Today's Sermon:

March 29, 2009

Auerbach, Purdy;
Purdy, Auerbach

The 4-day annual meeting
of the American Comparative
Literature Association
concludes today.
This year the the meeting
is held at Harvard University.
(Program-- pdf, 256 pp.)

"But the spirit of rhetoric-- a spirit which classified subjects in genera and invested every subject with a specific form of style as one garment becoming it in virtue of its nature [i.e. lower classes with the farcical low-style, upper classes with the tragic, the historic and the sublime elevated-style]-- could not extend its dominion to them [the Bible writers] for the simple reason that their subject would not fit into any of the known genres."

-- Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton edition of 1953, p. 45, as quoted at Wikipedia)

The Washington Post on its literary columnist Michael Dirda:

"... he holds a PhD in comparative literature from Cornell...."

Dirda on author James Purdy (April 5, 2000):

QUESTION: "What do you make of Purdy and his place in 20th century American fiction?"

"A small sidetrack in American literature-- a camp novelist, something of a cult figure. Will probably be forgotten in a generation. Malcolm is probably his best bet for survival, but a lot will depend on his readers and whether they can keep his name and fiction before the public. So far they haven't been doing much of a job. Personally, I think Purdy is a funny, brilliant writer, but that doesn't assure immortality."

Steven H. Cullinane on Purdy,
"Radical Emptiness,"
Friday, March 13th, 2009 --

"See you in the
funny papers, Purdy."