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Two Paths for the Novel - Zadie Smith (on "authenticity")
Tags: novel, literature, lit_crit, book_review, 911, philosophy on 2008-11-04 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (8) -About
more fromwww.nybooks.com
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The centuries are duly canceled. What follows is a page of landscape portraiture, seen from a train's window ("Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and fabulously high mountains"). Insert it into any nineteenth-century novel (again, a test first suggested by Robbe-Grillet) and you wouldn't see the joins. The passage ends with a glimpse of a "near-naked white man" walking through the trees by the track; he is never explained and never mentioned again, and this is another rule of lyrical Realism: that the random detail confers the authenticity of the Real. As perfect as it all seems, in a strange way it makes you wish for urinals.
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It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill. I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject. Netherland recognizes the tenuous nature of a self, that "fine white thread running, through years and years," and Hans flirts with the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world
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An interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?
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There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be here.
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Why is the greatest facilitator of inauthenticity Asian? Why is the closest thing to epiphany a dead black man? Because Remainder, too, wants to destroy the myth of cultural authenticity—though for purer reasons than Netherland. If your project is to rid the self of its sacredness, to flatten selfhood out, it's simply philosophical hypocrisy to let any selves escape, whatever color they may be. The nameless "dead black man" is a deliberate provocation on McCarthy's part, and in its lack of coy sentiment there is a genuine transgressive thrill. Still, it does seem rather hard to have to give up on subjectivity when you've only recently got free of objectification. I suppose history only goes in one direction.
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A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far-off, war-torn places. The frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!
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So, while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the "rotting flesh- assemblage hanging in his attic"; as Ernest Shackleton forces his dominance fantasy onto the indifferent polar expanse, Necronauts concern themselves with the "blackened, frostbitten toes he and his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat." And so on. Like Chuck Ramkissoon, they have a motto: "We are all Necronauts, always, already," which is recycled Derrida (as "blood like champagne" is recycled Dostoevsky). That is to say, we are all death-marked creatures, defined by matter—though most of us most of the time pretend not to be.
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For those who are theory-minded the INS manifesto in its entirety (only vaguely sketched out here) is to be recommended: it's intellectually agile, pompous, faintly absurd, invigorating, and not at all new. As celebrations of their own inauthenticity, the INS members freely admit their repetitions and recycling tendencies, stealing openly from Blanchot, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida, and, of course, Robbe-Grillet. Much of what is to be found in the manifesto is more leisurely expressed in the chief philosopher's own "tomes" (in particular Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature[2] ).
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A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel'
Tags: literature, short_story, fiction, lit_crit, book_review, borges, math, philosophy on 2008-10-30 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (5) -About
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Barely nine pages long, "The Library of Babel" is nothing less than an attempt to describe the chaotic order and meaning of the universe, building on the ancient notion of the world as a book (or a book itself divided into an almost infinite number of books) in which we ourselves are written, and which we also attempt to read.
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Mathematics was one of Borges's lifelong passions; he considered it, with theology, a branch of fantastic literature. In his early childhood, Borges had been taught by his father the paradoxes of Zeno and the rudiments of algebra, and his writing abounds in references to magical mathematical imaginings, such as Leibniz's binary notation or Brouwer's map, which, as Guillermo Martinez demonstrated in his "Borges and Mathematics," lent Borges a framework or scaffolding for many of his fictions
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The numbers he chose for the shelves and books in his story, Borges later confessed, were simply those of the municipal library in which he worked — and which he himself found so horrible. "Learned critics," he noted later, with some evident pleasure, "studied these figures and generously lent them a mystical significance."
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if:book: Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism
Tags: fiction, literature, history, new_historicism, stephen_greenblatt, lit_crit, shakespeare on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (5) -About
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Greenblatt has the power of reading closely, even if he doesn't read closely in the same way his mentors did; he still reads with "the rigor and excitement of the old New Critics." Henderson added that this historical moment is an excellent time for criticism, since "attention to detail and method is very important with a glut of information."
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the importance of thinking inside a text, rather than removing the text from its context (as in New Criticism).
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referring to the difference between New Historicism (a term Greenblatt himself coined for examining a text within the framework of history, culture, and sociology) and Cultural Materialism, a term for a branch of literary criticism stemming from Marxism that looks at a text not as an object, but as a process that is both politicized and historigraphical.
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Henderson added that the great question, then, was how to use history to tell a story. At the moment that New Historicism emerged, it put the individual back into the system (as opposed to high theory and Cultural Materialism). It was about America in individual lives.
