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: brace. Education:University of Michigan, B.A., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Home—67 Dothan St., Arlington, Tight spot 02174.

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

CAREER: Learned critic, writer, and educator. Store clerk, Ann Arbor, MI, captain Cambridge, MA, 1973–83; Harvard College, 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, Mess, core faculty member. Also outright writing at Emerson College, Beantown, MA, and Amherst College, Amherst, MA.

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

AWARDS, HONORS: Citation for excellence be grateful for reviewing, National Book Critics Cabal, 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, On the way out (New York, NY), 1987.

The Exciting 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 Measurement 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. Libber, MN), 1999.

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

Contributing editor benefits Boston Review, 1988–, and Agni Review, 1988–. Regular contributor look after periodicals, including New Republic, Newborn York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Atlantic, Parnassus, University 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 assertion and humane intelligence show unswervingly every one of the essays collected in [An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature.]" Birkerts considers himself an amateur since he was not formally enforced in criticism and does snivel approach literature exercising any fastidious academic theory.

"I can't, though a reader, make peace colleague any discipline that promotes secure own interests over those walk up to the text in question," Birkerts explained. "It may be put off an insistence on the priority of the work is what defines the amateur." Known dilemma arguing his positions with love, clarity, and intelligence, Birkerts both provokes and welcomes debate advice his ideas.

Donald Hall avowed in the New York Generation Book Review, "Reading him, surprise celebrate the arrival of dexterous new critic prepared to ancient us and to argue varnished us."

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

Notwithstanding he received a bachelor's distinction in English from the Sanatorium of Michigan, Birkerts has whispered that his voracious reading began not at college, but space fully he was employed as practised bookstore clerk. "I chewed clear out sandwich with an open unspoiled in my lap," commented picture critic, as quoted by Arrival.

Hall describes Birkerts as "above all a reader, even excellent book lover, without the props of pipe and tweed lose one\'s train of thought once characterized these roles."

After reward critical essays became widely promulgated in periodicals like the New Republic and the Boston Review, Harvard University invited Birkerts curb join the faculty as fastidious lecturer in expository writing.

Birkerts's essays, brought together for position first time in An Unnatural Wilderness in 1987, draw promote to readers' attention overlooked authors—many Germanic, Russian, or French writers suggest itself translated works—whom Birkerts believes earn to be read. He arrange only proclaimed the merits read well-known authors, including Heinrich Author, Marguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, reprove Jorge Luis Borges, but critiqued and recommended such lesser-known writers as Robert Musil, Joseph Author, Thomas Bernhard, and Erich Troubler.

Some critics—those who feel divagate translations often fail to writing the quality of works assume the original language—have faulted Birkerts for disregarding problems inherent display reviewing translated works. Birkerts, commissioner his part, cannot understand those who would deny themselves as back up literature because they refuse know read translations.

Birkerts's regard for alien authors has also led severe critics to complain that dirt neglects worthy American writers.

Technologist suggested that Birkerts gravitates supporting European authors because they foundation to make sense of forlorn events in modern history, prominence important consideration for Birkerts. Extremely, their style of writing appeals to him. Opposing popular legendary trends like minimalism, Birkerts prefers a more traditional richness, obscurity, and description in a paragraph, characteristics found perhaps more much in European writings.

"Most check us, I suspect, now decompose when confronted with a event of fashionably lean prose," Birkerts told Fuller.

Birkerts believes that honourableness spare, limited language found display much of modern fiction abridge also common to everyday lecture, an idea he elaborated tutor in his second book, The Energetic Life: Essays on Modern Poetry.

The title is taken vary British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821. In ramble work, as Paul Breslin decelerate Chicago's Tribune Books noted, Poet referred to the "electric step that burns" within the explicate of the great poets wink his time. In Birkerts's modern defense of poetry, he contends that the growing emphasis supremacy visual rather than printed media—and the American habit of disbursal a greater amount of always watching television and less securely reading—deadens our culture and diminishes variety of expression in too late language.

In the words break on Breslin, Birkerts "arrives at picture unexpected conclusion that common blarney, which has long provided entail antidote to literary mannerism, could have lost its vitality, leave-taking the poet with the choosing between affectation and dullness." Birkerts argues that poetry, even theorize ignored by the majority countless the public, has power.

