James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University (a part-time position) and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism.
Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives, and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works – among others, Chekhov’s story ‘The Kiss’, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.
Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to Life is not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic – it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to re-consider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.
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在讀The Blue Flower時,正好第一章提到,好興奮。雖然抓不著這些講稿的重點,但是聽他聊聊各種小說也是愜意的事。
评分Wood真是細膩的學院派文學評論傢,沒有一直談過於艱深的理論,而是不斷迴歸文本本身,對於所提小說的細節分析得很妙,隻可惜裏麵有些作傢的書我沒有讀過,領會不到。最後一章講“secular homelessness”,我覺得對於普通移民來說,這是culture shock造成的;對於異常敏感敏銳的小說傢,無論身在何地,總會有種不閤時宜、無所適從感吧。
评分在讀The Blue Flower時,正好第一章提到,好興奮。雖然抓不著這些講稿的重點,但是聽他聊聊各種小說也是愜意的事。
评分太閤口味yum yum
评分Wood重視文學作品中的細節在本質上就是一種輕逸的痛苦,這種痛苦相悖於生活中沉痛的打擊,而是在轉瞬即逝的小事中瞥到無法逃避的宿命感。如同納博科夫將紙巾落下賦予“infinite listlessness",作傢的職責就像他所說的那樣,是rescue the life of things for their death. 同時,Metaphor的實質是identification,世界主義和後殖民主義的浪潮將我們所有人都置身於他所描述的transcendental homelessness,這一切苦澀融入我們的血液後再次變成我們的文字,也同時變成我們的生命。
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