Portrait of T. S. Eliot, by Wyndham Lewis |
"Writing is not a science.... T.S. Eliot was honest about wanting both writing and criticism to approach the condition of a science...with the writer as catalyst, entering into a tradition, performing an act of meaningful recombination, and yet leaving no trace of himself....For writers, however, Eliot's analogy just won't do .... fictional truth is ... the watermark of self (Zadie Smith, "Fail Better," The Guardian, January 13, 2007).
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On Beauty |
My own moment occurred during the first semester of my freshman college writing course. We were reading a Hemingway short story; the professor criticized the staccato dialogue between husband and wife. When I defended it, as appropriate to this exchange, Professor Fehrenbach responded, "All of Hemingway's characters talk that way." And the world opened up for me, into a maze of texts. I realized that, to speak with authority about this one story, I needed to read them all. And so I become an English major, and begin to read, sort of conversationally, sort of systematically, as each text led me into the others that inform it. |
Stranger in a Strange Land: Grokking in the Americas
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What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?
What do you get when you drop a piano onto a military base?
Why couldn't the pony talk?
What's going on here?
Why-and-how do those puns work?
What is the logic of their working?
".... a novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal ... Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe...that fiction is the thing you relate to ... seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced ... we have to ask of each other a little bit more" (Zadie Smith, "Fail Better"). |