Non-fiction

The central concept of Against World Literature is the ‘Untranslatable’: a word or other semantic unit that cannot easily be rendered from one language to another, an ‘intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity’.

The authors specifically exclude ‘culture’ from their account of ‘how universities can be useful to individuals and societies’ because they are trying to take a pragmatic view of the situation. This certainly presents a simpler view of the situation universities face – a less confusing view – but it is not pragmatic, because the benefits universities provide to individuals, communities and nations are civic as well as economic, and these two are related to each other.

Notwithstanding the occasional gnomic aside to the effect that no science is untouched by magic, Gray has hitherto upheld the distinction between scientific progress, which is a fact of history, and human progress, which is a modern myth. But in his new book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, this distinction begins perceptibly to blur.

The Chinese Communist Party is arguably the single most powerful organisation in the world.

It was when I turned to The Bourgeois that I really got a sense of Moretti’s epistemological superiority over most of his humanities competitors… It is not that the scientific team-man has simply trumped or supplanted the delicately tuned aesthetician. It is that Moretti has become both simultaneously, a lonely centaur or Janus-faced creature, at once historically minded and future oriented, sentimental and technicist, elegiac and plain speaking.

It is Kennedy’s belief that lived experience is essential to the writing process and needs to be integrated into the way writing is taught. Inviting a horse to the writing workshop is not her only irreverent suggestion. She also proposes that the student group and their teacher might benefit from sharing a meal, attending a concert together, or taking a walk.

As the fifty-something David Shields remarks in How Literature Saved My Life, ‘everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.’ We are living in an age of idiots, in the etymologically precise sense of the word.

Feigel has gathered together a half-dozen writers – Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pen-name of Henry Yorke), Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, and the little-known Hilde Spiel – and traced their lives, loves and works through the first shattering attacks in 1940-41 to the lull, and then the resumption in 1944, as the pilotless V-1 and V-2 attacks began.

Wark’s two books work sequentially, although they also loop around the same figures and concepts. They could be treated as histories of the Situationist milieu and its aftermaths, but to do so would miss entirely what makes them such compelling and, at times, hilarious reading.

The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.