Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage

ISBN-13: 9781501307171 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 248 str.

Philip Weinstein

Opis

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.

Recenzje

...synthesizes from Franzen's conversations and correspondence with Weinstein, extant interviews, and Franzen's own writings a convincing psychological portrait of an author who recovered from depressive years of being angry with himself by projecting that anger and rage outward and then finding love of himself and others. Tom LeClair The Daily Beast

Spis treści

AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsPrefaceIntroductoryChapter One - Becoming Jonathan FranzenChapter Two - A Bugged World: The Twenty-Seventh City Chapter Three - Something Wrong in the Underbrush: Strong MotionChapter Four - Status and Contract, Collapse and ArrivalChapter Five - All in the Family: The CorrectionsChapter Six - Taking and Mistaking: FreedomChapter Seven - The New YorkerAfterword - Hungering for Clean: PurityIndex

O autorze

Philip Weinstein is the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, USA. The recipient of several NEH Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship, and past President of the Faulkner Society, Weinstein has written books that range from James to Faulkner and Morrison (in American literature), and from Dickens through Joyce (in British literature). These include Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (2005). Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner (2010) was the recipient of the Hugh Holman Award for the best book written on Southern Literature. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995).