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As a scholar, Greenblatt advised, decide when you have to cut yourself off; later you may know more but won't end up saying much more. You have to know when to stop. He said he had to learn for himself and his students to be responsible, but not to be so obsessive or so frightened. You must shape around the idea that you have a story to tell, for yourself and your readers.
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OnFiction: Literariness
Tags: literature, psychology, lit_crit on 2008-10-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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Literariness, in this perspective, characterizes the experience of literature, not its possible interpretations; it is a way of regarding the text and its effects in itself, not in relation to some external reference to political, historical, or other issues (interesting though these may be).
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An Appraisal - Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane - An Appraisal - NYTimes.com
Tags: writer, tribute, david_foster_wallace, lit_crit on 2008-09-14 -All Annotations (3) -About
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In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.
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A review of a memoir by the tennis player Tracy Austin became a meditation on art and athletics and the mastery of one’s craft. A review of a John Updike novel became an essay on how the “brave new individualism and sexual freedom” of the 1960s had devolved into “the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.”
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An ardent magpie, Mr. Wallace tossed together the literary and the colloquial with hyperventilated glee, using an encyclopedia of styles and techniques to try to capture the cacophony of contemporary America. As a result, his writing could be both brainy and visceral, fecund with ideas and rich with zeitgeisty buzz.
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Is Any Mesh of Literature and Science Doomed to Reductionism?
Is Any Mesh of Literature and Science Doomed to Reductionism?
Tags: science_in_fiction, philosophy, richard_rorty, consilience, literature, lit_crit, evolution, literary_darwinism on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Darwin to the Rescue - ChronicleReview.com
Tags: literature, academia, education, criticism, lit_crit, literary_darwinism on 2008-07-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Add Sticky Note
Zunshine, in fact, sees Literary Darwinism as a force that could add to the joblessness and hopelessness of students and professors, instead of vice versa: "Say I am a professor of English, I have graduate students, and I tell them: You have to forget about everything that your colleagues have been working on for the last 30 years because it's all literary theory, it's all wrong, and now you have this new scientific approach that you use. Now let me ask you, what would happen if a graduate student who hears this goes on the job market?"
- Doomsday!posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
Where does this throw-out-the-last-30-years stuff come from anyway? Who's advocating that? Science is cumulative and progressive by definition. The humanities people are guilty of faddish renunciation and adoption of theories and holy-grail thinking.
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(Carroll said that he recently gave himself "a crash course" in statistical analysis, but neither he nor Gottschall has any official training.) Alan Richardson, an English professor at Boston College who works with cognitive theory, writes in an e-mail message that the work he's seen from the evolutionary literary theorists "is riddled with basic errors in study design and methodology."Add Sticky Note
- all the better to cite Gottschall's work then. I mean really.posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
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"If you're interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and questions that fall into the category of narratology. I'm not sure that by taking samples and doing statistical processing that you're going to get very far." D.T. Max, the author of the New York Times Magazine article, got at that objection when he wrote, "I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke 'The Waste Land' or 'Finnegan's Wake.' Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator — these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists."Add Sticky Note
- ie: "...it doesn't have all the answers, so it's worthless."posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
The point of science is to ask better questions, people! Get with it. If "Literary Darwinism" (bad name!) inspires more and better questions and some subsequent dialog, there's value in that.
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But Literary Darwinists have been far less welcomed by mainstream literary theorists. Referring to the theory of the unity of scientific and literary knowledge in E.O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, wrote in 2005 that humanities departments "should definitely not want consilience, which is a bargain with the devil."Add Sticky Note
- note fundamentalismposted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
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"Most of the big ideas in literary theory have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no life in psychology anymore — it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no life really in political theory or in economics classrooms," Gottschall says. "My point is, we start with these bad theories, and work founded on faulty premises is going to be faulty itself." Of course, the tests he cites in his Globe article find both the feminist critique of the Western tradition as having a unique focus on beauty and the poststructuralist idea of the "death of the author" to be false. (Not all Literary Darwinists subscribe to Gottschall's reliance on quantitative study; others treat scientific ideas more as a theoretical frame for reading than as a guide to method.)Add Sticky Note
- wow. Is Gottschall's study in fact simply quantitative. And if it is, might that not be a function of its status as an early application of a new and developing method? AND - what is the author's motivation in citing Gottschall at all, especially if there are critics who do not rely on quantitative study, which this essay's author clearly finds distasteful.posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
More in the way of disingenuous argument. The author's concern here is being right, not greater understanding. Precisely the "sort" of discourse that is of no value. There's no place for this in science, which is why science works as well as it does.
