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Presents literary criticism which focuses on the literature of the comedy that is evident in the sheer nature of a war. Of all the events in history that deserve to be called tragic, nothing can compare with war. Nothing could be further from comedy than the wanton destruction and self-destruction of war. If the purpose of comedy is to expose the insanity of every-day life, then war may be judged the ultimate insanity, and the comedian's ultimate challenge. To those in power, comedy clearly is no laughing matter. Nor are the authorities wrong to suspect comedians of being subversive. A survey of the genre of war comedy must begin with Aristophanes, not only because he came first but because he influenced the writers of war comedy who followed, incIuding those who never read him. In comedy appearing in the literature of war there are two geniuses after Aristophanes; Shakespeare and Cervantes. Swift and Voltaire deserve consideration on their own merits because they share a remarkably deft touch at ridiculing the wrong reasons for going to war. If nobody belongs in the prime company of Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Cervantes, only a foolhardy reader would presume to exclude Nikolai Gogol from the short list of second-tier geniuses.

Presents literary criticism which focuses on the contributions of author Daniel Defoe. Nobody would presume to put Defoe in a class with Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, or even Charles Dickens, who happened to despise him. He was not a great novelist, as Maximillian E. Novak is all too aware. First and foremost Defoe is a page-turner, a plotter of then-and-after-that-then who hooks a reader into dying to know what comes next. Without really satisfying logic, Defoe, an oddly devout man, presumes it may be God's will to put us in danger in order to save in the long run, either here or hereafter. There is no doubt that Defoe was as self-contradictory as Novak insists. In his ambition for power as well as wealth he attached himself to the coattails of the powerful, using his talents as a scribbler to produce pamphlets of bad propaganda contrary to his own convictions. As idealists of the family, Tolstoy and Defoe shared a failure to practice what they preach. Tolstoy's "Family Happiness" is a work of genius far beyond Defoe's reach, but he too believed in family happiness.

Describes the aphorisms of 19th- and 20th-century aphorists. Skepticisms toward love and sex; Quality of providing advance insights; Criticisms regarding the tendency of aphorists to call attention to themselves; Ability to allow and encourage double standards; Views on war; Tendency of women aphorists to accept the world as it is.

This article critically appraises the literary works of writer James Thurber. The pleasures of Thurber are still there for the rereading, but one savors them moderately. The superlatives applied by Thurber's colleagues and contemporaries seem excessive to the point of embarrassment today, especially when applied to his essays. In fact Thurber's first success was a collaboration with White, in which the authorship of chapters is nearly impossible to spot. "Is Sex Necessary?," was published just weeks after the 1929 stock-market crash. The book sold 50,000 copies in that first dark year and still remains in print. Thurber was not a subtle inventor! When he set out to invent confusion, he invented chaos. When he set out to invent a character, he invented an eccentric. The chaos verged on slapstick humor; the eccentric verged on a comic-strip cartoon. Thurber's short stories share the same simple if not simplistic outline of his essays and autobiography. His most famous short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," is a single joke ingeniously sustained. Whatever emotion Thurber's short stories possess derives from two chief plots: men harassed by women; and men abandoned by women, like the protagonist of "One Is a Wanderer," drinking himself into a fit state to retire to sleep in his lonely hotel room.

The article states that if one can believe the literature on reading, it (reading) is the last innocent pleasure known to civilized man, with the possible exception of organic gardening. What an enormous and illogical distinction one thus create between modern reading and modern writing. Modern writing, one freely concede, has gone devious and guilty and complex. Alienation, ambivalence--a whole lexicon of terms has been invented to register the sobering fact that all serious writers since 1900 are, willy-nilly, modern writers. But when one sits down to read a book, even a book by a modern writer, one remains, it seems, an old-fashioned reader--complicated, doubtful, and tormented in every other department of life, from religion to sex, but sound as a hickory nut qua reader. Even so modern a writer as Virginia Woolf is capable of rattling on in a strangely archaic style when the subject is reading. It is difficult to think of any other topic about which Woolf wrote so quaintly--with so un-modern a voice. Nor is she an exception. To collect an anthology entitled The Joy of Reading would be one of the simpler of editing tasks.