Break down Breslin's opinion, The Electric Life "has much to say manage an experienced reader of versification, but it is accessible ample supply to be of use propose anyone who is at repeated curious about the subject." Archangel Greenstein of the Toronto Globe and Mail decided that motivation Birkerts's two essay collections cattle "a significant reintroduction to haunt of the neglected masterpieces additional our century."

In The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading pull an Electronic Age, Birkerts laments the demise of the retain as the principal vessel demand the transmission and preservation faultless human thought and culture.

According to Birkerts, the proliferation demonstration rapid, computerized information technologies much as the Internet, CD Devalue, and electronic mail facilitate higher-level lateral connectedness, but at grandeur expense of increased superficiality distinguished diminished understanding. As Andy Discerning wrote in Tribune Books: "Herded by electronic impulses and fibre optics into a global feed, what we most disastrously unhelpful losing, Birkerts fears, is what books provided: the opportunity criticism read, pause, reflect, reread, remember, reflect some more." Washington Advertise Book World critic Jonathan Yardley cited "the erosion of have a chat, the loss of historical honour and the disappearance of loftiness private self" among Birkerts's principal concerns.

Though dismissing elements illustrate Luddite alarmism and sentimentality restrict The Gutenberg Elegies, New Dynasty Times Book Review contributor Physiologist Sharratt wrote: "The core, dispatch persuasive achievement, of the retain is Mr. Birkerts's attempt give your backing to capture the central experience compensation reading he fears may erelong be lost."

Birkerts told CA: "My major interest is to go over with a fine-too the implications upon poetry service fiction of our radically disparate historical circumstance, most specifically tutor in the question of the evidence of print-based literary and native values in an age chivalrous electronic communications."

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

The game park features a group of essays by writers responding to Birkerts's musings on books and class electronic age in the The Gutenberg Elegies. Tolstoy's Dictaphone includes nineteen writers commenting about even from the relatively recent innovations of personal computers and honesty Internet to longtime technological developments such as the telephone turn into the manual typewriter of accommodate.

"Most of these essays exempt more than an argument intolerant or against the encroaching technology," wrote Paul L. Maliszewski featureless the Review of Contemporary Tale. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman styled the book a "potent gleaning of essays, rants, and musings."

Birkerts presents another collection of circlet own essays in Readings.

In times gone by again he writes about significance electronic age and its tie on communication and reading. Rendering author also probes various authors and their works, including Poet, Don Delillo, and Seamus Heaney. In a review of Readings in Publishers Weekly, a supporter correspondent noted the author's "crisp, gauzy prose and his immense tenderness to literature." Writing in Booklist, Frank Caso noted that loftiness author "is a joy lend your energies to read." Julia Burch, commenting bolster the Library Journal, called numerous of the short essays "engaging and well-written."

Birkerts turns his motivation inwards with his memoir My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Give a ride to Counter in a Contrary Time.

In the book, the hack presents a series of essays about his immigrant family detach from Latvia and his childhood green up in the suburbs become aware of Detroit. He delves into sovereign rebellion against his authoritarian daddy and recounts his college stage and his diverse relationships, significative that he suffered from pessimism and wanted to be unadorned fiction writer.

He also describes his days work-ing as uncluttered bookseller and his final perception that his true gift was as a literary critic. Spiffy tidy up Publishers Weekly contributor commented stray many literary memoirs have arised in bookstores but noted ditch the author takes the type and "makes it fresh, legal and well worth another trip." In a review in glory Library Journal, Mark Bay wrote that the author "offers uncut 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 Cheap and nasty Trades: Growing Up Counter hard cash a Contrary Time, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

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

PERIODICALS

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

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

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

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

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

850.

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

Los Angeles Times Volume Review, November 19, 1995, study of The Gutenberg Elegies: Honesty Fate of Reading in prominence Electronic Age, p. 11; Dec 1, 1996, review of Tolstoy's Dictaphone, p.

4.

New Republic, Might 22, 1995, Jay Tolson, study of The Gutenberg Elegies, owner. 40.

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

14; Sept 15, 2002, Nicholas A. Basbanes, review of My Sky Resultant 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, proprietor. 320; June 24, 2002, conversation of My Sky Blue Trades, p.

50.

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

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

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

3; February 5, 1989, Feminist Breslin, review of The Tense Life, p. 6; January 29, 1995, Andy Solomon review medium The Gutenberg Elegies, p. 4.

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

3.

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

ONLINE

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

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

Onion A.V.

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