Arthur Seaton is a man of frustration during a period in British cinema history where frustration was seen as a good thing, a political thing. This doesn't mean that the characters in films like Look Back in Anger, A Kind of Loving, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are political, nor even that the disparate filmmakers behind the films were politi…
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…
In his essay 'Structuralism and Literary Criticism', Gerard Genette interestingly and judiciously discusses Structuralism, acknowledging its importance while indicating its potential limits. “Literature had long enough been regarded as a message without a code for it to become necessary to regard it for a time as a code without a message.” Yet he also says, “the prejudice…