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In , when "Parthian Words" was first published, Jameson's viewpoint would have been unintelligible to me, and her rant intolerable.
In , I find it interesting and sad. It would probably seem quaintly unintelligible to most twenty-first century readers. Jameson writes this essay, as she says, as a survivor, being someone who came to consciousness before , when the world first convulsed. She was born in She faces, she writes, "a gap I cannot cross. But the evils of our reality aren't the same as those of the middle-class world of the traditional novel.
And our reality even in is changing because of the importance and implications of computer technology. For her, the date August 6, , marks a cataclysm. The contemporary novelist, as she says, lives in a world that has seen "Hiroshima, the death camps, wars in which children die of hunger or seared with napalm. And since the novelist's task is to confront our formidable reality, in all its uncertainty and instability, a rebirth of the novel is needed.
None of the novels of the s and s has been able to achieve the task. I like her appreciation of how the language and social reality in which writers live inform the character of their work as well as set the challenges they face. I like her sense of history and the intelligence that frequently shines through her prose.
And most of all, I admire her attempt to grapple with rather than give up on, in silence what lies on the other side of that gap in consciousness she acknowledges-- which is for me painfully similar to the gap many older people are facing today, people who "became conscious" before , another watershed date. There are a couple of chapters, though, where the rant descends into diatribe.
Her personal life suffered, and her first marriage to schoolmaster Charles Douglas Clarke was an unhappy one. No, cancel Yes, report it Thanks! Jameson's fiery mother, who bore three girls, encouraged Storm christened Margaret Storm to pursue an academic education. It reviews the evergreen question of the death of the novel, so often and confidently announced; the difficulties, peculiar to our nihilistic and This short audiobook offers the dispassionate but sharp-tongued comments on the novel, by an old fiction hand, a personal exercise of taste and judgment, backed by a life interest in the history and methods of literary criticism. A Catch of Consequence. Or three stars because of the diatribe which some people would probably think deserved one or two stars?
Should I give this four stars for the honesty and intelligence of some of the book? Or three stars because of the diatribe which some people would probably think deserved one or two stars? Mark rated it it was amazing Jul 30, Edgar Wallace, Complete Collection. My Friend My Father. Some Experiences of an Irish R. The House Behind The Cedars. Death of a Busybody. A Darkening of the Heart.
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