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Nonetheless, many literary scholars are skeptical of the idea that Literary Darwinism will save their sector of the academy.Add Sticky Note
- what about increasing the number of ways in which literature can be appreciated and put to useposted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
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Add Sticky Note
Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged."
Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure
- "exactly that sort"...posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-28
as if science is just an attempt to quantify things.
This "sort" of ignorant (at best) and disingenuous reasoning consistently shows up in attempts to defend the humanities from the "sort" of disrespect humanities professors consistently and comfortably show the sciences.
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For some of the literary scholars who use cognitive science, that is because their background incorporates cultural theory as well as science, and they're wary of junking 30 years of new thinking. F. Elizabeth Hart, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut who has a background in Renaissance literature and an interest in how cognitive theory affects, for example, conceptions of metaphor, says she mistrusts an approach that so de-emphasizes the effect of culture on the individual. "We have to find a theory that creates or explains or allows for an interface between the individual as an agent and the — to use a Marxist phrase — superstructure that bears down on the individual. You have to have a model that accounts for both," she says. Zunshine accuses the Literary Darwinists of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater. … It's somewhat ridiculous to say that scientific method can help us to shed light on all of the questions that literary theory has been engaged with."
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"If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it eludes form, or just doesn't 'see' it, then it will mean exactly nothing."
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James Wood's How Fiction Works. - By Judith Shulevitz - Slate Magazine
Tags: fiction, literature, criticism, lit_crit, book_review, james_wood on 2008-07-24 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Michael Chabon, fan fiction and comic book culture
Tags: fiction, literature, criticism, lit_crit, writing on 2008-06-11 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromentertainment.timesonline.co.uk
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innovative artists roam the aesthetic borderlands,
playing with conventions and deriving inspiration from numerous sources. He
has intelligent (and usually mellifluous) things to say about M. R. James,
Cormac McCarthy, Philip Pullman, Norse Myths and the comic strips of Ben
Katchor. For Chabon, artists such as these disprove Harold Bloom’s concept
of the “anxiety of influence”. Rather than trying to outdo and replace their
forebears, they honour those who inspired them, drawing sustenance from the
entire spectrum of culture. Munificent artists can’t be contained within the
arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the “serious” and the
“entertaining”. Chabon doesn’t need to reach for his gun to dispatch such
distinctions. He simply redefines them: “All literature, highbrow or low,
from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”.
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A thriller in ten chapters
Tags: book_review, literature, fiction, criticism, lit_crit, books on 2008-05-26 -All Annotations (0) -About
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One thing is certain: the appetite for print is growing. In 1996, there were between 60,000 and 100,000 new titles in the UK each year. By 2007, it was pushing 200,000. That's the biggest annual output of any country in the Western world, turning over some £4bn a year.
All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a new literary stratosphere. Two things complicate this equation. First, despite the steady evolution from typesetting to digitisation, the printed book has held out against electronic options. It is as if, after lift-off, the Apollo mission turned out to be not a space capsule but a Spitfire.
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Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point was almost a flop. It was published to mixed reviews in the US, did no serious business in the UK and was saved by - yes - word of mouth. After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book 'tip'. Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on the New York Times bestseller list.
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Just in case his message had been misunderstood, and as a further assertion of the disintegrating old-school claim that highbrow and popular culture are mutually exclusive, he added: 'I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition.'
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The Franzen episode illustrates the paradox of this decade that the more golden the opportunities available to the book, the more marginal, even vulnerable, it has seemed to become. Despite, or perhaps because of, this market transformation, the common reader, and many authors, have not been grateful.
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in the new marketplace, literary fiction still had its limits. This was dramatically demonstrated when On Chesil Beach, together with the entire Booker Prize shortlist, was outsold by Crystal, a ghosted novel
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After a decade of change, many of the old, elite signposts through the contemporary jungle of books and writing had become smothered in a profusion of comment, from blogs to book clubs. It became harder and harder to achieve a serious-minded consensus. The dictates of commerce seemed to threaten the traditional authority of the critic.
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If you believe, as I do, that Britain still sustains a vigorous and independent literary culture, look at America. The omens are not encouraging. American democratic instincts have transformed its literary landscape as surely as its colossal market has revolutionised bookselling. Anyone can review books - and now, in America, everyone does.
