David Mikics

Reading, David Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere information-gathering or escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful, satisfying reading experience, as well as sharper reading skills and improved concentration.

Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history "A cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. . . . A brisk study of [Kubrick's] films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite."--Dwight Garner, New York Times "An engaging and well-researched primer to the work of a cinematic legend."--Library Journal Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor's son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. He was a self-taught filmmaker and self-proclaimed outsider, and his films exist in a unique world of their own outside the Hollywood mainstream. Kubrick's Jewishness played a crucial role in his idea of himself as an outsider. Obsessed with rebellion against authority, war, and male violence, Kubrick was himself a calm, coolly masterful creator and a talkative, ever-curious polymath immersed in friends and family. Drawing on interviews and new archival material, David Mikics for the first time explores the personal side of Kubrick's films.

American Filmmaker

Stanley Kubrick

Stephen Burt

John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English David Mikics

Professor of English and American Literature and Language Stephen Burt, Frmets Frm Frm

Collects one hundred sonnets and commentaries that highlight the history of the sonnet.

The Art of the Sonnet

A New Handbook of Literary Terms offers a lively, informative guide to words and concepts that every student of literature needs to know. Mikics’s definitions are essayistic, witty, learned, and always a pleasure to read. They sketch the derivation and history of each term, including especially lucid explanations of verse forms and providing a firm sense of literary periods and movements from classicism to postmodernism. The Handbook also supplies a helpful map to the intricate and at times confusing terrain of literary theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the author has designated a series of terms, from New Criticism to queer theory, that serves as a concise but thorough introduction to recent developments in literary study. Mikics’s Handbook is ideal for classroom use at all levels, from freshman to graduate. Instructors can assign individual entries, many of which are well-shaped essays in their own right. Useful bibliographical suggestions are given at the end of most entries. The Handbook’s enjoyable style and thoughtful perspective will encourage students to browse and learn more. Every reader of literature will want to own this compact, delightfully written guide.

A New Handbook of Literary Terms

"The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche examines the argument, as well as the affinity, between these two philosophers. Nietzsche was an enthusiastic reader of Emerson and inherited from him an interest in provocation as a means of instruction, an understanding of the permanent importance of moods and transitory moments in our lives, and a sense of the revolutionary character of impulse. Both were deliberately outrageous thinkers, striving to shake us out of our complacency.".

The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche

"This book argues that critical tradition has obscured the mutually constitutive relation between the didactic mission of Renaissance epic and the pathos of the epic self." "Critics usually see Spenser and Milton either as poets dedicated to an autonomous aesthetic that dictates indulgence in pathos for its own sake, or as Christian moralists who subordinate pathos to the didactic demands of society. The Romantic tradition that stretches from Keats to Harold Bloom exemplifies the former option. Neo-Christian, reader response, and new historicist critics assert a contrary, but similarly unbalanced, view by choosing the didactic authority of social custom, tradition, or ideology over the pathos of subjectivity." "Resisting attempts to establish an absolute priority for either pathos or moralizing, David Mikics looks to the debate between subjective passions and didactic imperatives as a sign of the complex relation between literary creation and social norms. In a study that shies away from new historicist endorsements of the force of normative ideology, as well as late Romantic celebrations of the poetic self, the author finds that Spenser and Milton develop an innovative literary subjectivity under the pressure of the Reformation's moralizing aims." "Incorporating moral force within pathos would allow poetic passion to become a worthy and clearly justifiable public stance. But Spenser and Milton, in their pursuit of this rhetorical ideal, find themselves acknowledging, instead, an enduring disjunction between affect and the discursive forms of public morality which aim to discipline or exploit it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton

The Limits of Moralizing

A leading literary critic’s innovative study of how the Nobel Prize–winning author turned life into art. Saul Bellow was the most lauded American writer of the twentieth century—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the only novelist to be awarded the National Book Award in Fiction three times. Preeminently a novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings, Bellow filled his work with vibrant, garrulous, particular people—people who are somehow exceptionally alive on the page. In Bellow’s People, literary historian and critic David Mikics explores Bellow’s life and work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. Mikics covers ten of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow, such as his irascible older brother, Morrie, a key inspiration for The Adventures of Augie March; the writer Delmore Schwartz and the philosopher Allan Bloom, who were the originals for the protagonists of Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein; the novelist Ralph Ellison, with whom he shared a house every summer in the late 1950s, when Ellison was coming off the mammoth success of Invisible Man and Bellow was trying to write Herzog; and Bellow’s wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, and his best friend, Jack Ludwig, whose love affair Bellow fictionalized in Herzog. A perfect introduction to Bellow’s life and work, Bellow’s People is an incisive critical study of the novelist and a memorable account of a vibrant and tempestuous circle of midcentury American intellectuals.

David Mikics

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