Attain The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter And The Novel Prepared By James Wood Conveyed As Booklet

encanta leer a james wood, sobre todo cuando destaca cosas buenas las más difíciles de ver y expresar y no tanto cuando sus ensayos son meros derribos pero una sola mujer en todo el libro es una broma Wood is a confident critic and I enjoyed these essays generally and his willingness to champion the underdog and dismiss the overhyped goodbye Tom Wolfe.
I think I wished for something more overarching on comedy maybe he said it in the earlier essays and I just had forgotten by the time I got to the end.
His intro does talk about the religious, the comedy of correction and the secular, the comedy of forgiveness, The book is about the latter, I'm pretty smart. This guy is smarter. I'd agree with Richard. James Wood is smart. And he avoids most of them hyperacademic compound words, which makes this book actually enjoyable to read, Wood's enthusiasm for literature is incredibly contagious, His New Yorker pieces are wonderful as well, "A genre is hardening. It is becoming possible to describe todays "big, ambitious novel, " Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: Dickens, "James Wood. Hysterical Realism

"A spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of communism, All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German policespies, " Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto

Both of these opening sallies conjure the ominous and share a rhythmic persuasiveness that holds reader attention hostage, Both, too, vibrate with the sincerity of deeply held belief, They exemplify what Northrop Frye has defined as High Style, Sentences that seem to come from inside ourselves, as though the soul itself were remembering what it had been told so long ago, unmistakably heard in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit.
Both men argue against dehumanization, Marx in commerce, Wood in literature,

Here again is Wood, attacking the mob outing the enemy:

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity.
It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence, Stories and substories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion, Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs, Such recent novels as Rushdies The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Pynchons Mason amp Dixon, DeLillos Underworld, David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest, and Zadie Smiths White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges.
"

The conventions of realism are not being abolished, he continues, but exhausted, overworked, "Such diversity! So many stories! So many weird and funky characters! Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation props of the imagination, meanings toys The existence of vitality is mistaken for the drama of vitalityConnections are merely conceptual, rather than human.
It is all shiny externality, a caricature, "

So smells the skunk Wood throws at contemporary, primarily American, novelists, Theres no mistaking its odor, In his essay Anna Karenina and Characterization we learn, with equal clarity, what he prefers: Tolstoys characters, and the comfort with which they move and live in their own skins.
As with Shakespeare, "they feel real to us in part because they feel so real to themselves, take their own universes for granted, " Tolstoy starts with a description of the body which fixes a characters essence, says Wood, essences referred to repeatedly in the novel, Wood uses Tolstoyean characters as yard sticks throughout the rest of his essays to repeatedly beat the Dickens out of novels that lack human detail and dynamism,

Writing about German author Wilhelm Von Polenz, Tolstoy himself suggests that the greatest novelists love their characters and add little details which force readers to pity and love them as well, notwithstanding all their coarseness and cruelty.
Chekhov, whose name is also invoked throughout Woods oeuvre, is repeatedly praised as an exemplar of such an author, one who resists conclusion, and loves his characters from afar.


Wood tells us with precise, bold, often unbelievably beautiful artistry exactly what is good, and how and why its good, Isaac Babels atomic prose is unique because of its discontinuities and exaggeration, "If his stories progress sideways, sliding from unconnected sentence to sentence, then the very sentences vault forward within

themselves at the same moment, " J. M. Coetzees distinguished novels, "feed on exclusion they are intelligently starved, One always feels with this writer a zeal of omission, " "Bellows writing reaches for life, for the human gust, " "it is Bellows genius to see the lobsters crowded to the glass and their feelers bent by that glass to see the riot of life in the dead peace of things.
" Henry Greens "fine determination not to prosecute a purposecreates an exquisitely unpressing art, unlike any other, "

Woods essays typically start with pungent, seemingly incontrovertible axioms, "Fury, a novel that exhausts negative superlatives, that is likely, . .

read the rest here: sitelink com/bookre Twentytwo essays from the Durhamborn fingerdrumming superstar no Wood, I wont let that lie and parttime Harvard professor and New Yorker hack, Wood is unique as a critic as he snipes at the level of the sentence, where other reviewers may linger on theme, imagery, context, He rolls up his sleeves for delicious close readings of all his books and will not let those tonal lurches, authorial intrusions and pesky non sequiturs lie, Often he misuses his examples: sometimes hes diagnosing a wider malaise with technique within an authors corpus, sometimes it seems like cleverdick pointscoring, The essay of interest to the layman in this collection is his piece Hysterical realism, where he invents a subgenre of literature within a review of Zadie Smiths White Teeth.
Pretty gutsy stuff. Lumping Delillo, Pynchon, Rushdie, Smith and Foster Wallace together wasnt the wisest move, but gutsy still applies, and that essay is as important and convincing as any postpostmodern theorising.
As for the rest, theyre all localised to one author per piece: we have riotous excoriations of Rushdie, Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen on one side, and eighteen or so giddy exhortations of his lesserknown favourites on the other, among them Italo Svevo, J.
F. Powers and Monica Ali. Reading these pieces can be frustrating if you are unfamiliar with the workeither he piques your interest immensely as in the case of Shchedrin and Bellow or locks you out the lovein by being so damn particular.
Also, Woods idea of comedy seems more gentle and subtle than satirical or ironical, making the humour explored in the texts often dryer than a Kenyan wheat paddy, Such is humour. Overall, an overlong but beguiling bounty, Heres the thing about James Wood, Hes brilliant, of course, and his criticism is devoid of rancor, When he makes a critical determination, he doesnt gloat over it he makes his point and moves on, Its a joy to read criticism without the egomaniacal high dudgeon souring matters, I learn more about writing fiction from Wood's essays than from any workshop I've ever been in, An incredibly sensitive and wellread critic, A book lover's book. A guide for how to read thoughtfully and, for me, what to read next, James Wood is great. Last time I was this excited reading an author write on the subject of books it was Robertson Davies and that was a long time ago, "James Wood has been called our best young critic, This is not true. He is our best critic he thinks with a sublime ferocity, "Cynthia Ozick

Following the collection The Broken Estatewhich established James Wood as the leading critic of his generationThe Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.


In twentythree passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.


This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane.
The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction, .