topic/literary-theory
Terry Eagleton,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
James Wood,
Zadie Smith,
Annie Dillard,
George Saunders,
Ben Lerner,
Richard Seymour,
Jon Baskin,
Richard M. Rorty
[...] I think fine writing in fictional prose comes into its own only with the Modernists: first with James, and with Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, Kafka, and the lavish Joyce of the novels.
This is an elaborated, painterly prose. It raids the world for materials to build sentences. It fabricates a semi-opaque weft of language. It is a spendthrift prose, and a prose of means. It is dense in objects which pester the senses. It hauls in visual imagery of every sort; it strews metaphors about, and bald similes, and allusions to every realm. It does not shy from adjectives, not even from adverbs. It traffics in parallel structures and reptitions; it indulges in assonance and alliteration. [...]
[...] It is an energy. It sacrifices perfect control to the ambition to mean. It can penetrate very deep, piling object upon object to build a tower from which to breach the sky; it can enter with courage or bravura those fearsome realms where the end products of art meet the end products of thought, and where perfect clarity is not possible. Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language.
Symbol does not only refer; it acts. There is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you climb to the higher levels of abstraction, symbols, those enormous, translucent planets, are all there is. They are at once your only tools of knowledge and that knowledge's only object. It is no leap to say that space-time is itself a symbol. If the material world is a symbol, it is the symbol of mind, or of God. Which is more or less meaningless - as you choose. But it is not mere. In the last analysis, symbol and art objects do not stand for things; they manifest them, in their fullness. You begin by using symbols, and end by contemplating them.
Well, all the voices are mine. All the characters are just shards of the fractured me. That’s why I sympathize with them all, even the monsters.
yes!! in response to a prompt about him using lots of different voices
[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.
[...] The novel ideally is not reducible to the political. It’s a journey toward meaning that transcends the frame of politics. Blood Meridian—just to think of a great novel that traverses the political—is not simply a book about the violent policies of the American government paying out for scalps on the Western frontier. It takes up subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds of systemic violence a work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justified or even really explained.
[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.
sam lipsyte
[...] the modernist aesthetic: go in fear of general ideas, Pound had said, the natural object is always an adequate symbol of the idea or the inward state. There is much to be said for this view: it is a way of bringing the minimum of conceptual baggage to the fresh encounter with reality. What was death to Stevens? A flock of pigeons that made ambiguous undulations as they went downward to darkness on extended wings. What was the secret principle of order in things to Ezra Pound? A rose in the steel dust. What was the paradise, tucked in memory or hidden just behind misery, to T. S. Eliot? Sunlight and laughter in a garden. These images have immense and memorable evocative power, and they have the permanent sphinxlike and unparaphrasable quality of all powerful metaphors. One feels in them the imagination in the twentieth century pounding on the wall of what it cannot know. [...]
[...] For Hegel, art was one of the organs through which a society could reflect on - by making explicit to itself - its form of life, which meant not only its habits of thought or speech but also the institutional structures and power relations that continuously shaped those habits. Much of Pippin's philosophical criticism is devoted to making explicit how novelists like James and Proust can help us recognize configurations of thought that are less eccentric than common, less a function of individual history than of "the situation of modernity itself". One of his recurrent points is that exclusively psychological readings of individual action can itself become a sociohistorical habit, so seemingly "natural" to us that we cease to see it as a choice?
That so much of our social and communal life has become so fine-grained and circumstantail that is it difficult, from any amount of distance, to see as anything other than the result of arbitrary pathology is in large part why Pippin believes the novel "might be the great modern philosophical form". He means that novels can show in a manner that philosophy cannot - or has not been inclined to - how ordinary people struggle to be recognized as moral agents and to do justice to the claims of others in th everyday social world. [...]
Toril Moi, in her essay "Nothing Is Hidden", identifies this difference between the kind of criticism practiced by many in her academic discipline and philosophically therapeutic criticism: whereas the suspicious literary theorist presumes that the "text is hiding something from us," she writes, the Cavell/Wittgenstein critic presumes that "the problem is in me, in us". In other words, the artwork's value comes from showing readers something about themselves. [...]
he goes on to explain what he sees as the job of the therapeutic critic: not only to account for what is important about the work but also why readers might have missed it