James Wood (literary critic)

James Wood (born November 1, 1965 in Durham , England ) is a British literary scholar , essayist and novelist . He has been a professor of literary criticism at Harvard University since 2010 and is a permanent employee of the New Yorker . He is considered one of the most important literary critics in the world.

Life

James Wood's father was a professor of zoology at Durham University . James Wood attended the Chorister School in Durham and Eton College , where he received a music scholarship. He studied English literature at Jesus College (Cambridge) .

From 1992 to 1995, Wood was senior literary critic for the Guardian and a judge for the 1994 Booker Prize . In 1995, he became senior editor of the United States' political magazine The New Republic . In 2007 Wood became a permanent employee of the New Yorker . His reviews and essays have also appeared in the New York Times , the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books .

Wood taught literary studies with Saul Bellow at Boston University . He has also taught at Kenyon College , Ohio and, since September 2003, a half-time at Harvard University; initially as a guest lecturer and now as a professor. Wood is also a visiting professor at the Humanities Center at Tufts University .

In 2008 Wood published the normative literary theoretical work How fiction works to create guidelines for fictional literature. After his detailed analysis of the classics of narrative literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries, a classicistic set of rules for writing a novel is drawn up.

His second novel Upstate , published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is about dealing with an adult nuclear family member (father, sister) suffering from depression and a subtly observed comparison of cultural standards of behavior between the United States and the United Kingdom. The critics say he adhered to the criteria that he upheld as a literary critic, he told calmly, without any "hysterical realism," a term he coined. The title Upstate refers to the arrival of the English in the small-town US state of New York.

Wood is married to Claire Messud . They live with their two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts .

Prizes and awards

• In 1990 he won the British Press Prize for Young Journalist of the Year.
• 2007 admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin .

Works (selection)

Fiction

• The Book Against God . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2003, ISBN 0-374-11538-9 (autobiographical novel).
• Upstate ("Upstate", 2018). Rowohlt, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-498-07406-7 (translated by Tanja Handels ).

Non-fiction

• The Broken Estate. Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library). Random House, New York 2000, ISBN 978-0-375-75263-6 .
• The Irresponsible Self. On Laughter and the Novel . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2004, ISBN 0-374-17737-6 .
• The art of storytelling (“How Fiction Works”, 2008). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-07367-1 (translated by Imma Klemm-Ortheil).

Web links

• Opening speech at the gala for the award of the Griffin Poetry Prize 2009 (with videos)
• William Deresiewicz : How Wood Works: The Riches and Limits of James Wood . In: The Nation , December 8, 2008.
• Ijoma Mangold : The best reader . In: The time . No. 31 , 2011, p. 42 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://ase.tufts.edu/chat/
2. ↑ Book Reviews: Mannered, Pretty 'Upstate' Is Quiet To A Fault , NPR, June 7, 2018, accessed December 2, 2019