Take his reading of the phrase “leggy thing,” which occurs in Nabokov’s novel Pnin. Wood fishes for these rhetorical devices in the choppy waters of actual novels, often emerging with several at once. Under the guise of a reader’s handbook, an introduction to the primary elements of fictional narrative (voice, detail, character, dialogue), Wood has written a manifesto-one with the singular feel of an etiquette manual, though none of its fussiness. He believes that there is a right way and a wrong way for novelists to comport themselves. Wood, you might say, has a deep ethical commitment to literary tact. The charge is not false, exactly-Wood has written many harsh things about many contemporary novels-but in How Fiction Works he turns it upside down, revealing decorum and moral intensity to be the roots of a beautifully leafed-out aesthetic philosophy. He is an “elegant assassin,” says the Boston Globe. Wood is a “courtly eviscerator,” says n+1.
The epithet varies from venue to venue but always yokes together two presumably opposed attributes: polished manners and deadly ferocity. Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.The Englishman James Wood, recently named The New Yorker’s chief book reviewer, by now comes to us wreathed in a Homeric epithet. Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University (a part-time position) and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
0 kommentar(er)
