Re: why is theory French/German, did you read Benjamin Moser's "Against Translation" in Liberties? I hated his Sontag bio, but I admired that essay. (It's not online anymore, alas.) And I think his rebuke of Sontag for staying semi-closeted in the bio has a subtext (maybe even just a text: he does quote Paglia) of her too-great investment in Euro impersonality as against messy American diversity. (And re: Grapes of Wrath, same exact thing happened to me. I'm pretty sure it's still a great or semi-great novel but am too afraid to re-read.)
Yes, I agree with all of that! Especially about the problem of biographical form itself. Leaving aside specific cases, it's amazing this form has been left so undeconstructed; even novelists with reputations for being staid realists like Updike or Franzen are a hundred times more inventive than the writers of these birth-to-death doorstoppers, which, as you say, are almost the opposite of criticism in their bland evenness of coverage and attitude. A ferocious essay on Sontag's dereliction during AIDS would have been better than mild moralizing tucked between pop psych analyses of her relation to her mother and her "Cluster B personality disorder." (Moser is gay, though.) And I'm going to read The Volcano Lover as soon as I'm able, before the month is out at least.
Lol! The Lispector charges are: a necessarily one-sided story about his allegedly heavy-handed treatment of the work submitted by a translator he'd hired, an accusation that he stole structure and ideas from a Brazilian Lispector bio and other female Brazilian scholars, and the assertion that he's a dick in general, with one account of a threatening handshake (not of a sexual nature). Some of these echoing his critique of Sontag, some echoing his critique of Rieff, especially the latter, taking credit for women's work. It's certainly possible or even likely he's as bad as they say but I also get the sense they, as in the writers of the below articles, also don't like this man writing about and translating (i.e., "colonizing") women on principle.
Re: why is theory French/German, did you read Benjamin Moser's "Against Translation" in Liberties? I hated his Sontag bio, but I admired that essay. (It's not online anymore, alas.) And I think his rebuke of Sontag for staying semi-closeted in the bio has a subtext (maybe even just a text: he does quote Paglia) of her too-great investment in Euro impersonality as against messy American diversity. (And re: Grapes of Wrath, same exact thing happened to me. I'm pretty sure it's still a great or semi-great novel but am too afraid to re-read.)
Yes, I agree with all of that! Especially about the problem of biographical form itself. Leaving aside specific cases, it's amazing this form has been left so undeconstructed; even novelists with reputations for being staid realists like Updike or Franzen are a hundred times more inventive than the writers of these birth-to-death doorstoppers, which, as you say, are almost the opposite of criticism in their bland evenness of coverage and attitude. A ferocious essay on Sontag's dereliction during AIDS would have been better than mild moralizing tucked between pop psych analyses of her relation to her mother and her "Cluster B personality disorder." (Moser is gay, though.) And I'm going to read The Volcano Lover as soon as I'm able, before the month is out at least.
Lol! The Lispector charges are: a necessarily one-sided story about his allegedly heavy-handed treatment of the work submitted by a translator he'd hired, an accusation that he stole structure and ideas from a Brazilian Lispector bio and other female Brazilian scholars, and the assertion that he's a dick in general, with one account of a threatening handshake (not of a sexual nature). Some of these echoing his critique of Sontag, some echoing his critique of Rieff, especially the latter, taking credit for women's work. It's certainly possible or even likely he's as bad as they say but I also get the sense they, as in the writers of the below articles, also don't like this man writing about and translating (i.e., "colonizing") women on principle.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/benjamin-moser-and-the-smallest-woman-in-the-world/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/benjamin-mosers-pulitzer-prize-biography-travesty/