Wood's "common reader"

[Markekohut]

I still have a sixties paperback called The Uncommon Reader full of the kinds of writers of the time Wood seems not to like...black humor, loose (or tight) allegories, not typical endings, etc.....
Seem to be against his later day.

I also checked out " common reader" and the great Johnson used it w faith in the eager burgeoning new literate readers but in his famous line about same allows the Good to rise over time...(phrase might also have anti-royalty resonances in England not present in these United States.

Nother thought: Wood rejects the critical ethos of the time before his time in a kind of critical anxiety of influence. 

And/or in a touching faith in the reading citizens of his time despite pop culture. 

But he may just mean he reviews as "neither critic nor scholar" as Woolf wrote of Common Readerliness....(see Woolf lambasting the growth of reviewers of her time) 

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 21, 2012, at 10:00 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh14content/Walser.pdf
> "I take McElroy’s greatness as a given. And yet—to be honest—he does not make survival easy on himself.Yes, he displays in all of his
> work a command of the “highly specialized discourses” (Siemion 134) that make up the unprecedentedly powerful system of contemporary science. Many of his contemporaries, by comparison, are dealing only in simplified sketches and textbook condensations. But this command is not necessarily an advantageous trait, when it comes to literary selection. For most readers, the problem is not mastery, but how in the absence
> of that mastery to make enough sense of the world—and McElroy may simply be too brilliant and conscientious to construct a model of the whole that is encompassable by minds less formidable than his own. "
> 
> "Common Reader" is the enemy of literature.  Seriously, is GR written for the common reader?
> 
> On Sunday, October 21, 2012, David Morris wrote:
>>>  How does Woods feel about Joeseph McElroy.  Years ago I read his "An Actress in the Houe" and thought it a rare and accomplished modernist work: almost stream of consciousness first person observations. Very rare for a book written in 2004. 
>> 
>> Any thoughts about McElroy's earlier works?
>> 
>> David Morris 
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