Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare's Freedom

Such as mine especially literary criticism literary criticism should be actually sort of engaging writing I think. But only because it works with and because it professes to admire people who actually write for a broad a broader audience than a small coterie. But in fact on the whole my profession for a number of different reasons one could analyze this as on the whole discouraged that kind of writing I don't mean discouraged. It's not only a question of kind of an allergy to and panic leap panicky fear that you might sond middlebrow but also a certain kind of dream of. Of philosophical or scientific rigor. As if it were incompatible with with ordinary English prose. And indeed at some times it may be this is that I'm not the least bit. I should say quickly I'm not against a difficult and complex writing with a couple of graduate students

this semester I've been reading sitting and reading a book by a former colleague of mine at Berkeley caught in the improbability of a fellow that's fantastically difficult sentence by sentence unbelievably hard but thrilling. But it takes but I'm sure but it takes a kind of major effort and a serious commitment to get through even a page of it it's that at that level of debts that it's genuinely intellectually thrilling. But you have to leap over a fantastic number of hurdles to get there. I've always been as you say without the general principle of disliking this that way of approaching things and I see what it's forces I've always for various reasons really. Probably since Newton. My new school experience or whatever because of teachers that I had. I've always been committed at least to the idea that the it's possible to write complex relatively complex things in a fairly coherent and clear. And engaging prose. So I believe in it

and I try to do it. Having given you this build up when I finally turn up on the book and read you little sod absurd make a fool of myself but I just want to.