Bruce Bawer
Theodore Bruce Bawer is an American-Norwegian writer. Born and raised in New York, he has been a resident of Norway since 1999 and became a citizen of Norway in 2024. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam.
Bawer proposed same-sex marriage in his book A Place at the Table. While Europe Slept skeptically examined the rise of Islamism and sharia in the Western world, and The Victims' Revolution was a criticism of academic identity studies.
While has sometimes been described as a conservative, 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."
Early life and education
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. 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.
Writing career
Literary criticism
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 Eliot especially persuasive", and described Bawer as "an impressive textual critic" with a "casual and self-assured" critical voice.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."
Early books
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."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".
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?"
Poetry
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 to the movement's manifesto, Poetry after Modernism.Bawer's poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, and The New Criterion. 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 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.
Film criticism
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 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 "olitically unpredictable" critic who "deflates the arty, the preachy and the kitschy, 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.Gay rights
''A Place at the Table''
Bawer's book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society was published by Simon & Schuster. He described it in its first pages as "a reflection on the theme of homosexuality", motivated by the fact that current debates had "generated a lot more heat than light". The book, which criticized both heterosexuals' antigay prejudices and the political and cultural stereotypes which, in his view, were foisted on many gay people by the "queer subculture", received much attention. Reviews in mainstream media tended to be positive, while, as Bawer himself later put it, "antigay conservatives and queer lefties alike savaged the book"Author and attorney Dale Carpenter later summed up the response of many gay publications: "In a year-end roundup of gay-themed books for 1993, one critic for San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter called the book 'terrible,' but nevertheless 'important' because of its widespread impact. Gay professor and author David Bergman chided Bawer for allegedly failing to appreciate 'the great spectacle of human difference,' but acknowledged that Bawer had expressed 'what many people feel.'"
The book received positive reviews by James P. Pinkerton in Newsday, John Fink in the Chicago Tribune, David Link in Reason, and Lee Dembart in the Los Angeles Times. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave the book a mixed review. In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, too, found the book "imperfect."
More conservative voices included Margaret O'Brien Steinfels of the Catholic magazine Commonweal, who, in the New York Times Book Review, described the book as "a model polemic" and admired Bawer's "efforts to be fair and balanced". Yet she rejected Bawer's call for same-sex marriage, arguing that insisting on it "is likely to prove... explosive". Gay-rights opponent Maggie Gallagher, while calling the book "fascinating", criticized Bawer for being dissatisfied with "mere tolerance". Helle Bering-Jensen, in the Washington Times, sounded a similar note, arguing that while most Americans "are quite happy to let other folks live the lives they please", many "draw the line... at gays in the military, gay marriages, gay parenting and so forth".
A Place at the Table was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of Gay Men's Studies and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, which described it as a "sharply argued polemic".
In a 1999 article, "A Book that Made a Difference", author and attorney Dale Carpenter noted that "No author better crystallized this deep and widespread yearning than Bruce Bawer in... A Place at the Table, the decade's most important book on the gay movement." In a 2019 article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, James Kirchick referred to A Place at the Table as "the integrationist founding text".