The Reading ExperienceA Literature and Criticism BlogThe Critical Sphere- June 30, 2008 Reginald Shepherd re-reads Donald Allen's influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), and finds it is much less "political" than many people think: Looking through the poems and the authors statements, though many of them manifest a strong will to...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/the-critical--3.html The Many Faces of Odysseus- June 25, 2008 Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Starcherone Books) would seemingly qualify as a "novel" only if we define the form in the barest possible terms: a lengthy composition in prose. Puporting to be a decoded translation of a...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/zachary-masons.html The Critical Sphere- June 23, 2008 Richard Larson updates a college essay he once wrote on Woody Allen's Manhattan: the paper made the claim that the city is the protagonist and the narrative arc of the film is a fall from grace, a subsequent desperate floundering,...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/the-critical--2.html Exhaustion- June 17, 2008 Wyatt Mason disagrees with Will Blythe that the free indirect mode of narration, as illustrated in this case by James Agee's A Death in the Family, is an "exhausted trope": . . .Once one begins to issue such broad summonses,...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/wyatt-mason-dis.html The Critical Sphere- June 16, 2008 Stephen W. Beattie on the dominance of the middlebrow in current fiction: There are any number of reasons to explain the cultural dominance of conventional, middlebrow fiction in North America today. Commentators like Lee Siegel blame the confluence of technology...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/the-critical--1.html Incorporating the Old- June 12, 2008 It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that "experimental" writers (and the critics who champion them) have little regard for the kind of fiction that preceded them, that they simply deny the continued aesthetic value of what has come before. But I...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/it-is-sometimes.html Dead Systems- June 10, 2008 In his essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the novel in its "classic" phase: All the technical elements of the narrative--systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular...http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/in-his-essay-on.html |