This is not a recording: Faux-Dickensian (or James Wood's Hysterical Realism Again)

[Mark Kohut]

Philip Roth, in one of his most famous essays---from the sixties, I
think (It is in Reading Myself and Others)---asked how satire in
the US is even possible for writers since the lived reality was
so.......crazy. As his easiest example, he wrote of how a TV show
purporting
to give us real people with real insight might have a Nobel winner, an
actress promoting her new movie, an heroic American who saved
someone's life, etc all on one after another wrapped around by a
comedic host.........

It is real hard to out satirize shuck a self-parody of Life in the
US....he argues and such an insight as a necessary condition for a
writer to
be deeper than has stayed in my head as a judgment re Pynchon's
greatness, Roth's Best and a few others.....to me that Hysterical
Realism
is a positive notion.....Magical Realism is for writers from other
countries mostly. It seems. And IT has exhausted its originality---a
key component, yes?---

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 6:01 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes....I'm on board. Thanks.
>
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>> The novelist Jan Brandt ("Gegen die Welt") claims to write MANIC REALISM, a
>> label which is, according to Brandt, the most adequate to grasp the totality
>> of description. He differentiates it from 'magic realism' by "extraordinary
>> violence" and "unexplainable brutality" that can hit the world any time and
>> thus are mixed into reality and fantasy from the very start. The examples he
>> gives in addition to his own big novel are "2666" by Bolano and "House of
>> Leaves" by Danielewski. Of course, MANIC REALISM sounds - not only, or in
>> the first place, because of its resonance with 'magic realism' - much better
>> than 'hysterical realism', a label Wood created with pejorative intentions.
>> So perhaps MANIC REALISM could indeed be working as a "great phrase" for a
>> "new branch of surrealism". Vonnegut, Pynchon ...
>>
>>> Der Manische Realismus ist ein Begriff, der meines Erachtens am ehesten
>>> die Totalität der Darstellung erfasst. Er grenzt sich vom Magischen
>>> Realismus, wie man ihn von Gabriel García Márquez kennt, dadurch ab, dass
>>> sich im Manischen Realismus Realität und Fantasie mit einer
>>> außerordentlichen Gewalt vermischen, mit der unerklärlichen Brutalität, die
>>> jederzeit über die Welt hereinbrechen kann.<
>>
>> http://culturmag.de/litmag/jan-brandt-gegen-die-welt-im-interview/35338
>>
>>
>> On 16.08.2014 19:14, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>
>>> You know what I have come to think about this famous Wood labeling?
>>> He created a great phrase
>>> for some of our current best writers which, with just a little
>>> flicking perspectival change, have created
>>> a new branch of surrealism. They are better than he says.
>>>
>>> On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 3:29 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l