MDMD(2): Deflation and Friendship flip-flop

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Monte Davis writes:
> . . . And so I plunged eagerly into many, many articles and books
> that promised to tell me more about "unreliable narrators."

> And found, all too often, second-rate philosophy instead of insight
> into the fictions, which were treated as springboards to Deep
> Thought With Its Very Own Hegelian Hermeneutic. I concluded,
> regretfully, that deconstruction had poisoned the well. (And fell
> back on Wayne Booth and Kenneth Burke, who haven't let me down yet.)

I'll second that recommendation of Wayne Booth. My first encounter was
a chance one with his essay on the role of the narrator in Tristram
Shandy*** - opened my eyes more than any other single piece of writing
on fiction and that includes my first ever lit-crit reading, Ellman's
`Ulysses on the Liffey'. His `Rhetoric of Fiction' is superb. And boy,
is that man well-read.

*** in the Casebook series on Tristram Shandy which contains several
other good essays.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.