Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[Markekohut]

Maybe that touches bottom re Wood. After so many "critics" in his--our--world, I think of the Leavis's and many others---went after the deficiency of our culture's "mass" tastes, Wood wants to reestablished a--the--common reader. Plot, old-fashioned characterization just like the 19th Century novel as if everything gone could be new again. 





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On Oct 19, 2012, at 12:40 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>>>>