Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Fri Oct 19 20:20:04 CDT 2012


Chip, agenda, dogma, or manifesto;  Tin soldiers waiting to fall.

David Morris

On Friday, October 19, 2012, jochen stremmel 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 <javascript:;>>:
> > 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<javascript:;>>
> 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 <javascript:;>>:
> >>> 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.
> >>>>
>
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