Two gems:
The term to best
describe current American literature – high cultural pluralism. (To which I
would add, when it comes to high cultural pluralism as it relates to “literature,”
the liberal mainstream celebrates the nihilistic hipster and the Upper West
nostalgist to the exclusive of just about every else.)
And this, “There
is a genuine problem when young people are taught to believe that they can be
writers only in the presence of real or invented socio-political grievances.”
An essay that
precipitated many letters, including this stirring one:
“[Donald Barthelme’s]
fiction, with its multiple references and allusions to the histories of
literature, art, philosophy, architecture and politics, certainly bears the
traces of his own study of the history of everything, as a ‘melancholy
recognition’ [my quotation marks] of how useful the study might ultimately
prove to be; asked why he wrote the way he did, he liked to reply: “Because
Samuel Beckett always writes the way he does.”
Alex Johnston,
Nov. 4, 2010
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