Bruce Bawer

Theodore Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956) is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999.

He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam.

He earned a B.A. in English from Stony Brook in 1978, followed by an M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1983, both also in English.

While in graduate school, he published essays in Notes on Modern American Literature and the Wallace Stevens Journal, and opinion pieces in Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times.

His dissertation, "The Middle Generation", was about the poets Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.

Bawer contributed to the arts journal The New Criterion between October 1983 and May 1993.

A New York Times Magazine article "The Changing World of New York Intellectuals", foregrounded the contributors to The New Criterion, observing that "The youthful contributors to Hilton Kramer's magazine—Bruce Bawer, Mimi Kramer, Roger Kimball—are still in their 20s, but they manage to sound like the British critic F.R. Leavis. Their articles are full of pronouncements about 'moral values,' 'the crisis in the humanities,' 'the significance of art.' Their mission is to defend American culture against shoddy merchandise, and they don't shirk from the task."

A revised version of Bawer's dissertation was published under the same title in 1986.

Reviewing the book in The New Criterion, James Atlas called the "character analyses... shrewdly intuitive and sympathetic", found Bawer's "explanation for why the poets of the Middle Generation were so obsessed with [T.S.] Eliot especially persuasive", and described Bawer as "an impressive textual critic" with a "casual and self-assured" critical voice.

In 1987, his book The Contemporary Stylist was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

The year after, Graywolf Press issued Diminishing Fictions, a collection of essays on the modern novel.

Reviewing it in the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller complained of "sour notes", such as "undeserved sneers", but concluded that "What redeems Bawer's excesses is the persuasive case he makes that he is on a desperate rescue mission."

From 1987 to 1990, Bawer served as the film critic for the conservative monthly The American Spectator.

He also wrote several articles on film for The New York Times and other publications.

A chapbook of Bawer's poems, Innocence, was published in 1988 by Aralia Press, which also published individual poems by Bawer in other forms.

A collection of his film reviews, The Screenplay's the Thing, was published in 1992.

"Best known as a literary critic, Bawer is an engaging, astute, formidable film reviewer as well", wrote Publishers Weekly, describing Bawer as a "[p]olitically unpredictable" critic who "deflates the arty (Caravaggio), the preachy (Platoon; The Milagro Beanfield War) and the kitschy (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but gives thumbs up to The World According to Garp, Raising Arizona, Roxanne, Crossing Delancey and The Mosquito Coast... One wishes he were a full-time movie critic."

Bawer later wrote that he left The American Spectator because of a conflict with an editor over a reference to homosexuality in one of his reviews.

He has since returned to the magazine as a freelance book reviewer.

Bawer proposed same-sex marriage in his book A Place at the Table (1993).

Graywolf published Bawer's second collection of essays on fiction, The Aspect of Eternity, in 1993.

Publishers Weekly called the essays "beautifully written" and "a cause for celebration", and George Core, in The Washington Times, called Bawer "a first-rate critic whose continuing achievement as an independent literary journalist... is cause for our astonishment and celebration—one of the few positive signs about critics and criticism in our contentious and stuffy times".

A full-length collection of Bawer's poetry, Coast to Coast, appeared in 1993.

It was selected as the year's best first book of poetry by the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook.

Bawer also published a collection of essays on poetry, Prophets and Professors, in 1995.

"Running through these critical commentaries", wrote Publishers Weekly, "is the theme that too many younger poets are caught up in romantic excess, that the influence of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the confessional self-destruction of Sylvia Plath have excused so much of the sloppy, informal and poured-out emotion of today's poets... He is on the side of the formalists and those for whom poetry is not a game of literary gossip. This book is an intelligent study by someone who has read and judged a great deal of poetry and criticism."

In The New York Times, Katherine Knorr wrote that "Bawer is one of the best literary critics in America today", who proves "that the best literary criticism comes from a serious, close reading of the work that avoids the temptations of celebrity and fashionable politics".

Reviewing Prophets and Professors, Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley described Bawer as "one of the appallingly few American literary journalists whose work repays the reading" and "an intelligent, independent, tough-minded critic and a clear-eyed observer of literary affairs".

In The New York Times Book Review, Andrea Barnet described the book as "immensely readable... provocative and entertaining", saying that Bawer was "thoughtful, sharply opinionated, high-minded and unafraid to slash at sacred cows", Leslie Schenk of World Literature Today opined that Bawer "has the uncanny knack of writing good sense precisely in those fields where good sense seems to have been taboo... As though with the scalpel of a surgeon removing tumors, he deftly, coolly, cuts through the ephemeral malarkey that hitherto obscured his subjects. His book A Place at the Table, for example, stands as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar in the seas of mush that otherwise surround the subject of homosexuality."

In Prophets and Professors, "Bawer performs a similar operation on American academia's pet fetish, modern poetry", resulting in "the most important book on poetry since Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?"

Along with Dana Gioia, Thomas M. Disch, Charles Martin, and others, Bawer was one of the leading figures of the New Formalism movement in poetry.

His poetry appeared in the 1996 anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, and he contributed to an essay (described as "heavy-handed" by Publishers Weekly) to the movement's manifesto, Poetry after Modernism.

Bawer's poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, and The New Criterion.

While Europe Slept (2006) skeptically examined the rise of Islam(ism) and Sharia in the Western world, and The Victims' Revolution (2012) was a criticism of academic identity studies.

He has been described as a conservative by some.

Bawer has argued that such labels are misleading or reductionist.

He said his views were "motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny."

Bawer is of Polish descent through his father and is of English, Welsh, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and French descent through his mother, whom he profiled in the September 2017 issue of Commentary.

Born and raised in New York City, Bawer attended New York City public schools and Stony Brook University, where he studied literature under the poet Louis Simpson.

As a graduate student, he taught undergraduate courses in literature and composition.