Sven birkerts biography of mahatma

PERSONAL: Born Sept 21, 1951, in Pontiac, MI; son of Gunnar G. (an architect) and Sylvia (Zvirbulis) Birkerts; married Lynn Focht (a psychotherapist), August 23, 1985; children: twosome. Education:University of Michigan, B.A., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Home—67 Dothan St., Arlington, Beguile 02174.

Office—CAS Agni Review, 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, Arrangement 02215 (Charles River Campus). Agent—Helen F. Pratt, 1165 5th Ave., New York, NY 10029.

CAREER: Erudite critic, writer, and educator. Store clerk, Ann Arbor, MI, flourishing Cambridge, MA, 1973–83; Harvard Habit, Cambridge, MA, lecturer in instructive writing, 1984–91; Agni Review, Beantown, MA, editor, 2002–; Mt.

Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, lecturer; Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington, Connate, core faculty member. Also cultured writing at Emerson College, Beantown, MA, and Amherst College, Amherst, MA.

MEMBER: PEN (member of ceo board), National Book Critics Circle.

AWARDS, HONORS: Citation for excellence imprison reviewing, National Book Critics Faction, 1986; Spielvogel-Diamondstein Citation, PEN, 1990, for The Electric Life; Reader's Digest-Lila Wallace Foundation grant, 1991; Guggenheim Foundation grant.

WRITINGS:

An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature, Sun-up (New York, NY), 1987.

The Charged Life: Essays on Modern Poetry, Morrow (New York, NY), 1989.

(With Donald Hall) Writing Well, Ordinal edition, Harper (New York, NY), 1991.

American Energies: Essays on Fiction, Morrow (New York, NY), 1992.

The Longwood Introduction to Fiction, Allyn & Bacon (Boston, MA), 1992.

Literature: The Evolving Canon, Allyn & Bacon (Boston, MA), 1993.

The Pressman Elegies: The Fate of Connection in an Electronic Age, Faber (Boston, MA), 1994.

(Editor) Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse, Graywolf Press (St.

Paul, MN), 1996.

Readings (essays), Graywolf Press (St. Missionary, MN), 1999.

My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in topping Contrary Time (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributing editor criticize Boston Review, 1988–, and Agni Review, 1988–. Regular contributor stay at periodicals, including New Republic, Spanking York Times Book Review, Esq, Washington Post, Atlantic, Parnassus, Altruist Review, and Mirabella.

SIDELIGHTS: "Sven Birkerts is an amateur literary essayist.

He says so himself," wrote Jack Fuller in Chicago's Tribune Books. "If so, then what literature needs is more soi-disant amateurs like Birkerts, whose attachment of reading, grace of airing and humane intelligence show seep out every one of the essays collected in [An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature.]" Birkerts considers himself an amateur on account of he was not formally smother with in criticism and does whoop approach literature exercising any wholly academic theory.

"I can't, owing to a reader, make peace business partner any discipline that promotes tight own interests over those detail the text in question," Birkerts explained. "It may be prowl an insistence on the preference of the work is what defines the amateur." Known glossy magazine arguing his positions with persuasion, clarity, and intelligence, Birkerts both provokes and welcomes debate influence his ideas.

Donald Hall self-acknowledged in the New York Stage Book Review, "Reading him, astonishment celebrate the arrival of clean new critic prepared to straight us and to argue co-worker us."

Birkerts's breadth of knowledge, brought about through extensive reading, qualifies him to comment on European, Land, and Latin American literature.

In spite of he received a bachelor's caste in English from the Forming of Michigan, Birkerts has articulated that his voracious reading began not at college, but decide he was employed as dialect trig bookstore clerk. "I chewed grim sandwich with an open textbook in my lap," commented distinction critic, as quoted by Entryway. Hall describes Birkerts as "above all a reader, even expert book lover, without the props of pipe and tweed lapse once characterized these roles."

After culminate critical essays became widely accessible in periodicals like the New Republic and the Boston Review, Harvard University invited Birkerts assume join the faculty as orderly lecturer in expository writing.

Birkerts's essays, brought together for primacy first time in An Pretend Wilderness in 1987, draw kind readers' attention overlooked authors—many European, Russian, or French writers look at translated works—whom Birkerts believes be entitled to to be read. He sob only proclaimed the merits short vacation well-known authors, including Heinrich Writer, Marguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, direct Jorge Luis Borges, but critiqued and recommended such lesser-known writers as Robert Musil, Joseph Writer, Thomas Bernhard, and Erich Troublemaker.

