News That Stays News

William Deresiewicz November 22, 2010

Deresiewicz (Billy D) was one of my favorite professors in college- he taught “Modern British Novel” and served up his own interpretations of Joyce and Woolf with a real intellectual edge. He was one of the idolized teachers in the English department- the guy whose class would fill up twenty seconds after registration opened online- and the sort of guy you can imagine getting into the pants of his more adoring fans (I have no desire for malice here- he was just one of those people). Everyone I knew at Yale was sad when he didn’t get tenure and went out to make a name for himself as a literary critic.

His most famous essay to date is probably The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, and he’s one of those critics who periodically writes something about the academy, but he also does a lot of specific work.

Deresiewicz on

1. Cormac McCarthy and No Country for Old Men

2. The New Yorker critic, James Wood, and his book How Fiction Works

3. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

4. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, and Home

Deresiewicz is one of the pugnacious ones, but he’s still more of the literary establishment than someone like B.R. Myers, whose  A Reader’s Manifesto still leaves marks (it’s subtitled “An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose.”)