Doris Lessing

[Glenn Scheper]

You who read probably already know all this, but
the Elfriede Jelinek links led me to this author
resonant with me, and it seems, Pynchon themes.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dlessing.htm
Doris Lessing

 THE GOOD TERRORIST (1985) examined with irony a militant
 left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism
 and terrorism. "Kindly, skilled people watched, and waited,
 judging when people (like herself, like Pat) were ripe,
 could be really useful. Unsuspected by the petit bourgeois
 who were in the thrall of the mental superstructure of
 fascist-imperialistic Britain, the poor slaves of
 propaganda, were these watchers, the observers, the poor
 people who held all the strings in their hands. In
 factories, in big industries - where Comrade Andrew wanted
 her, Alica, to work; in the civil service (that was just the
 place for Comrade Muriel!); in the B.B.C., in the big
 newspapers - everywhere in fact was this network, and even
 in little unimportant places like these two houses, Nos 43
 and 45, just ordinary squats and communes. Nothing was too
 small to be overlooked, everyone with any sort of potential
 was noticed, observed, treasured... It gave her a safe,
 comfortable feeling."

http://www.busstop.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/lessing.html
JOYCE CAROL OATES : ON DORIS LESSING

 Briefing for a Descent into Hell is "inner space fiction"
 (Mrs. Lessing's category), and shows a remarkable sympathy
 with the "broken-down" psyche. It is the record of the
 breakdown of a professor of classics, his experience of a
 visionary, archetypal world of myth and drama, his treatment
 at the hands of conventional psychiatrists, and his
 subsequent|and ironic|recovery into the mean, narrow,
 self-denying world of the "sane."

http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no2/lessing.html
 Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing

 I examine Lessing's notion of "selfhood" through these
 novels and alongside her autobiography proper because Under
 My Skin is, I believe, an example of what postmodernist
 theorist Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic
 metafiction.(1) If indeed any autobiographical enterprise
 involves the self-conscious and deliberate textualisation of
 oneself and the creation of a "fictive" construct, Lessing
 deliberately posits fiction and truth as two sides of the
 same coin. Linda Hutcheon defines historiographic
 metafiction as "offered as another of the discourses by
 which we construct our versions of reality", arguing that
 "both the construction and the need for it are what are
 foregrounded in the postmodern novel".

http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol3no2/scott.html
 Similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. by Lynda Scott.

 [4] In the light of her definitions, Under My Skin looks
 very much like a post-modern text and an example of
 historiographic metafiction, since it '[c]asts doubt on the
 very possibility of any guaranteed meaning, however studied
 in discourse' as Hutcheon says (56).

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.