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Topic: James Wood (critic)

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	Voice Literary Supplement: Looking Backward
		Not ironized nostalgia, nor that which leads to hideous, shrinking, shameful adult messes—no, Thomas Bunting, as sour as he professes to be, is caught in the dandelion clutches of fuzzy, straight-up yearning for the childhood and parents he claims to dislike.
		Wood is a little too polite as a fiction writer.
		Wood's novel, however, lacks the imagination to seduce us into a world that doesn't belong to us, and to which we have no ties.
	www.villagevoice.com /vls/179/julavits.shtml (867 words)

	James Wood (critic) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		James Wood (born 1965 in Durham, UK), is a literary critic.
		Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, News from the Republic of Letters where he is a Contributing Editor, and the London Review of Books where he is a member of its editorial board.
		Wood began teaching literature in a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/James_Wood_(critic) (635 words)

	Amazon.ca: The Book Against God: Books: James Wood (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Wood holds these writers largely responsible for the breaking of the estate (along with a string of contemporary apologists who are accused by Wood of having “dismantled” God) and the essay reads like an angry indictment against the men who made it possible for Wood to lose his faith.
		Wood's religious-philosophical musings propel the narrative, but it's the relationship between a son and his earthly father that lies at the heart of Wood's and Bunting's so-called "BAG." A better twentieth century story of father and son you'd be hard pressed to find.
		Wood's criticism has a preternatural quality (how could someone so young be so well read?), and the Book Against God, while flawed and self-consciously limited, displays a profound understaning of literature, its roles, capabilities and power.
	www.amazon.ca /Book-Against-God-James-Wood/dp/0374115389 (2376 words)

	The New Yorker : critics : books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		This was the age of the antiquarian, the amateur scholar, the ecclesiastical polyglot, the obsessed bibliophile.
		James I was himself a learned man, reared in Scotland by one of Montaigne’s tutors, and capable, Nicolson says, of translating any passage of the Bible from Latin into French and then into English.
		They announced in their preface that they would not be held to a “uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words,” so that, for instance, they would feel free to translate the word for “purpose” sometimes as “purpose” and sometimes as “intent.” In fact, they were fruitfully inconsistent.
	www.newyorker.com /critics/books/?030526crbo_books (2334 words)

	The Book Against God
		Thomas Bunting, the narrator of literary critic James Wood's first novel, is an atheist.
		The duty of the hero in a First Novel is, typically, to embody the author's ego ideal: the introspective, embattled consciousness, sensitive as a burn, escaping the restricted universe of childhood, on a quest to give birth to its own identity.
		Wood's alter-ego is a different sort of autobiographical proxy.
	www.mclemee.com /id28.html (704 words)

	The Reading Experience: James Wood
		Again, Wood has every right to prefer this sort of fiction, indeed, to write essays extolling the virtues of those writers who provide it and belittling those who don't, but to elevate this preference to a critical principle of universal salience is something else.
		Although, one has to simply accept that Wood's critical principle is both incontestable and universally applicable, since Wood doesn't really carry through his notion of "the irresponsible self" and the gentle comedy accompanying it in any kind of sustained argument.
		When Wood, for instance attacks the author of "Gravity's Rainbow" for being too vivid, he's essentially telling him that there are too many things in his book and that those are causing him to lose his way, the way James believes was meant to be travelled.
	noggs.typepad.com /the_reading_experience/2004/10/james_wood.html (3155 words)

	The Morning News - Birnbaum v. James Wood by Robert Birnbaum
		Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting lecturer in English and American Literature at Harvard.
		He was formerly the chief literary critic for the Guardian and has previously published a collection of critical essays, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, and a novel, The Book Against God.
		In that way I think that the critic’s task is something different from the editor because it’s the weird combination of being able, ideally, to pluck something out of the present and say this is really good, this is really good, while also keeping an eye on the horizon, on posterity.
	www.themorningnews.org /archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_james_wood.php (7157 words)

	The Harvard Crimson :: Arts :: The Critical View
		Wood’s aim in teaching the class, as well as next semester’s course on postwar American and British fiction, is to present what he calls a “writer’s criticism,” which he differentiates from a scholar’s literary analysis.
		Wood’s criticism is different from most of this age, and that’s mostly a result of its intent.
		Wood says he hasn’t encountered any hostility from academia over lecturing without a Ph.D., which he feels is “rather remarkable.” He acknowledges that his lack of specialization might hinder his approach in someways, but also thinks it could help.
	www.thecrimson.com /article.aspx?ref=349548 (1312 words)

	James Wood's daring novel. - By Morris Dickstein - Slate Magazine
		James Wood's first novel, The Book Against God, is a daring piece of work—not only a novel of ideas but, God help us, of theological ideas, though it is grounded in its characters' lives, and, undoubtedly, in Wood's own.
		Throughout, Wood's hero, Thomas Bunting, is trying to free himself from the God (and the example) of his father—not a severe believer, like Wood's own, but a surprisingly genial, tolerant former theology professor who left the academic world for the simpler life of a country vicar.
		If metaphor is Wood's substitute for belief, his awkward way of deciphering the world as a place of signs and wonders, the novel expresses Wood's nostalgia for a credulous, stable Age of Faith, with its sacramental plenitude of meaning.
	www.slate.com /id/2083728 (1224 words)

