Regarding Elijah Wald's review of my book "The Triumph of Meanness" (Living/Arts, Sept. 15): If I were as confident as Wald that there was a kind of general agreement on the level of Americans' meanness, I would have focused more on prescription than...

THREE RECENT BOOKS ON BACH suggest different ways to tackle the old conundrum of the critical versus the positivistic. While the German research institutes continue to establish the latter and provide the documents, the facts, the editions, the source-descriptions and the biographies, the former...

Some time ago, having occasion to outline a possible scientific approach to the problem of literary criticism, the present reviewer expressed a hope that a critic might appear who, possessed of both literary and scientific equipment, would attempt this task in extenso. Mr. Richards, in his "Principles of Literary Criticism," if he does not entirely fulfil this hope, at any rate makes an extraordinarily interesting beginning. He is erudite and he is intelligent; he makes the courageous attempt ...