Disciplined Subjects and Better Selves

Mixing belles-lettres and scholarship, these brilliant essays on literature and poetry evince a bold sensibility. Sabbagh writes in the main in a highly reflective and at times speculative manner, unlocking different genres and purviews ways of reading literature, contemporary and canonical, which are eminently creative. His main concern throughout these critical adventures is to discern different and eliding literary aesthetics: the logics of different writer-ly temperaments, of different structures of feeling. The term which best names his critical manner, whether occasional and belle-lettristic, or more thoroughbred and scholarly, is in-sight. This collection of critically bold and aggressive essays is nearly always concerned with how a work, or a body of work, reflects basic features of the human condition. Each essay and occasion to essay is for Sabbagh an opportunity to unlock generic features of a meaningful human reality that is, implicitly, assumed to be One. He shows, compellingly and insistently, how all truly literary artifacts are parts of a universal symbolic world - descried, then reconstructed by the imaginative literary critic.