On two strains of Greek narrative (economic and theological) that continue in modern science fiction storytelling. Good stuff. Filed under: Daniel Mendelsohn.
Tag: danielmendelsohn
Critical thinking #4: Daniel Mendelsohn
I always tease them at the beginning of the semester about their writing—I say, “Whenever you write me at 11 o’clock on a Thursday night begging me for an extension on the paper, the prose is always so beautiful and the email is so wonderfully structured.” It’s a joke, but it’s also not a joke—in that situation they understand the rhetoric of the form to which they’re committing themselves: They understand who they are as a writer and a beseecher, they understand who I am as the person in charge, they understand what evidence to adduce in their favour—their dog died, their computer broke or whatever. Which is why the email begging for the paper extension is always a well-written piece. But whenever they have to write three paragraphs about women in Genesis or whatever—when they have to make an argument—it’s basically “word salad,” because they’ve never read anything that presents a text, wrestles with it and comes up with some conclusions. For that reason, I think it’s better that they should be reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida.
Filed under: Daniel Mendelsohn.
KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT.
Daniel Mendelsohn. More Mendelsohn.
UC Berkeley Classics Department: 2009 Commencement Address by Daniel Mendelsohn
What can it mean to devote oneself to a discipline that likes to think that it is timeless, that it has cheated the centuries, the millennia?
UC Berkeley Classics Department: 2009 Commencement Address by Daniel Mendelsohn
Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.
The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
Although I can’t vouch for anything beyond the second season, Mendelsohn’s critique seems fair. (via)
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
A few years ago, I read a collection of Mendelsohn’s criticism, most of it anyway, and found it quite enjoyable.
The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (review: 3.5/5)
How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken collects some of the criticism of Daniel Mendelsohn. Books, movies, theatre. Mendelsohn is a Classics scholar so his work is constantly making connections with the old Greek and Roman tragedies and epics.
I didn’t read all the essays because sometimes I just wasn’t familiar with what he was criticizing. But among the ones I liked were:
- his wonderful critique of Brokeback Mountain, or rather, a critique of how the critical reception washed out what makes it special (An Affair to Remember);
- his pondering why Tarantino movies, Kill Bill in particular, can be so boring and lifeless (It’s Only a Movie);
- his thinking about “the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens… the way in which history becomes drama” in a review of the movies United 93 and World Trade Center (September 11 at the Movies)
- his studies of productions of Tennesee Williams‘ plays (Victims of Broadway I and Victims of Broadway II)
- his takedown of Alice Sebold‘s sappy The Lovely Bones (Novel of the Year)
Daniel Mendelsohn had a good interview on NPR last month.
Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.
Mark Larson 