Narrators, Part 2 -- The Cess of Omniscience
10.25.2010

At the end of a work of fiction, the ideal reader knows as much as the author. How could it be otherwise? There is nothing else to know.

This means that the end of the work is the end of omniscience.

Bloopers and essentialism
10.17.2010

Bloopers are bloopers, but the study of bloopers is Theory. The study of bloopers can also be fun, and should be (even if an air of quasi-tragic resignation in the face of bloopers is the central, melodramatic posture of deconstruction). It can also tell us a little about the ways that we're all essentially essentialists.

I am, at any rate.

Gatz
10.07.2010

If you're in New York and seeing You can't get there from here but you can get here from there, the show that Claire Bowen described in a recent post, you should also try to see another astonishing union of literary work and vivid display in the the seven hour production of Gatz at the Public Theater

Narrators, Part 1 -- How can you know it's third person?
10.04.2010

When I was a kid I hated what I called I-books, first person narratives.  It was not only that there was something unseemly about people telling the kinds of stories I liked (genre: heroic, adventurous, courageous) about themselves.  There was also something just a little bit viscerally off-putting about them.

Reported speech in the heroic couplet
09.27.2010

While Beckett once advised another writer to stop "blazing away at the microcosmic moon," it's sometimes an irresisitible temptation to try to "flush the coverts of the microglot," as J.L. Austin put it (in "A Plea for Excuses"). And why resist it?

Metaphor and the fallacy of conversion
09.19.2010

Joshua Landy just posted a very interesting blog entry here, partly on how the fallacy of conversion tends to work in Derridean argument.  I am no longer enchanted by Derrida -- I've been... deconverted? deprogrammed? -- but I was prompted to defend him in the comments to that post. 

By way of introduction, a plea for anticipatory absolution
09.13.2010

Since being invited, after some coughing and ostentatious self-effacement, to contribute here, I've had a kind of blogger's block about it -- here, though not elsewhere. 

Pages

William Flesch's picture
William Flesch
William Flesch is the author, most recently, of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Harvard, 2008), and The Facts on File Companion to 19th Century British Literature.  He teaches the history of poetry as well as the theory of poetic and narrative form at Brandeis, and has been International Chair Professor at the National Taipei University of Technology (2012) and Old Dominion Fellow of the Humanities Council and Visiting Professor at Princeton (2014-15).

Publications

The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry: 19th Century
Facts on File | 2009
Comeuppance
Harvard University Press | 2008