	The Reading Experience: Rigid and Impacted
		Actually, it's James Wood's criticism that represents a "literary hostility to Mind," since it almost never engages in honest analysis of a given text in terms of what it seeks to accomplish, but instead just endlessly repeats the same old formula: psychological realism is all, psychological realism is all.
		James Wood is a well-known and well-regarded literary critic.
		Usually when we criticize a critic as dogmatic or moral, we tend to mean that they are censors rather than critics--that they disqualify works based on how the work reduces to easily-ascertainable moral theses, rather than on, say, qualities of style or characterization.
	noggs.typepad.com /the_reading_experience/2005/07/james.html (9370 words)

	Amazon.com: The Broken Estate: Books: James Wood (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Wood is a great lover, and this makes him if not a great hater then one who gets hot under the critical collar, his ardor turning to irritation and intemperance in pieces on Morrison, Pynchon, and Murdoch.
		James Wood is one such critic, and to say he is one of the best contributors to the New Republic is not praise enough.
		Wood and this book is a perfect introduction to why he has acquired such a reputation at such a comparatively young age.
	www.amazon.com /Broken-Estate-James-Wood/dp/0712665579 (3287 words)

	Empire Information Services: News Story
		James Kiepper, author, historian, retired UAlbany professor, and leading authority on the history of the New Hampshire Presidential Primary, will offer an Election Day discussion of U. politics and historical research on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at 12:15 p.m.
		James Wood became chief literary critic for the London "Guardian" at the age of 26 in 1991.
		Perhaps the most influential literary critic of his generation, he is known for criticism that champions art over ideology, aesthetics over politics.
	www.eisinc.com /release/storiesh/WRINST.612.html (1090 words)

	The Kenyon Review—Conversation with James Wood
		James Wood is author of three books: a novel, The Book against God, and two books of essays, most recently, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel and The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief.
		The critic transforms public discourse and actually improves the writing of his day, becoming a great critic and a leader in the year’s hot ideas, in the act of something really like prophecy.
		I mean, think of someone like Henry James, in which clearly enough, a super-vigilant consciousness accompanies always the creative effort of producing those fictions, such that the verbal surface of the criticism, at least for me, is pretty much indistinguishable from the verbal surface and verbal depth of the fiction.
	www.kenyonreview.org /interviews/pfwood.php (6096 words)

	The Reading Experience: The Critic as Hanging Judge
		Wood is sometimes compared to the academic critic F.R. Leavis, and indeed Wood's prose does have some of the smug lecture hall certainty and harsh evaluative tone of Leavis at his worst.
		Wood also shares something with the "moral critics" such as the poet-critic Yvor Winters or Lionel Trilling (or even Irving Howe.) With all of them, literature is a rather sour and sober affair, the critic its grave taskmaster.
		James Wood excoriated those novelists that showed too much concern for "social reality"; and that was a very valid point; particularly in the immediate days following 9/11, which was when he wrote the piece that carried those accusations.
	noggs.typepad.com /the_reading_experience/2004/04/it_would_seem_t.html (3295 words)

	James Wood (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Wood is the author of The Broken Estate, Essays on Literature and Belief.
		James Wood on Dostoevsky's world of pride and humility, reason and unreason.
		James Wood on why Ian McEwan's readers are offered many of the true pleasures of fiction, but sometimes starved of the truest difficulties.
	www.tnr.com /showBio.mhtml?pid=20&sa=1 (294 words)

	Brian Sholis
		Critical lapses—"reviews that are all positive or negative, only neutral or descriptive or so obscure or academic you can't figure out what they're saying,' to quote Jerry Saltz—should be a point of particular concern when lots of money is pouring into the art world, as it is now.
		In a moment when professionals swarm graduate school open houses and degree shows, dealers and collectors legitimize the efforts of young artists and then trade in (and often profit from) the results of their endeavors.
		"Only the best critics are generous enough to find the right words," Roger Sale once wrote, and the translation from the visual to the verbal inherent to almost all art criticism makes this specificity an imperative.
	www.briansholis.com /WRITING/CONTENT/NOTES_ON_CRITICISM/index.html (545 words)

	New York Press
		In his defense of himself and The New Republic, James Wood defends himself against the charge of being a reactionary or a professional hitman and reminds us of all the contemporary writers he's championed.
		But the problem with Wood is not that he's some demented gatekeeper trying to expel modernity like Dale Peck, nor is it that he confuses good taste with good writing, although that's closer to the truth.
		Wood's real problem is that he often fails to recognize his own well-reasoned and compelling vision of what the novel ought to be.
	www.nypress.com /print.cfm?content_id=13703 (951 words)

	Book Against God (1st Ed.) is available from Bestprices.com Books!
		"James Wood, the critic, is one of the few living practitioners of his craft who will be read fifty years from now.
		Wood does some technical things so well that it would be a shame if he did not continue in the trade.
		Wood's effort to encompass the comic, the picaresque and the theological; the fictional values undergo joint strain.
	www.bestprices.com /cgi-bin/vlink/0374115389BT.html (543 words)