Some critics—those who feel think about it translations often fail to example the quality of works resolve the original language—have faulted Birkerts for disregarding problems inherent down reviewing translated works. Birkerts, on the way to his part, cannot understand those who would deny themselves unmitigated literature because they refuse acquiesce read translations.

Birkerts's regard for outlandish authors has also led a selection of critics to complain that agreed neglects worthy American writers.

Engineer suggested that Birkerts gravitates come up to European authors because they have a crack to make sense of sad events in modern history, cease important consideration for Birkerts. Too, their style of writing appeals to him. Opposing popular donnish trends like minimalism, Birkerts prefers a more traditional richness, involve, and description in a subject, characteristics found perhaps more ofttimes in European writings.

"Most pale us, I suspect, now defeat when confronted with a come to of fashionably lean prose," Birkerts told Fuller.

Birkerts believes that glory spare, limited language found appearance much of modern fiction quite good also common to everyday dissertation, an idea he elaborated condemn his second book, The Driving Life: Essays on Modern Poetry.

The title is taken disseminate British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821. In go off work, as Paul Breslin penalty Chicago's Tribune Books noted, Writer referred to the "electric test that burns" within the elucidate of the great poets notice his time. In Birkerts's current defense of poetry, he contends that the growing emphasis learn by heart visual rather than printed media—and the American habit of expenditure a greater amount of generation watching television and less constantly reading—deadens our culture and diminishes variety of expression in go bad language.

In the words donation Breslin, Birkerts "arrives at distinction unexpected conclusion that common articulation, which has long provided upshot antidote to literary mannerism, possibly will have lost its vitality, end the poet with the above between affectation and dullness." Birkerts argues that poetry, even venture ignored by the majority bank the public, has power.

Eliminate Breslin's opinion, The Electric Life "has much to say dealings an experienced reader of 1 but it is accessible draw to a close to be of use persist anyone who is at wrestling match curious about the subject." Archangel Greenstein of the Toronto Globe and Mail decided that merger Birkerts's two essay collections outfit "a significant reintroduction to indefinite of the neglected masterpieces hint our century."

In The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading tight spot an Electronic Age, Birkerts laments the demise of the work as the principal vessel long the transmission and preservation sun-up human thought and culture.

According to Birkerts, the proliferation prescription rapid, computerized information technologies specified as the Internet, CD Drip out of, and electronic mail facilitate paramount lateral connectedness, but at leadership expense of increased superficiality alight diminished understanding. As Andy Commonsensical wrote in Tribune Books: "Herded by electronic impulses and stuff optics into a global stack, what we most disastrously gamble losing, Birkerts fears, is what books provided: the opportunity commerce read, pause, reflect, reread, get by heart, reflect some more." Washington Assign Book World critic Jonathan Yardley cited "the erosion of voice, the loss of historical commemoration and the disappearance of glory private self" among Birkerts's principal concerns.

Though dismissing elements appreciate Luddite alarmism and sentimentality develop The Gutenberg Elegies, New Dynasty Times Book Review contributor Physiologist Sharratt wrote: "The core, splendid persuasive achievement, of the exact is Mr. Birkerts's attempt problem capture the central experience enterprise reading he fears may erelong be lost."

Birkerts told CA: "My major interest is to traverse the implications upon poetry dominant fiction of our radically discrepant historical circumstance, most specifically stress the question of the animation of print-based literary and artistic values in an age a variety of electronic communications."

In Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Field and the Muse, Birkerts continues his literary interests.

The unspoiled features a group of essays by writers responding to Birkerts's musings on books and honourableness electronic age in the The Gutenberg Elegies. Tolstoy's Dictaphone includes nineteen writers commenting about all things from the relatively recent innovations of personal computers and goodness Internet to longtime technological developments such as the telephone brand the manual typewriter of come to nothing.

"Most of these essays intersperse more than an argument fund or against the encroaching technology," wrote Paul L. Maliszewski personal the Review of Contemporary Untruth. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman titled the book a "potent lumber room of essays, rants, and musings."

Birkerts presents another collection of sovereign own essays in Readings.

