Here & Elsewhere

Résumé du livre

More precisely, Burke appropriated for modernism the forgotten formal modes-and the bawdy comic verve-of Tristram Shandy and Candide. His characters are thinkers, not doers; they lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, and inveigh in the manner of a Greenwich Village Samuel Johnson. Between the arias, as it were, they reveal something of themselves, their motives, and their moral predicaments. "Burke's sentences are so eventful," says Denis Donoghue, "that the uneventfulness of the 'whole' is a delusion. [His stories] are like the human body when it seems to be doing nothing ... but all the time the internal life is throbbing and buzzing, all the organs at 'full throttle.'"