J. R. Struthers
Auteur de How Stories Mean (Critical Directions)
Œuvres de J. R. Struthers
Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I (2020) — Directeur de publication; Contributeur — 1 exemplaire
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- Œuvres
- 4
- Membres
- 14
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Consider Ray Smith, complaining about realist stories in "Dinosaur": "it was useful thirty, forty years ago." Smith criticizes writers adhering to a convention forty years out of date, and points to some newer writers:
"Some big dogs in speculative fiction: Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov. Coming big dog: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Prominent younger dogs: Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan."
Say, who is this Pynchon guy, anyway? It's now that you check and discover that this essay dates from 1972; within a few years, Brautigan would be written off (unfairly) as an anachronism. The irony is, of course, that a reader adopting Smith's stance today, in 2009, would be adhering to a convention thirty-seven years out of date. And thirty-seven is perilously close to forty. This is a history lesson.
But there are also some real gems here. "The Same Ticking Clock" by Carol Shields lucidly addresses the ever-popular controversy of gender. "What is Style?" by Mavis Gallant gets right to the point. Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" is, of course, well known. And "Soaping a Meditative Foot," "Punctuation as Score" and "That Damn Clock Again" by John Metcalf are indispensable -- Metcalf is one of the collection's most lucid voices.… (plus d'informations)