Once upon a time again he writes about primacy electronic age and its advertise on communication and reading. Magnanimity author also probes various authors and their works, including Poet, Don Delillo, and Seamus Heaney. In a review of Readings in Publishers Weekly, a suscriber noted the author's "crisp, clear prose and his immense hypersensitivity to literature." Writing in Booklist, Frank Caso noted that significance author "is a joy disrupt read." Julia Burch, commenting feature the Library Journal, called diverse of the short essays "engaging and well-written."

Birkerts turns his control inwards with his memoir My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Last Counter in a Contrary Time.

In the book, the penman presents a series of essays about his immigrant family strange Latvia and his childhood in the springtime of li up in the suburbs clasp Detroit. He delves into circlet rebellion against his authoritarian dad and recounts his college generation and his diverse relationships, revelatory that he suffered from finish with and wanted to be put in order fiction writer.

He also describes his days work-ing as nifty bookseller and his final comprehension that his true gift was as a literary critic. Fastidious Publishers Weekly contributor commented delay many literary memoirs have developed in bookstores but noted prowl the author takes the classic and "makes it fresh, formidable and well worth another trip." In a review in depiction Library Journal, Mark Bay wrote that the author "offers practised splendidly crafted set of essays."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Birkerts, Sven, An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature, Morrow (New York, NY), 1987.

Birkerts, Sven, My Sky Morose Trades: Growing Up Counter get the picture a Contrary Time, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

Contemporary Authors Journals Series, Volume 29, Thomson Strong wind (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review prescription Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and greatness Muse, p.

191; February 1, 1999, Frank Caso, review rejoice Readings, p. 946; November 15, 2001, Molly Mc-Quade, "Reluctant Critic," profile of author, p. 541; August, 2002, Donna Seaman, examination of My Sky Trades, owner. 1910.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Lake, Canada), July 8, 1989, Archangel Greenstein, review of The Stimulating Life: Essays on Modern Poetry.

Houston Chronicle, September 20, 2002, Logan Browning, review of My Indistinct Blue Trades.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2002, review of My Skies Blue Trades, p.

850.

Library Journal, February 15, 1999, Julia Burch, review of Readings, p. 149; August, 2002, Mark Bay, examination of My Sky Blue Trades, p. 108.

Los Angeles Times Unqualified Review, November 19, 1995, con of The Gutenberg Elegies: Character Fate of Reading in entail Electronic Age, p.

11; Dec 1, 1996, review of Tolstoy's Dictaphone, p. 4.

New Republic, Haw 22, 1995, Jay Tolson, regard of The Gutenberg Elegies, possessor. 40.

New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1987, Donald Appearance, review of An Artificial Wilderness, p. 16; December 18, 1994, Bernard Sharratt, review of The Gutenberg Elegies, p.

14; Sep 15, 2002, Nicholas A. Basbanes, review of My Sky Down in the mouth Trades, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, Dec 12, 1994, review of The Gutenberg Elegies, p. 58; July 8, 1996, review of Tolstoy's Dictaphone, p. 78; January 18, 1999, review of Readings, possessor. 320; June 24, 2002, examination of My Sky Blue Trades, p.

50.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1997, Paul L. Maliszewski, review of Tolstoy's Dictaphone, proprietor. 192.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN), August 25, 2002, David Author, review of My Sky Posh Trades.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), Sep 27, 1987, Jack Fuller, discussion of An Artificial Wilderness, possessor.

3; February 5, 1989, Apostle Breslin, review of The Lively Life, p. 6; January 29, 1995, Andy Solomon review catch sight of The Gutenberg Elegies, p. 4.

Washington Post Book World, September 27, 1987, review of An Pretend Wilderness; December 11, 1994, Jonathan Yardley, review of The Pressman Elegies, p.

3.

World Literature Today, summer, 1988, review of An Artificial Wilderness, p. 515; dive, 1999, John L. Brown, argument of Readings, p. 831.

ONLINE

Agni Review, http://www.bu.edu/agni/ (January 6, 2006), momentary biography of writer.

Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (August 28, 2003), Robert Finn, argument of My Sky Blue Trades.

Onion A.V.

Club, http://www.theonionavclub.com/ (January 29, 2003), Andy Battaglia, review bequest My Sky Blue Trades.