Poetics
335 BC · 144 pages
Tragedy earns pity and fear through the mistake of a decent man, Aristotle argues, and plot matters more than character. Every screenwriting manual since has been repeating him.
★ 7.2
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Against Interpretation
And Other Essays
1966 · 312 pages
Sontag's charge against criticism: pulling meaning out of a work is a way of not experiencing it. She wants attention paid to surface and speed, and asks for an erotics of art instead.
★ 6.8
Selected Non-Fictions
1999 · 560 pages
Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.
★ 6.4
The Great War and Modern Memory
1975 · 431 pages
The trenches taught the century to speak in irony, Fussell argues, reading Sassoon, Graves, and Owen against the language they inherited. Historians have argued with him for fifty years inside his frame.
★ 6.3
Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World
1991 · 202 pages
Wonder was never innocent, Greenblatt argues. Reading Columbus's landfall and the travel writers around him, he catches the moment when amazement at a new world hardens into a claim to own it.
★ 5.6