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Chargement... Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (édition 1988)par Willa Cather (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreWilla Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing As an Art par Willa Cather
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Fiction.
Literary Anthologies.
HTML:"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named thereâ??that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears inWilla Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after allâ??no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itselfâ??a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Perhaps the easiest summary here of that difference is in the Foreword by one Stephen Tennant (itself dating to 1949): "A great writer should always have an anonymous quality, something remote like a pregnant silence—which is silent, and yet contains all sound, all time, all things." Cather finds that greatness in Sarah Orne Jewett, Katherine Mansfield, and Stephen Crane, and emphatically not in Defoe's Roxana. She seems to have gotten the memo about the worth of negative reviews.
The Roxana essay (written as an introduction to a Knopf reissue!) damns the book as petty, mercantile, and heartless, making no allowance for that being Defoe's intent. In that essay and in "The Novel Démeublé" (it's another sign of this book's antiquity that French words and passages are not translated for the reader), Cather spares nothing in condemning the then-hot (she wrote most of these pieces in the '20s) novel of bottomless description and endless domestic detail. I wonder how Franzen might respond to her points; but I also wonder where Perec's Les Choses fits into her scheme. That novel's insistent foregrounding of material items and commercial transactions seems, thanks to Cather, to have been anticipated by Defoe's novel, and while neither one would hold any position on her axis of literary value, I can now see a possible progression of experiments in coopting non-literary language for literary purposes.
There's not much here that will directly help the writer with his or her own projects, but it's a quick and refreshing reminder that the way we read and write doesn't have to have changed with times and technology. Some classics are classics for good reason. ( )