FREE WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS: ESSAYS FROM THE CLASSICS TO POP CULTURE PDF Lecturer in the Department of Classics Daniel Mendelsohn | 423 pages | 15 Mar 2014 | NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS | 9781590177136 | English | United Kingdom TOP 17 QUOTES BY DANIEL MENDELSOHN | A-Z Quotes A Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture to The New Yorker and The New York Review of BooksMendelsohn just might be our most irresistible literary critic …Cheerfully pessimistic though he may be, he is never an alarmist…He practices a civilized, soothing form of criticism, his intellect an alembic that purifies, restores calm and historical context…This constitutional temperance gives his prose its legato rhythms, the languorous judgments; he might be a cat toying with his prey. And much of the fun of reading Mendelsohn is his sense of play, his irreverence and unpredictability, his frank emotional responses… He forces the [essay] form in directions Francis Bacon never imagined. Most impressively, he performs this deeper reading across many different art forms… It is a supremely entertaining book. To read it is to sit next a fabulous dinner guest whose comments contain a devastating truth. He is a scrumptious stylist …He writes better movie criticism than most movie critics, better theatre criticism than most theatre critics and better literary criticism than just about anyone… practically every sentence of this book [is] an eye-opener. In the book, his scope includes both the high- and middlebrow. Taken together, the collection offers a sort of defense of the modern age of culture. If a true-blue classicist can engage with the current zeitgeist Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture the full weight of his intellect and without an iota of demoralization, than the rest of us have no excuse. He is already both classicist and mensch. Mendelsohn is a critic who consistently takes his subjects seriously, be they TV shows Mad Men3-D blockbusters Avataror the poems of Rimbaud…Along with perceptive essays on Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, and more, the collection adds up to a wonderfully eclectic set of musings on the state of contemporary culture and the enduring riches of classical literature. Slider by webdesign. Previous Previous book: An Odyssey. Next Next book: C. Reviewers & Critics: Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books | Poets & Writers Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. More Details Other Editions 5. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Waiting for the Barbariansplease sign up. Is there violence in the book? Carla No - other than recapitulations of the violent scenes that occur in Greek tragedies and other classics. The essays are often covering quite serious, s …more No - other than recapitulations of the violent scenes that occur in Greek tragedies and other classics. The essays are often covering quite serious, sometimes awful aspects of history - It's a collection of essays on literature and other works of art; it is not a narrative with violent scenes. See 1 question about Waiting for the Barbarians…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Sep 26, Terence rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Lovers of perceptive criticism. Shelves: essay-collectionsliterary- criticisme-books. Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought? And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. They were, those people, a kind of solution. Below, I want to give an abstract of the reviews collected here. And what is that, if not drama? Taymor attempted to combine the classical transformation myth with the modern American version. Her failure was two-fold. First, the two conceptions are incompatible. Where, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture ancient tales, metamorphosis is a punishment and a humiliation, in the American version, transformation is empowering. Worst of all … the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic …. In her defense, she went only because we were double-dating with her best friend, who was a fan. The film is really rather awful, an opinion shared by Mendelsohn. But he takes this piece of schlock as an opportunity to examine why the Titanic has become a modern myth. It comes down to two things. The second need the Titanic can fill is our perverse desire to see something beautiful destroyed. Never once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture people. The clever games that the Odyssey plays are, in the end, games worth playing. It is this skill at delineating characters through dialogue … that creates the sense of intimacy that his novels have. He stopped writing at the age of 20 because he grew up, and the urgency of rebellion died. In his estimation, separately the two threads work. The difficulty comes when Littell attempts to combine them into one novel. In this way, a literary experience can lead to a profound life experience. He starts out with a beautifully simple subject and verb but then goes off on a tangent that occupies a clause or two before getting to the predicate many of the ellipses in the quotes above are reflections of this. And in his HelenEuripides dramatized a popular myth that claimed the real Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt, remaining faithful to Menelaus; Paris spirited away a phantom. Ford to name some ST authors or Alan Dean Foster to name a SW author could write their own interpretations without being strait-jacketed. I want to see the phenomenon go mainstream, as they say. View 2 comments. Dec 24, Antigone rated it really liked it Shelves: essays-shorts. You will know Mr. Here are twenty-four of the more recent works split into four categories: Spectacles, Classica, Creative Writing and Private Lives. If you're of a mind to sample a collection of urbane, esoteric and pleasantly sophisticated considerations of culture at the cusp of the new millennium - here's a very agile mind at work. Jul 04, Hank Stuever rated it liked it. An immersive experience for people who try to write intelligent cultural criticism that includes me as well as those who enjoy reading it. For popular culture fans, there's plenty here to think about; the middle section of essays on classics will be a chore, but a worthy one. It's difficult to quibble, since Daniel Mendelsohn could write circles around most of us, but I'm not sure every piece here was meant to live between hardcovers. Some of the insights he lands on are eloquently demonstrate An immersive experience for people who try to write intelligent cultural criticism that includes me as well as those who enjoy reading it. Some of the insights he lands on are eloquently demonstrated, but also make him seem a little like Captain Obvious, explaining things for an audience that may not even own a television or ever darken the door of a cineplex, but, just as likely, have seen the movie or watched the show and are right there with him. I don't think he always has a handle on writing for both crowds, so there's a tone of lecturing that creeps in. It sometimes feels like he's writing mainly for himself. Which, in a way, we all are. Aug 24, Kyle Muntz rated it it was amazing. I never imagined I would read a collection of book reviews for pleasure, but Mendelsohn is such a good writer. The section on the classics in particular is amazing. Mar 06, Trish rated it really liked it Shelves: classicsessaysliteraturemythologynonfictionhistorycriticism. March 22, To say I enjoyed this book does not capture my experience with it. I struggled, I laughed, I ruminated, I was awakened. Mendelsohn wields a scalpel with care and precision. His essay on Franzen made me think of divorce: that is, I imagine! A writer must feel pain and pride in equal measure when their work comes to the attention Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn might be an acquired taste, but there is something necessary here. Most of it went over my Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, but if I really tried, sometimes a point would register. One gets some satisfaction from that. I am not qualified to Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture this Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, but I drew pleasure from knowing there are people like Mendelsohn out there, who can make connections between artists, thinkers, and writers of the past and the things we do and think today. At least one thing I do owe Mendelsohn: on the first page of his Foreword, he introduces to me a poem written by Constantine Cavafy called "Waiting for the Barbarians. Orators cease speechmaking, senators stop legislating, the emperor sits his throne dressed in his silks and jewels, waiting. They wait and wait, dressed to the teeth and murmuring anxiously, until it becomes clear the "barbarians" won't be arriving as planned.