Cam Balzer
on literature
on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
"... a novel like the English Patient offers you layers of enlightenment and beguilement, making it a rich world for this kind of double--edged reading...."
"... Dillard creates mysteries in which readers can lose themselves–and find themselves, more humble and more submissive to the subtilties of constructed realities of all kinds...."
"... It seems reasonable that dialogism may be our best hope as both a meeting place and the mode of interaction for the encounter of Western readers and non-Western texts...."
"... After the upheavals of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, and a catastrophe as great as the fire of 1666, London was no doubt a city in search of 'the gods who presided at its founding'...."
"From the incantatory invocation, 'Deshil Holles Eamus,' to the cacophony in the darkened streets of Dublin and in Burke's public house, the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode is a tumult of 'vocations'...."
"... Endgame’s staged reality is a world in the process of being voided--emptied, cancelled out--and that this unmaking is focused on the human body and its projections into the material world..."
through 1998
