front cover of Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination
Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination
Mark Krupnick
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability.

    The editors—Krupnick’s wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick’s work with the “deep places” of his own imagination.

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front cover of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism
Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism
Mark Krupnick
Northwestern University Press, 1986
Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth century's most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trilling’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trilling’s criticism and fiction in the context of his New York intellectual group, illuminating the connection between Trilling’s preoccupation with self-definition and his struggle to achieve a cultural overview in a period marked by contradictions, polarizations, and reversals. He provides not only the best single assessment of Trilling but also an incisive history of American literary criticism through the mid-twentieth century.
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