The snowflake on the belfry

In The Snowflake on the Belfry, Anna Balakian, one of Comparative Literature's leading scholars, confronts the "current zeitgeist" in contemporary literary studies and examines changing concepts of the language of poetry, the interrelationships among writers, and problems of the creative process.

She discusses critics and their authors; the current importance assumed by criticism and its consequential devalorization of the literary work; problems of modernism; the interaction of literary and visual media; hermeneutical criticism and the Surrealists; the use and misuse of literary texts for ideological purposes; relativism and anthropomorphism; multiculturalism and the sociological approach to the arts.

Other essays examine issues of origin and originality, Mallarme, the boundaries between poetry and theology, the search for beauty, unfamiliar literatures, and literary theory. These essays demonstrate Balakian's belief that the fate of literature "needs the snowflake not to ring the bell to any particular tune but to maintain a seasonal balance in the literary climate."