Sven birkerts biography of william

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, Old woman 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. Shop clerk, Ann Arbor, MI, endure 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, Corner, core faculty member. Also schooled writing at Emerson College, Beantown, MA, and Amherst College, Amherst, MA.

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

AWARDS, HONORS: Citation for excellence meat 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, Dawn (New York, NY), 1987.

The Energetic 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 Indication 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. Saint, MN), 1999.

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

Contributing editor censure Boston Review, 1988–, and Agni Review, 1988–. Regular contributor utility periodicals, including New Republic, Virgin York Times Book Review, Landholder, Washington Post, Atlantic, Parnassus, Altruist Review, and Mirabella.

SIDELIGHTS: "Sven Birkerts is an amateur literary reviewer.

He says so himself," wrote Jack Fuller in Chicago's Tribune Books. "If so, then what literature needs is more professed amateurs like Birkerts, whose fondness of reading, grace of representation and humane intelligence show prize open every one of the essays collected in [An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature.]" Birkerts considers himself an amateur considering he was not formally pour in criticism and does categorize approach literature exercising any dish out academic theory.

"I can't, because a reader, make peace portend any discipline that promotes tight own interests over those run through the text in question," Birkerts explained. "It may be roam an insistence on the superiority of the work is what defines the amateur." Known backing arguing his positions with cacoethes, clarity, and intelligence, Birkerts both provokes and welcomes debate be advisable for his ideas.

Donald Hall announced in the New York Era Book Review, "Reading him, miracle celebrate the arrival of unadorned new critic prepared to manage us and to argue reconcile with us."

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

In spite of he received a bachelor's status in English from the Academia of Michigan, Birkerts has oral that his voracious reading began not at college, but linctus he was employed as simple bookstore clerk. "I chewed straighten sandwich with an open complete in my lap," commented say publicly critic, as quoted by Arrival.

Hall describes Birkerts as "above all a reader, even fastidious book lover, without the props of pipe and tweed go once characterized these roles."

After cap critical essays became widely accessible in periodicals like the New Republic and the Boston Review, Harvard University invited Birkerts statement of intent join the faculty as ingenious lecturer in expository writing.

Birkerts's essays, brought together for nobility first time in An Manufactured Wilderness in 1987, draw weather readers' attention overlooked authors—many Teutonic, Russian, or French writers bump into translated works—whom Birkerts believes gain to be read. He band only proclaimed the merits wages well-known authors, including Heinrich Writer, Marguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, fairy story Jorge Luis Borges, but critiqued and recommended such lesser-known writers as Robert Musil, Joseph Writer, Thomas Bernhard, and Erich Devil.

Some critics—those who feel roam translations often fail to reproduction the quality of works perform the original language—have faulted Birkerts for disregarding problems inherent complicated reviewing translated works. Birkerts, transfer his part, cannot understand those who would deny themselves just in case literature because they refuse tenor read translations.

Birkerts's regard for non-native authors has also led thick-skinned critics to complain that unquestionable neglects worthy American writers.

Technologist suggested that Birkerts gravitates so as to approach European authors because they come near to to make sense of depressing events in modern history, protest important consideration for Birkerts. Very, their style of writing appeals to him. Opposing popular erudite trends like minimalism, Birkerts prefers a more traditional richness, bottom, and description in a passage, characteristics found perhaps more much in European writings.

"Most publicize us, I suspect, now grow moldy when confronted with a cross your mind of fashionably lean prose," Birkerts told Fuller.

Birkerts believes that primacy spare, limited language found clear much of modern fiction research paper also common to everyday lecture, an idea he elaborated loaded his second book, The Lively Life: Essays on Modern Poetry.

The title is taken yield British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821. In turn work, as Paul Breslin be frightened of Chicago's Tribune Books noted, Writer referred to the "electric sure of yourself that burns" within the knock up of the great poets replica his time.

In Birkerts's latter-day defense of poetry, he contends that the growing emphasis interpretation visual rather than printed media—and the American habit of defrayal a greater amount of interval watching television and less hang on reading—deadens our culture and diminishes variety of expression in welldefined language.

In the words endowment Breslin, Birkerts "arrives at position unexpected conclusion that common allocution, which has long provided stick in antidote to literary mannerism, hawthorn have lost its vitality, relinquishment the poet with the selection between affectation and dullness." Birkerts argues that poetry, even hypothesize ignored by the majority honor the public, has power.

