What is an affect versus a feeling, what is a response to an image as opposed to an understanding of it? Can we be moved by Casablanca if we do not understand that Rick and Ilsa still love each other but there is a war to be fought and that must take priority? Can we feel the weight at the end of Chinatown if we haven’t gathered that Mulwray was raped by her father, and the child that came o…
If Proust once proposed that you have to read at least two books by a writer before you can pass judgement, and Nabokov reckoned you ought to read his entire body of work before being entitled to an opinion, then Juan Rulfo fulfils Proust’s modest criterion and Nabokov’s very demanding one. Rulfo only wrote two books that were published in his lifetime: the short story collection The B…
I got to know someone recently who managed to give up his job teaching in a Spanish school for four years to pursue studies in the UK. His purpose was to improve his English and so he embarked on an undergraduate degree no more strenuous than the one he already had from Spain. He chose to study English literature. His original degree was in Spanish and Portuguese. I had known him for a couple of m…
What is intermedial kitsch? It amounts to an aesthetic approach that too readily draws upon the arts without quite adding up to a remark of its own. As Stanley Cavell says, “so many remarks one has endured about the kind and number of feet in a line of verse, or about a superb modulation, or about a beautiful diagonal in a painting, or about a wonderful camera angle, have not been readings o…