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…
1 Perhaps a certain type of empathy in friendship can hide blind spots elsewhere. That giving our thoughts over to one person can indicate far more our inconsiderateness towards others, and yet speculation takes many forms without always indicating depth of feeling. I believe I had always given much thought to my closest friend, and at the same time, we would explore these thoughts in numerous con…
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…