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Measure for Measure - The Boston Globe
Tags: literature, academia, david_sloan_wilson, art, criticism, lit_crit, fourth_culture on 2008-05-13 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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most of the "big ideas" in contemporary literary studies have been flawed from their inception - they have been based, at least in part, on failed theories of human nature.
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Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley's Frederick Crews points out, is that "our bogus experiments succeed every time."
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Over the last several decades literary studies has been deeply colored by postmodern skepticism about the possibility of developing new ideas or knowledge that are in any sense "truer" than what came before. It has also aggressively committed itself to the idea that scholarship can - and should - be a means to achieve political ends.
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bring together obsolete theory, inadequate methods, unbridled ideological bias, and a spirit of surrender to "unknowability," and you have the modern situation in academic literary study - a system that seems to be designed not to generate reliable and durable knowledge.
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literary traditions actually change gradually and predictably. From this Martindale provocatively argues that the principal driver of artistic change is not social, political, or religious upheaval, but the steady pressure on individual artists to "make it new."
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Another type of investigation exploits the massive processing power of computers to generate new information and ideas about literary history. Great gains have been made in recent years with stylometric studies, the computerized crunching of sentences that can establish an author's stylistic fingerprint.
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like so much else that passes for knowledge in contemporary literary studies, this assertion has its basis only in the swaggering authority of its asserter
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As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.
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I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism.
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Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.
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to emerge from the present crisis, literary studies must borrow more from the sciences than the habit of experimentation. We must also study its theories, its evidentiary standards, and its optimistic philosophy of knowledge.
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Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today
Tags: lit_crit, writing on 2008-04-14 -All Annotations (0) -About
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With the decline of book reviewing, who will take the measure of the next generations? The term “standards” may seem old-fashioned in our anti-elitist culture. But critical standards are essential not to impose hierarchy but to celebrate genuine craft, imagination, and human interest, or to show where they fall short, even in the work of talented writers. Useful reviewing comes in many guises: rapturous accounts of thrilling new discoveries, interpretive discussions of complex literary careers, and killer reviews targeting inflated reputations. All can serve a worthwhile purpose.
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They might argue that the Internet, though it has undermined many publications, offers a more accessible venue to prospective writers and Web-surfing readers. As far as I can see, a strong case can be made only for online magazines like Slate and Salon or highly selective portals like Arts & Letters Daily, which most resemble the print journals and literary miscellanies on which they’re modeled. These are edited sites, much like print publications but quite unlike the river of complaint, prejudice, and enthusiasm that makes the Internet so egalitarian. Since everyone has political opinions, political blogs have thrived where literary blogs have faltered. The real site of literary comment on the Web is not the blogs - apart from our own blog, The Valve, and the personal blogs of prolific scholars like Michael Bérubé - but the intriguing customer reviews on Amazon, which differ little from the customer reviews of travel destinations, computer software, and home appliances. It’s nice that the Internet is a talk-back medium, with articles dragging long tails: a buzz of reader reactions, however fatuous. But book reviews, to be of any value, demand a trained sensibility and real critical expertise; they need to furnish more than rough-hewn consumer guidance and the colorful peeves of the man in the street.
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Though it is built on reading and writing, the Internet is seen as the enemy of literature, digging the grave of the printed book.
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the Internet is eating away at it own foundations, the printed sources of so much of its real content. The blog will not make up the difference, at least in its unedited form as a spontaneous effusion, a personal diary in shorthand. As Adam Kirsch has written: “Bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve."
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The neuroscience delusion TLS
Tags: neuro, criticism, lit_crit, literature, academia, science_in_fiction on 2008-04-13 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The capacious frame of reference in which the work is
located – evident to the critic but not to the author – places the former in
a position of knowing superiority vis-à-vis the latter. The work becomes a
mere example of some historical, cultural, political, or other trend of
which the author will have been dimly aware, if at all. The differences
between one author and another are also minimized. Like hypochondriacs,
theory-led critics find what they seek -
The switch from Theory
to “biologism” leaves something essential unchanged: the habit of the
uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose
distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are
consequently lost. -
While
aficionados of Theory regarded individual works and their authors as, say,
manifestations of the properties of texts, of their interaction with other
texts and with the structures of power, neuroscience groupies reduce the
reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every
action in ordinary human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human
animal life. For this reason – and also because it is wrong about
literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and
represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity – neuroaesthetics
must be challenged. -
For Byatt, reading Donne’s poetry leads to the
formation of “mental objects”, and the excitement induced by the poetry is
due to the specific nature of the mental objects created in the reader.