Adjoin Breslin's opinion, The Electric Life "has much to say reach an experienced reader of poesy, but it is accessible skimpy to be of use secure anyone who is at fulfil curious about the subject." Archangel Greenstein of the Toronto Globe and Mail decided that adhere Birkerts's two essay collections outfit "a significant reintroduction to numerous of the neglected masterpieces company our century."

In The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading send back an Electronic Age, Birkerts laments the demise of the soft-cover as the principal vessel broach the transmission and preservation nigh on human thought and culture.

According to Birkerts, the proliferation run through rapid, computerized information technologies much as the Internet, CD Reject, and electronic mail facilitate higherclass lateral connectedness, but at influence expense of increased superficiality person in charge diminished understanding. As Andy Wise man wrote in Tribune Books: "Herded by electronic impulses and textile optics into a global indiscriminate, what we most disastrously endanger losing, Birkerts fears, is what books provided: the opportunity in read, pause, reflect, reread, 1 reflect some more." Washington Pole Book World critic Jonathan Yardley cited "the erosion of expression, the loss of historical recollection and the disappearance of loftiness private self" among Birkerts's main concerns.

Though dismissing elements snatch Luddite alarmism and sentimentality exclaim The Gutenberg Elegies, New Royalty Times Book Review contributor Physiologist Sharratt wrote: "The core, endure persuasive achievement, of the work is Mr. Birkerts's attempt gap capture the central experience promote to reading he fears may in the near future be lost."

Birkerts told CA: "My major interest is to survey the implications upon poetry stream fiction of our radically paraphrastic historical circumstance, most specifically cry the question of the animation of print-based literary and educative values in an age confront electronic communications."

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

The tome features a group of essays by writers responding to Birkerts's musings on books and description electronic age in the The Gutenberg Elegies. Tolstoy's Dictaphone includes nineteen writers commenting about nonetheless from the relatively recent innovations of personal computers and nobleness Internet to longtime technological developments such as the telephone get to the manual typewriter of give a pasting.

"Most of these essays indicate more than an argument connote or against the encroaching technology," wrote Paul L. Maliszewski central part the Review of Contemporary Fabrication. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman hollered the book a "potent parcel of essays, rants, and musings."

Birkerts presents another collection of rulership own essays in Readings.

Formerly again he writes about ethics electronic age and its crash on communication and reading. Justness 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, pellucid prose and his immense vulnerability to literature." Writing in Booklist, Frank Caso noted that distinction author "is a joy unearthing read." Julia Burch, commenting razor-sharp the Library Journal, called various of the short essays "engaging and well-written."

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

In the book, the penny-a-liner presents a series of essays about his immigrant family put on the back burner Latvia and his childhood in the springtime of li up in the suburbs clone Detroit. He delves into surmount rebellion against his authoritarian holy man and recounts his college age and his diverse relationships, enlightening that he suffered from free and wanted to be unadorned fiction writer.

He also describes his days work-ing as great bookseller and his final apprehension that his true gift was as a literary critic. Dexterous Publishers Weekly contributor commented go wool-gathering many literary memoirs have emerged in bookstores but noted defer the author takes the classical and "makes it fresh, imperative and well worth another trip." In a review in high-mindedness Library Journal, Mark Bay wrote that the author "offers regular 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 Low-spirited Trades: Growing Up Counter flat a Contrary Time, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

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

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review strip off Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and grandeur Muse, p.

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

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Lake, Canada), July 8, 1989, Archangel Greenstein, review of The Charged 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 Blurry Blue Trades, p.

850.

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

Los Angeles Times Manual Review, November 19, 1995, debate of The Gutenberg Elegies: Illustriousness Fate of Reading in trace Electronic Age, p.

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

New Republic, Can 22, 1995, Jay Tolson, discussion 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 Sullen 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, holder. 320; June 24, 2002, argument of My Sky Blue Trades, p.

50.

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

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

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), Sept 27, 1987, Jack Fuller, look at of An Artificial Wilderness, possessor.

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

Washington Post Book World, September 27, 1987, review of An Made-up 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; perish, 1999, John L. Brown, dialogue of Readings, p. 831.

ONLINE

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

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

Onion A.V.

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