that links an international community of writers. German-language authors Max Frisch, Robert Musil and Eva Demski, Russian poets Joseph Brodsky and Osip Mandelstam, and such figures as Julio Cortazar, Umberto Eco, Marguerite Yourcenar and Malcolm Lowry are among those highlighted. Birkerts delves into Musil's pioneering portrayals of sexual obsessions, reads Primo Levi's death-camp memoirs as a literature of the sacred and assesses Salman Rushdie's attempts to create myths of India and Pakistan. Meditations on television, documentary fiction and literary biography round out the volume. It would be impossible to sum up the riches of this invaluable guide through the wilderness of modern literature. Birkerts, who teaches at Harvard, won the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism."
— Publisher's Weekly
"Poststructural critics and post-modern American novelists irritate Birkerts because they insert a 'membrane of self' between the work and the reader. His favorite critics are those who, like Walter Benjamin, display 'a sensibility as opposed to an intelligence,' or, like Roger Shattuck, explore the 'margins of culture.' His favorite novelists — almost all European — reach beyond a facile vision of the abyss to a more complex and comprehensive prospect of futurity. What marks the nearly 30 novelists he discusses is their commitment to an intuitive, poetic language that fleshes out an image of a world flawed but rich in potential. Birkerts's prose is lucid and aphoristic, his criticism rich in apercus but often flawed by excess. Though he undervalues American fiction, and overvalues European, he makes his case with passion and clarity."
— Arthur Waldhorn, Library Journal
— Publisher's Weekly
"Poststructural critics and post-modern American novelists irritate Birkerts because they insert a 'membrane of self' between the work and the reader. His favorite critics are those who, like Walter Benjamin, display 'a sensibility as opposed to an intelligence,' or, like Roger Shattuck, explore the 'margins of culture.' His favorite novelists — almost all European — reach beyond a facile vision of the abyss to a more complex and comprehensive prospect of futurity. What marks the nearly 30 novelists he discusses is their commitment to an intuitive, poetic language that fleshes out an image of a world flawed but rich in potential. Birkerts's prose is lucid and aphoristic, his criticism rich in apercus but often flawed by excess. Though he undervalues American fiction, and overvalues European, he makes his case with passion and clarity."
— Arthur Waldhorn, Library Journal
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews