Marvin Mudrick's Books

Mudrick Transcribed

Classes and Talks

By: Marvin Mudrick

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Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks exists only because of the diligence and ingenuity of a student, Lance Kaplan, who recorded some of Marvin Mudrick’s classes on cassette tapes. After Mudrick’s untimely death in 1986, Kaplan began to transcribe and edit the recordings. “Transcribe” and “edit” are, however, inadequate words to describe the creation of this extraordinary book, which is a kind of miracle of attention. It is entertaining, freakishly smart, and full of love—a love of life, books, music, and people. The transcriptions include a class on eighteenth-century English prose, a class on the writing of narrative prose, two interviews about the College of Creative Studies, and talks on literary criticism, artistic response, genius, and the craft of teaching. The only volume that has never been commercially published, this may well be the gem of the Berkshire Classics Mudrick collection.

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Page Count

428

Publisher

Berkshire Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1614720711

ISBN 13

9781614720713

The Man in the Machine

By: Marvin Mudrick

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The Man in the Machine

By: Marvin Mudrick

The Man in the Machine consists of lively, iconoclastic assessments of major writers and critics by Marvin Mudrick, about whom the critic Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick." The book takes its title from Mudrick’s introduction, in which he writes about Edgar Allan Poe’s pervasive influence on modern literature: "[Poe] had the effrontery to palm off on us the silliest, least interesting, and most influential of twentieth-century critical dogmas: that books are machines with nobody inside." Writing about such masters as Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Trollope, Saint-Simon, Conrad, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn, Mudrick shows us the pyrotechnics that can occur when a towering intellect meets characters from the past with all dogma and theories of literature tossed to the wind.

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Page Count

158

Publisher

Berkshire Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1614728720

ISBN 13

9781614728726

On Culture and Literature

By: Marvin Mudrick

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On Culture and Literature

By: Marvin Mudrick

On Culture and Literature displays the style, brio, and independence of thought that makes Marvin Mudrick one of the few literary critics who is read for pleasure. This is cultural criticism at its most exciting, and Mudrick expands the field of criticism to include literature, political and musical works, autobiography, and science. The literary criticism establishment comes under fire, especially the power couple Lionel and Diana Trilling, as Mudrick brings the critic as reader to center stage: our human consciousness and ethical imagination encountering others through the heightened reality of a work of art. Mudrick invites readers along for the ride, in fresh encounters with Eliot, Hemingway, Bellow, and Mailer, with Lady Murasaki, Casanova, Chaucer, Tolstoy, and Shaw, writing throughout with characteristic leaps of insight and scholarship.

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Page Count

206

Publisher

Berkshire Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1614728488

ISBN 13

9781614728481

Nobody Here But Us Chickens

A Book About People in Books

By: Marvin Mudrick

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Nobody Here But Us Chickens

A Book About People in Books

By: Marvin Mudrick

Nobody Here But Us Chickens is a virtuoso display of literary and hiNobody Here But Us Chickens is a virtuoso display of literary and historical portraiture by Marvin Mudrick, whom the Washington Post called a “literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight.” Mudrick believed that in books, as in life, people matter, and that it matters in books, as it does in life, whether people are decent or not. Sticking to this plain common sense, Mudrick assembles an eye-opening hall of fame and rogues gallery that includes devastating, satirical attacks on Shakespeare, Jesus, and Flaubert, as well as a wide-ranging meditation on heroism. Mudrick devotees will know that he favors Chaucer, Jane Austen, and D. H. Lawrence, all of whom appear here, but we also get to know what he thinks about Coriolanus, Van Gogh, and Solzhenitsyn. Readers unfamiliar with the daring of Mudrick’s opinions and the special texture of his prose will come away from Nobody Here But Us Chickens wishing that critical biography was always this much fun.storical portraiture by Marvin Mudrick, whom the Washington Post called a "literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight.

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Page Count

244

Publisher

Berkshire Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1614728879

ISBN 13

9781614728870

Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?

By: Marvin Mudrick

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Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?

By: Marvin Mudrick

Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? demonstrates how much Marvin Mudrick loved life and celebrated the dignity of life in literature. “It’s helpful to be reminded now and then,” he writes, that “while novelists persist in their noisy betrayals of human dignity, living has a longer history than reading, and truth than fiction.” Mudrick insists on seeing authors and their characters as people and he describes and judges them as frankly as if they were living among us. In this collection, we meet heroes, monsters, and every shade of character in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics. We get to know each of them, so vivid are Mudrick’s quotations and commentary. Essay after essay demonstrates that good criticism can amplify both life and literature.

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Berkshire Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1614728860

ISBN 13

9781614728863

Jane Austen

Irony as Defense and Discovery

By: Marvin Mudrick

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Jane Austen

Irony as Defense and Discovery

By: Marvin Mudrick

Has there ever been a critic of Jane Austen equal to her verve, her animation and independence of thought? Marvin Mudrick’s Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, his first book, was published in 1952, and remains a fundamental work of commentary on Austen. It is filled with idiosyncratic insights about what makes Austen’s novels so daring and alive. Mudrick writes, for example, that this book “began as an essay to document my conviction that Emma is a novel admired, even consecrated, for qualities which it in fact subverts or ignores.” He goes on to show Austen to be a writer of irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world. Mudrick examines her writings as aspects of a developing personal irony, an irony that later became the vital principles of her art. It was her ironic detachment, he maintains, that enabled her to expose and dissect, in novels that are masterpieces of comic wit and brilliant satire, the follies and delusions of eighteenth-century English society—and of human society even today.

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