Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas

by Adam Kirsch

Overview

A collection of essays from a “great poet-critic-intellectual” (Daily Beast).

Adam Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute…[a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and life of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So shines literature, in these unflinchingly bold and provocative essays—as an illuminating, regenerative, and immortalizing force.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393243468
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/17/2014
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker and Tablet. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

…[Kirsch's] rare literary authority is on full display. It's the sort of thing we expect in midcentury critics like Alfred Kazin…and Lionel Trilling…but encounter only infrequently in the work of contemporary essayists…It's a pleasure to be convoyed through Western literature by Kirsch, whose self-assuredness feels more like intellectual comfort than it does coercion…Kirsch proves that [criticism] is not just a genuinely intellectual act, but a social one too, a way of writing and thinking that connects minds joyously across time and continents.

The New York Times Book Review - Alice Gregory

"One of the excitements of reading Kirsch on poetry is the sense that he still holds out this quixotic ambition for the form, never mind the current fashion."

Harper's Magazine - Christopher Beha

"An adventurous critic and essayist of cascading impact… Kirsch’s smart and piquant essays articulate reasons “to be grateful for literature,” even as his whitewater title essay confronts us with the mad futility of our devotion to books."

Booklist - Donna Seaman

"It is fashionable today to mourn the paucity of public intellectuals in America. Meet Adam Kirsch, one of the very best literary/cultural critics writing today—a critic in the grand tradition of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling. Rocket and Lightship is a delight to read."

Marjorie Perloff

"Kirsch’s writing is rarely overly zesty, it’s lucid, forceful, and clear throughout—he doesn’t wander, he walks."

Boston Globe - Michael Andor Brodeur

"Adam Kirsch is one of the best of our cultural and literary critics. Whether he is dispatching the repellent ideology of Slavoj Zizek or reappraising the literary legacy of E. M. Forster, he writes with stunning force and beautiful lucidity."

Janet Malcolm

"“[Kirsch’s] rare literary authority is on full display…It’s a pleasure to be convoyed through Western literature by Kirsch, whose self-assuredness feels more like intellectual comfort than it does coercion."

Alice Gregory

2014-09-21
A critic asks why literature matters. In this collection of 19 essays, New Republic senior editor Kirsch (Why Trilling Matters, 2011, etc.) considers the cultural work of literature, complicating Matthew Arnold's comment that poetry is "at bottom a criticism of life." Focusing on writers as diverse as Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and critics Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, Kirsch maintains that all literature expresses "the writer's experience of being in the world, of his aspirations and expectations and anxieties." These essays reflect on both the writer's and reader's contexts, illuminating their complexities. In an analysis of Sontag's work, for example, Kirsch argues that Cynthia Ozick, who saw in Sontag "the stylish barbarism of the sixties," and Camille Paglia, who castigated Sontag as a self-absorbed elitist, both were right if one considers the intellectual transformations evident in Sontag's essays and journals. Kirsch is a contributing editor for Tablet, a magazine of Jewish arts and letters, and he focuses on Jewish identity in several essays: an intellectual portrait of Hannah Arendt; a consideration of Alfred Kazin's literary history and journals; an overview of Ozick's fiction and filial relationship to Henry James; and an analysis of Proust's affinity to his contemporary, Russian poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. Proust and Bialik, Kirsch asserts, tried "to reconstitute the kind of absolute authority which is missing from the secular world….[B]oth are performing the modernist leap of faith, which attempts to make art itself an independent value." The value of literature lies in its presentation of an opportunity for transcendence. In the title essay, Kirsch reveals his own anxieties about the future of literature. "Writers used to write for posterity—that is, for people essentially like us in the future." But future readers, he conjectures, "will understand us wholly differently, and much better, than we can understand ourselves." These incisive, deeply informed essays speak to the power of literature to illuminate, and transform, the world.

Kirkus Reviews