Byatt summarizes Changeux’s account of the construction of mental objects
from the activation of a large number of neurones in different layers of the
brain. His account is hierarchical. He distinguishes between: “the primary
percept – a mental object constructed by direct contact with the outside
world”; “the image” (an object of memory); “the concept” (memory with
diminished sensory content, an “algebra” derived from the isomorphs of
perceptual acts); and “linked or associated concepts”. These correspond to
increasingly complex contents of consciousness physically realized in ever
more complex linkages in the brain. While Byatt admits that “we are not yet
within reach of a neuroscientific approach to poetic intricacy”, she reports
that she was “convinced on reading Changeux that the neurones Donne excites
are largely those of reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned
formal structures like geometry, algebra and language”. -
by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large
number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and
another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading
Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and
reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash;
between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting
cross over missing toilet paper. That is an impressive number of
distinctions for a literary critic to lose. But that is the price of
overstanding. -
that apparent
localization of human feelings in bits of the brain is a kind of artefact. -
people read quite
differently; or that there is a difference between reading a poem for a
first, a second, or a hundredth time; or between reading it as a naive,
delighted, or bored reader, and reading it as an erudite critic. -
Although direct stimulation of the brain in the waking
adult may generate quite complex hallucinations – even awaken elaborate
memories – this occurs only because neural activity is associated with such
experience under normal conditions. The experiences arrived at by the
anomalous route are parasitic on those that are had in the ordinary way. -
Under normal circumstances, experiences are had by a person, not by aAdd Sticky Note
stand-alone brain.- Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Ownposted by taryn930 on 2008-04-13
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It's me? I've won after all these years? | News | Guardian Unlimited Books
Tags: criticism, doris_lessing, fiction, lit_crit, nobel, women, writer on 2007-10-12 -All Annotations (0) -About
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the Nobel Academy, singled out Lessing's 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece The Golden Notebook for praise, calling it "a pioneering work" that "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship"
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Never afraid to embrace politics, she became a member of the British Communist party in the 50s and campaigned against nuclear weapons.
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'A way in the world', Prospect Magazine issue 139 October 2007 - Printer Friendly Article
Tags: anthony_powell, fiction, lit_crit, non-fiction, review, vs_naipaul, writer, writing on 2007-10-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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This collection, Miguel Street, wasn't the first book he published; his publishers, typically then as now, wanted the more certain commercial prospects of a novel. But when it came out as his third book, its comedy attracted nice reviews—he might have become the RK Narayan of the Caribbean. Instead, Naipaul perceived it as a kind of lie. His view of the street was close-up and "flat"—it ignored what the writer knew lay outside because by this time the writer was living in England, had travelled widely, and couldn't pretend as a writer that he knew only one place. "It was to that complication," Naipaul writes, "that my writing took me."
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What Ails the Short Story - Stephen King - Books - Review - New York Times
Tags: anthology, fiction, lit_crit, literature, short_story, writing on 2007-09-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
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I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
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Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked...
Tags: adolescent, alice_sebold, brooklyn, criticism, david_eggers, fiction, jonathan_lethem, jonathan_safran_foer, lit_crit, literature, mcsweeneys, michael_chabon, new_york_city, sue_monk_kid, writing on 2007-09-27 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”
Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.
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if:book: books and the man i sing
Tags: art, criticism, lit_crit, publishing_industry, writing, andrew_keen on 2007-09-27 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.futureofthebook.org
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Pope's response to the print boom was not simply to wish things could return to their previous state; rather, he popularised a critical vocabulary that both helped others to deal with it, and also – conveniently – positioned himself at the tip of the writerly hierarchy. His extensive critical writings, popularising the notions of 'high' and 'low' quality writing and lambasting the less talented, served to position Pope himself as an expert. It is no coincidence that he was one of the first writers to break free of the literary patronage model and make a living out of selling his published works. The print boom that he critiqued so scatologically was the same boom that helped him to the economic independence that enabled him to criticise as he saw fit.
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I've argued elsewhere that 'fiction' is a complex concept and severely in need of a rethink in the context of the Web; my hunch is that while for nonfiction writers the Web requires an adjustment of distribution channels and little more, or creative work – stories – the implications are much more drastic.
I have this suspicion that, for poets and storytellers, the price of leaving copyright behind is that 'high art' goes with it.
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Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism
Tags: atheism, ayn_rand, business, capitalism, criticism, fiction, lit_crit, literature, novel, philosophy on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and