Activity

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language tha…

And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to its fou…

The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert; and of course it didn't end with Greene. Efficient contemporary realistic narrative, elegantly finished, still sounds pre…

[...] George Eliot, in her essay on German realism, put it like this: 'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fel…