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Chargement... Sharppar Michelle Dean
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Well-researched but she doesn’t seem to like her subjects much. I felt a critical edge throughout. ( ) This is something of a literary criticism, history and biography of 10 women writers of the 20th century who had a great deal of influence and insight into journalism, philosophy, political science and feminism. All broke barriers of one sort or other in journalism, literary criticism, political science and philosophy, broadcasting, film and theatre criticism, screen writing and fiction. Most are American but it includes German, British writers. The book starts with Dorothy Parker and ends with Janet Malcolm. Featured writers are Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Zora Neal’s Hurston, Hanna Arendt, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion! Nora Ephrom, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm Interesting to discover what they endured for their craft. Some were successful, some not so much. Success came at a price: some were very lonely, ostracized, unhappily married or self isolated. Alcohol played a large role in their lives. Interesting potted and intertwined biographies of writing women, primarily who started out in journalism, but many of whom wrote novels too. Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Janet Malcolm, Mary McCarthy and a couple of others make shorter appearances. It was interesting to read how often their lives crossed in friendships and rivalries, and although Dean while noting it, attempts to deflect from the capacity of most of them for cruelty at times, inferring that acknowledging women could be cruel in some way devalues them, it is certainly a constant. None of these women had uncomplicated lives. All of them to varying degrees were fine writers, and all of them had, at some point, had solid reputations. On collecting their stories Dean has offered up a volume of journalistic founding mothers, perhaps, though it would have been interesting maybe to have included some lesser known women writers too. Sharp brings together a dozen women authors and critics from the twentieth century—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lillian Hellman—who were, in various ways, professionally opinionated. Michelle Dean has an excellent eye for pulling quotations both from the work of these women and from the other literary figures with whom they interacted, and that was one of the principal pleasures of this book. It's a decent primer to the careers of most of the women depicted here, many of whom should be better known than they are. However, Sharp doesn't really cohere as a book. What threads bring this group of women together, what argument can be made about them, beyond the fact that they were all once described (or critiqued as being) "sharp"? This was then, and is now, just another way of saying "being a woman in public." A brief aside in the introduction also shows that Dean is aware that she's chosen to focus largely on middle-class white women, most of whose careers centered on New York. She also doesn't seem to care very much about that. After all, Zora Neale Hurston can only be called a "marginal" literary figure if you've got very determined ideas as to where the centre lies. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work. These ten women--Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm--are united by what Dean calls "sharpness," the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world. -- Provided by publisher. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)810.9Literature English (North America) American literature History and criticism of American literatureClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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