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Review of Contemporary Fiction
Copyright Review of Contemporary Fiction, Inc.
COPYRIGHT ProQuest. All rights reserved
from April 2004
Last Number: July 2010
ISSN 0276-0045
[Content not included in vLex Global Academic]
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The Esthetic Structure of the Sentence
For philosophers, a sentence is a form of speech that has a beginning and an end within itself, and is of a length that can be readily grasped--two conditions that resemble those required of a tragedy: beginning, middle, end, and the unities of time and place that are imposed upon the action. Moreover, philosophers can often be classified in terms of their favorite parts of speech: there are those who believe that nouns designate the only reliable aspects of being; others, of a contrary view,...
The Subtle Genius of the Novel
Literature, particularly fiction, conspires to human freedom: in this way it has a political effect. But the vision projected by literature, its implicit philosophy, sits opposite the political understanding of the world. Here, Rolin discusses the purpose of literature.
West discusses the old days on the Cornell campus, in which there thrived a literary oasis, now coarsely revamped, called the Temple of Zeus, where, amid mythic statuary and urns of parboiled coffee, litterateurs met and talked. Often there were readings, and those who read heard from the front row of listeners the click of Alison Lurie's knitting needles and the gurglings of her tummy. Moreover, there was something both pagan and holy about these Zeus readers, and a free-floating reverence f...
Scott defines writing as a conversation that is no doubt linked to early militant years, when many of people could not, would not, separate the struggle for changing the world from the struggle for finding the appropriate language to engage that world. Among other things, if a story operates some kind of conjuncture between affect and the social, then, in terms of expressing our evolving subjectivities, both the question of the shape of the sentence and the relationship between sentences are ...
Higgins opines that public readings can be tricky--there are no limits to the depths into which a bad reading can sink neither are there limits to the heights to which an outstanding reading can ascend. Among other things, Higgins presents an open letter to a certain sceptical builder who maintained that serious writing is a foolish occupation.
Continents Kept Hidden: The Music of Alban Berg
Jonke explores the works of composer Alban Berg. He opines that Berg's Piano Sonata Opus 1 and Alexander Scriabin's Piano Sonata no. 5 exhibit astounding similar features, not only of their single-movement form but also in their structural motifs, as well as in their mood or atmosphere. Among other things, Jonke views Berg's sonata as a kind of landscape picture in sound--an opera of nature that remained unwritten before he completed his Wozzeck.
Brain and body have long been perceived as opposing entities, but also as closely allied. Here, Delbanco deals with western models of achievement, western artists in old age. He also shares his memory of his old mentor Max Eastman, who had published more than twenty books--volumes of poetry, biography, and political commentary, as well as a set of translations from the Russian, the second installment of his autobiography, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch.
From Western to Novel: On the Transposition (or Encounter?) Between Genres
Montalbetti discusses the influence of film genre and aesthetic happiness in her writing. Based on this aesthetic energy, she began a conscious attempt to transpose a film genre into fiction into her novel Western. The idea of writing a Western is first of all the result of a desire to work with lighting.
Before the war, avant-garde movements in Romania were quite numerous and varied, and surrealism was also present among those movements, though the Romanian version had a greater aspect of social protest to it. Roman literature could almost have been synchronized with Western literature, given its concurrent avant-garde movements, along with certain key individuals who are now upon as precursors. Tsepeneag discusses the idea of onirism that began with surrealist paintings.
Motte comments on Jean Rolin's L'Explosion de la durite, the chronicle of a trip whose purpose is to convey an automobile from Paris, the capital of Darkest France, to Kinshana, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among other things, he finds that it is a pleasingly subtle text, a narrative as sly and canny as one is likely to find in contemporary French literature. One doesn't quite know what to call it, however, in view of how lustily it plays on the boundaries of genre.
After the Silence: The Non-Eventfulness of Bulgaria's Communism, and Its Personal Stories
Georgi draws upon two projects devoted to recounting the everyday personal stories, life, and culture of the socialist era in Bulgaria. He discloses the Bulgarian silence both before and after 1989, along with a little thesis about the non-eventfulness of socialism itself, at least in its Bulgarian manifestation.
Jameson reviews As a Friend by Forrest Gander.
Dewey reviews New Lives by Ingo Schulze.
Flores reviews Cortejo de Sombras by Julian Rios.
Ribas reviews Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine and translated by Peter Wortsman.
Feeney reviews The Young Man from Savoy by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz and translated with introduction and afterword by Blake Robinson.
Tupko reviews Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth.
Bernstein reviews Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman.
Kellman reviews The Shadow Factory by Paul West.
Waxman reviews On a Day Like This by Peter Stamm.
Crossley reviews The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa and translated by Daniel Hahn.
The Dead All Have the Same Skin
Twitchell-Waas reviews The Dead All Have the Same Skin by Boris Vian.
Of My Real Life I Know Nothing
Shapiro reviews Of My Real Life I Know Nothing by Ana Maria Moix translated by Sandra Kingery.
Garrett reviews My Amputations by Clarence Major.
New World/New Words: Recent Writing From the Americas
Ponce reviews New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas edited by Thomas Christensen and foreword by Gregory Rabassa.
The American Epic Novel in the Late Twentieth Century: The Super-Genre of the Imperial State
Clare reviews The American Epic Novel in the Late Twentieth Century: The Super-Genre of the Imperial State by W. Gilbert Adair and foreword by Joseph Tabbi.
Lain reviews Jesus Coyote by Harold Jaffe.
Book Reviews
Pinker reviews The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon.