Title: James Wood's Case Against 'Hysterical Realism' and Thomas Pynchon
Abstract: The undeniable force and sometimes contrarian originality of his judgments, together with a punchy, aphoristic prose that never settles into predictability, have in little over a decade made the Englishman James Wood one of our leading critics, a status ratified by his recent appointments to the staff of The New Yorker and the English Depart ment at Harvard. This combination suggests the dual appeal of his writings, which achieve an elusive blending of commanding insight and lively readability, laying claim to the attention of the academic scholar and the common reader alike. Starting out as the literary editor at The Guardian in England, Wood came to the United States in 1995 to become the book editor at The New Republic, where his challenges to the approbation enjoyed by some of our most prominent novel ists soon earned him a reputation for fierceness and independence. Although a flexible surveyor of the literary field, one attached to no one brand of fiction, in his essays and reviews he has been unfolding an ongoing argument for the primacy of realism in fiction, and the au thors he has chided either fail to achieve a convincing realism or, what in his eyes is more damning, deliberately depart from it. It might seem that realism needs no such advocacy, but since the sixties at least, particularly in America, the most advanced fiction has shown an impatience with realism and the subtle psychological explo
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 57
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