A founder of comparative literature as a discipline.
Harry Levin (1912–1994), literary critic and modernist literature scholar, graduated from Harvard University and began teaching there some years later. In 1960 he became Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and retired in 1983. He continued to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Elena Zarudnaya, until his death in 1994. He and his wife had a daughter, Marina.
One of the first books to sum up the contribution of James Joyce, this volume remains an essential guide to the works of a great innovator of modern literature. Because Harry Levin’s view is large, as opposed to the many necessary exegeses and close textual studies, he leads the reader easily into the delights to be found in Joyce, from the comparatively simple prose of Dubliners, through Ulysses and into the complexities of Finnegans Wake. The insight and brilliance of this “critical introduction,” first published by New Directions in 1941, make it as rewarding for the expert as the student. For this revised edition, Mr. Levin, who is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, has made revisions and added a new preface and a long “postscript” which he calls “Revising Joyce.” He examines the works that have come to light in the last few years and some of the important later biographical writings about Joyce.
Harry Levin’s Memories of the Moderns, originally published by New Directions in 1980, is now presented in New Directions Paperbook format. This gathering of prose pieces––reviews, essays, lectures, introductions, personal recollections, and epistles, written for the most part during the 1970s––combines criticism with reminiscence and is both an exploration of the idea of modernism within the international frame of comparative literature and a valediction. By now, what was so avant-garde, experimental, difficult, and sometimes shocking in the writings of the twentieth-century modernists has permanently altered our literature––the groundbreakers have become our classics. Discussed here are Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, Jean-Paul Sartre (writing on Flaubert), Francis Ponge, W. H. Auden, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, I. A. Richards, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, and F. O. Mathiessen. There is as well an opening letter to James Laughlin, who published Harry Levin’s seminal book on James Joyce in 1941.
A founder of comparative literature as a discipline.
