Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[jochen stremmel]

If I understood the reviewer right (In his Introduction, Wood tells us
that although he admires the critics Victor Shklovsky and Roland
Barthes, among their deficiencies was their failure to write as if
they expected “to be read and comprehended by any kind of common
reader,” a mistake that Wood himself presumably will not make.
(“Mindful of the common reader,” he writes a little later, “I have
tried to reduce what Joyce calls ‘the true scholastic stink’ to
bearable levels.”) it was Wood himself who introduced the strange
creature, the common reader.

I'm happy reading Pynchon and Leonard and Hemingway and Hammett and
Faulkner and Willeford and Fitzgerald, and if I need a critic I read
Tanner. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder.

2012/10/19 alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>:
> Yup, it ain't for the common reader, whoever she or he is. But that
> argument is easy. We can argue that about any book of this kind. Like
> the books, how to read novels or literature like a professor and so
> on, this book is not for students of fiction who are learning how
> fiction works or how to read fiction; those who are better read than
> Wood will get the most out of it, and will discover its true errors,
> accept, if not agree with, its most insightful readings. His critique
> of Pynchon is fairly solid, but, of course, it is also skewed by his
> taste, his ambition, for Wood fancies himself, somehow, a Henry James
> the critic. I any event, the chapter on consciousness is great and
> probably better and easier to read than Eagleton. The development that
> Wood traces is not new, but it provides a very good foundation for his
> examination of characters and how they work. It also supports his
> critique of author's like P and how they use and make characters. I
> don't agree that P is a child of Fielding. On this, Wood is simpley
> misreading the American Tradition that P sprung from and continues to
> advance. Tanner, as stated several times here, is an excellent
> dialectic to Wood on the American Tradition. Because so many,
> including Wood, conflate James and Conrad, then link him with
> Fitzgeral and Hemingway and all the flotsam that has been shored
> against the ruins of Eliot and James, they misread American
> Literature, ignoring its so-called renaissance period as an attempt to
> write romance in the European style (Melville & Co.).
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 5:40 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Found that http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/august08-how-fiction-works/
>> in the Web, and found it utterly convincing.
>>
>> Perhaps there's more to find in the book - I doubt it.
>>
>> 2012/10/19 alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>:
>>> In _How Fiction Works_ , in the chapter, "A Brief History of
>>> Consciosness", Wood examines, first, the OT Story of David, then
>>> Macbeth, and then Raskalnikov. It is worth reading. It is worth
>>> reading.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> The Eagleton book is The Event of Literature.  The chapter I was discussing
>>>> is entitled Stategy, which according to Eagleton comes from Burke, who saw
>>>> human communication as a form of action.  Dramatism.
>>>>
>>>> On Mark's comments, for me the sure sign of real literature is originality.
>>>> The presentation of non conventional values is ipso facto originality.
>>>> Values can be expressed in a million ways.  Where does this expression come
>>>> from--from the writer's unconscious.  More generally from all that is hidden
>>>> from normal view. Nothing is new under the sun.  But much is hidden.
>>>>