Re: "To Celebrate the Best Parts of His Nature:" Fiction and the Discourse of Man – By Nick Ripatrazone - The Marginalia Review of Books

[Monte Davis]

“One of the striking features of the discourse of man to modern eyes, in a
sense the most striking, is how unreadable it is, how tedious, how
unhelpful. The puzzle is why it is unreadable.” Thus, Mark Greif in his
exhilarating study *The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in
America 1933–1973 <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10326.html>*. By “the
discourse of man” Greif means the vast midcentury literature on human
dignity, from *Being and Nothingness*, to the “Family of Man” photo
exhibition, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a discourse that
Greif interrogates with verve, erudition, sympathy, and suspicion, and that
he follows into the fiction of our time. I’ve been toting* The Age of the
Crisis of Man* around for the last month, using a pencil for a bookmark,
because there’s something to underline on every page—and I haven’t even got
to the chapters on O’Connor and Pynchon. —*Lorin Stein,*


*http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/11/07/staff-picks-tom-magliozzi-and-dr-t/
<http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/11/07/staff-picks-tom-magliozzi-and-dr-t/>*


Also...
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/188120/mark-greif-adam-kirsch

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-age-of-the-crisis-of-man/

http://flavorwire.com/498149/10-must-read-academic-books-for-2015/  [#3]



On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 6:15 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Catholic Pynchon. ( which we have discussed here). best novelist of his
> time, he sez.
>
> http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/fiction-and-the-discourse-of-man/
>
>
> Sent from my iPad-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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