James Wood (critic)

James Wood was born in Durham, England, in 1965, and educated at Eton College on a choral scholarship and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read literature. In 1990, he was the winner of the British Press Young Journalist of the Year Award. Since 1992, Wood has been the chief literary critic of The Guardian in London and has served as senior editor of The New Republic since 1996. His reviews and essays have appeared frequently in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, where he is a member of its editoral board.

Related Topics:
Durham - Eton College - Jesus College, Cambridge - The Guardian - The New Republic - New York Times - The New Yorker - New York Review of Books - London Review of Books

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James Wood is often dubbed "the best literary critic of his generation." Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood most often seems to advocate an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we’re rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is making aesthetic judgments."

Related Topics:
Harold Bloom - Literary criticism - Harvard Crimson

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Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the comtemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth…"

Related Topics:
Hysterical realism - Zadie Smith

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Wood is the author of two books of criticism, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 2000) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), and a novel, The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003). Additionally, Wood has written introductions to Selected Stories of D.H. Lawrence (Modern Library, 1999), Collected Stories of Saul Bellow (Penguin, 2002), The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov (2001), The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004), Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2001), The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2002), The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000), and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics, 2004).

Related Topics:
D.H. Lawrence - Saul Bellow - Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov - Graham Greene - Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - The Woodlanders - The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus - Jean-Paul Sartre

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Wood has taught at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Harvard University. He is married to American novelist Claire Messud and lives in Washington, DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Related Topics:
Kenyon College - Harvard University - Claire Messud

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