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Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, And Other Literary Essays
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About this ebook
In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture.
If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared — if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity — could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.
If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared — if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity — could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.
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Author
Cynthia Ozick
Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Harper's, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.
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Reviews for Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, And Other Literary Essays
Rating: 3.5384615 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
13 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This woman knows how to write about literature. Her piece on Kafka is brilliant as are the many other smaller gems sprinkled throughout the book. She inspires the reader to seek out new authors as I did reading through Edmund Wilson's The Dead Sea Scrolls piece. Her fiction is as good as her critical writing. I recommend The Messiah of Stockholm.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I had a mixed response to Cynthia Ozick's latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. One of the things I like best about Ozick as a critic is that she pulls no punches; as she says in "The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin," "[a] critic is, at bottom, a judge, and judgment ought not to be tentative[.]" Yet it is this selfsame certainty which I found irritating in "The Boys in the Alley," perhaps because her judgment here is directed at me, the reader, as much as (if not more than) the literary critics who are her putative subject; that this essay is both the longest and one of the first in the book colored my perception of the book as a whole and diminished, to some extent, my enjoyment of the more traditional literary criticism found in the sections on "Fanatics" and "Monsters."What bothered me so much about "The Boys in the Alley" (who, by the way, are Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus) was Ozick's condescension toward the typical Goodreads reader, whose reviews she describes as contributing merely to "the skin of a genuine literary culture." She goes on in this vein:"Most customer reviewers, though clearly tough customers when it comes to awarding stars, are not tough enough - or well-read enough - for tragic realism or psychological complexity."Ouch. To the extent Ozick and her publisher intend for her book to sell to the non-literati, they exhibit an amazing amount of chutzpah in denigrating the very people who are most likely to buy it.Ozick is far from the first (or last, for that matter) person to raise this question: How knowledgeable and well-read must I be for my opinion of a particular work or author to "count," to be worthy of both public expression and public consideration? Ozick surely realizes that we are not all so fortunate as to be full-time readers; most of us are lucky to fit a couple of hours of reading around work and family responsibilities. She also acknowledges that "[t]he literary judgments even of novelists of consequence can be capricious," citing Virginia Woolf's dismissal of James Joyce and V.S. Naipaul's disdain for Henry James. If even such literary heavyweights as these can "get it wrong," why should Ozick so vociferously denounce most of us as "naive and unqualified [not to mention "insipid"] readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings"? Don't get me wrong; I am no literary relativist. I agree with Ozick that "a critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard." I believe that not all books are created equal; that we can, and should, recognize some books (the few) as "better than" others (the many); and that we need those, like Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Michael Dirda, and Ozick herself, who can offer what most of us cannot: "horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions." What I do suggest, however, is that readers are inherently suspicious of critics perceived to be elitist and that Ozick should remember that just because the current "climate of opinion" doesn't look like Trilling's doesn't necessarily mean that we have no "living literary consciousness" at all.Getting off my soapbox now, the more conventional critical essays comprising the remainder of the book are well worth reading, with Ozick providing some astute aphorisms, including my personal favorite:"Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings."I suggest that readers may appreciate this collection more if they save "The Boys in the Alley" for last.I received a free copy of Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.