Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
I was also going to vote for The Swerve but then I went to read more about it on its Amazon page and came across some critical reviews including an excellent one by "Harold Kirkpatrick" here, which includes this paragraph:
...
I don't like the idea of Greenblatt overstating the importance of a central point of his book; another commenter also says that Greenblatt "overreaches" in his analysis.
It is a shame. The book sounds interesting and some commenters say that despite the bias of his premise, there are still good stories and historical anecdotes in the book that are well worth reading, but I don't know now if I'll read it if it wins. I'm not a fan of slanted history in non-fiction. If I do I read it I may spend the book thinking about which things he may be overemphasising and wondering which other important things he may have left out. |
Interesting. But one could ask, "Who is Harold Kirkpatrick?" He may know what he is talking about ... or he may not. Greenblatt's credentials according to Wikipedia are:
Greenblatt was born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from Newton North High School, he was educated at Yale University (B.A. 1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D. 1969) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A. 1966, M.A. 1968). Greenblatt has since taught at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. He was Class of 1932 Professor at Berkeley (he became a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University, where in 1997 Greenblatt became the Harry Levin Professor of Literature. He was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is considered "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s."[3]
Greenblatt is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Greenblatt has taught at such institutions as the École des Hautes Études, the University of Florence, Kyoto University, the University of Oxford and Peking University. He was a resident fellow at the American Academy of Rome, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been president of the Modern Language Association.
I think I'll be happy to take a punt with Greenblatt, and I voted for "The Swerve".
(Edit: And also for Sassoon and Johnson.)