LET'S REVIEW: BOOK REVIEWING AS LITERARY CRITICISM
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"In my view, most of the debate about positive and negative reviews is misguided not only because it oversimplifies but because it proceeds according to mistaken assumptions about the objective of reviews, and of criticism in general. Reviews should not be written as a kindness to either readers or writers but as a contribution to the continued relevance and vitality of literature. While many reviews may be no more than a transitory register of unreflective opinion or superficial pronouncement (at times no more than perfunctory plot summary), others offer genuine insight into the immediate context and the aesthetic effect of the book under review, and the very best also help maintain the continuity of literature by declining to write about a new book as if it has arrived shorn of all connection to the writer's other work and to important literary history." --From "Going Negative"
AMERICAN POSTMODERN FCTION
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From the Introduction:
Although these are essays that have appeared variously over the past decade or so, usually on the publication of a new work by the writer at hand. . .they were almost all written as part of an effort on my part to “cover” as many classic postmodern writers as I could while also in individual reviews and essays examining the formal features and stylistic tendencies, as well as discernible commonalities of insight and perspective, associated with American postmodern fiction in general. Ideally, then the reader would find in the following selections both close readings of an individual author’s work and accumulating commentary on the nature, assumptions, and identifiable practices of postmodern fiction.
INNOVATIVE WOMEN WRITERS
From the Introduction:
I have no overarching theory about the nature or direction of innovative writing by women writers, although as I do note in several of the essays in the first section, there is a recognizable affinity among numerous current writers for what I am here calling "fabulation." Otherwise it seems to me that a representative sampling of writing by women today decidedly exhibits much variety in its outlook and eclecticism in its method. (Although this is not to say that in the essays that follow I always find the writer has successfully expressed that outlook or feel the writer's method is always sound.)
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Also:
Experimental Fiction Now
Between Silliness and Satire: On Black Humor Fiction
The Art of Disturbance: On the Novels of James Purdy
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