	The Balloonist: Zadie Smith
		The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called "hysterical realism".
		These are the famous claims made for "soul" and they lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match, invoked by Wood: the inviolability of "soul" versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.
		I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a fl cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice.
	kevinh.blogspot.com /2006/05/zadie-smith.html (407 words)

	The Irresponsible Self by James Wood: Reviews
		No one has delineated the hollow that lies at the center of the contemporary "ironic" novel so well as the literary critic James Wood; indeed, no one has written better about most of what he writes about.
		Wood may be one of those very rare critics whose work is still read a half century on.
		A master of close reading, Wood has an unmatched ability to tease out the minutest nuances of character and plot, but sometimes his soaring metaphoric prose, his sheer literary flair and extravagant reach can leave one a little dizzy.
	www.metacritic.com /books/authors/woodjames/irresponsibleself (420 words)

	Observer review: The Irresponsible Self by James Wood \| By genre \| Guardian Unlimited Books
		James Wood is not often thought of as a comedian.
		The simple but profound problem with many novelists, as Wood reads them, is that they have failed to realise the true nature of their chosen form; they are artists who have not yet learned how to reply to their calling.
		Wood spends most of the book digging this trap for himself, but what prevents him from falling into it is the same generous but discriminating sympathy that he admires in other writers.
	books.guardian.co.uk /reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1217666,00.html (989 words)

	The Book Against God - James Wood
		"The Book Against God, James Wood's much-awaited first novel, is so intriguing in part because of the technical resourcefulness with which it unites two hitherto distinct literary traditions: the familiar story of a young man's principled revolt against the faith in which he was raised, and the extravagant self-revelations of a tormented underground soul.
		Perhaps the reason Wood presents him as such an unpleasant fellow is because he only can accept this notion is if he is in the wrong against all the people who care for him, unable to accept their (near-) unconditional love in any other way.
		British literary critic James Wood was born in 1965.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/popgb/woodj.htm (1651 words)

	Amardeep Singh: The real issues in James Wood's novel, The Book Against God
		But here is where I part with Wood: the urgent issue in politics today is not one of real or false religion, so much as it is how to guarantee that societies around the world can continue to protect religious freedoms.
		Arnold begins to look better: Wood overlooks the possibility that Arnold's softened, inclusive Establishment in fact might have enabled the public presence of religion to become symbolic in a useful way (the same way that Monarchy is useful), even as modern nation-states transition to secularist politics.
		Woods' worrying over whether professions of Christian belief by some philosophers were sincere seems misplaced to me. I think that the attitude he brings to lit-crit, i.e., downplaying authorial intention, can usefully be applied to philosophical works as well.
	www.lehigh.edu /~amsp/2004/07/real-issues-in-james-woods-novel-book.html (1597 words)

	Short Fiction
		Reviews the critical response to Bellow's short fiction, traces Bellow's early, middle, and tale late periods as a short fiction writer, with a review of the critical literature as each collection or novella appeared.
		Criticizes the eight-page Introduction by the critic James Wood, pleading the case for Saul Bellow as a major writer.
		Bellow uses Shawmut to function as both social critic and object of criticism, a man filled with self-disgust over evasions of the deepest impulses of his soul and his neglect of his Jewish heritage in order to assimilate with a mainstream society that is hostile to the outsider.
	www.saulbellow.org /CriticismandReviews/ShortFiction.html (11814 words)

	The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter And The Novel - James Wood (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Critic James Wood considers the role of humor in fiction, making a distinction between secular comedy (which focuses on the human condition) and what he calls "religious comedy" (which aims to teach a lesson by way of satire or farce).
		Wood calls on his wide-ranging erudition, examining laughter in writers from Cervantes to Naipaul to Bellow.
		One of the nation's most controversial literary critics serves up twenty-three original, hard-hitting essays on a wide range of subjects, including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Bellow, Naipaul, the theater, and religious comedy.
	www.biblio.com /books/32778372.html (305 words)

	LRB \| James Wood : The Slightest Sardine (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose agreement in fact makes gloomy sense.
		But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are often suspicious of the way academic criticism confounds or even nullifies authorial intention in pursuit of the symptomatic.
		* Oxford, 386 pp., £30, February, 0 19 818428 X. James Wood is a senior editor at the New Republic and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v26/n10/wood02_.html (3003 words)

	Amitava Kumar :: James Wood :: April :: 2006 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Wood finds much to admire both in Flaubert and in the biography by Fredrick Brown; and when you read the last line of the passage that I have quoted below, you know that Wood could be talking also about himself:
		Thus the paradox that the most sensitive modern analyst of realism, Roland Barthes, the critic who most acutely laid bare realism’s grammar with something like a lover’s devotion, was almost derangedly hostile to its ambitions, an implacable denier of its effects.
		In today’s paper, Wood is described as “a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.”; I’m curious whether in his courses Wood uses Barthes’ S/Z, a text that he mentions in his Prospect essay; I also wonder what other examples of criticism he holds up as models for his students.
	amitavakumar.blogsome.com /2006/04/17/james-wood (502 words)

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