SOURCE: "Reading Sven Birkerts," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 124-27.

In the following review of An Artificial Wilderness, Parini illuminates Birkerts's critical technique with respect to contemporary, academic criticism.

"The arrow of modern life and the arrow of private sensibility have passed in opposite directions," writes Sven Birkerts, one of the most independent critics now writing in America, in his first collection of essays, An Artificial Wilderness. This remark is made in the course of an "appreciation" of Cyril Connolly, a critic who in many ways Birkerts himself recalls. Connolly is praised for his awareness of literature as part of a larger historical process: "Implicit in his valuations, supporting and authorizing them, was an active recognition of historical process. This awareness was at once particular—he grasped the dynamic interactions of person, place, and milieu—and relativistic." He sets this concern for context against the...