The Novel in the Balance investigates the issue of "balance" as a thematic and stylistic feature of contemporary American fiction. In his refreshingly jargon-free examination of modern and postmodern writings, Arthur Saltzman cites the hovering, poised, provisional quality of contemporary fiction as the impetus for his study, and he distinguishes paradox as the common philosophical premise and formal principle uniting the works he considers here. Through a comparative analysis of numerous exemplary modern and postmodern novels, Saltzman identifies the strategies employed to produce a state of...
The Novel in the Balance investigates the issue of "balance" as a thematic and stylistic feature of contemporary American fiction. In his refreshingly...
In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Nicholson Baker is widely viewed as a best-selling highbrow eroticist for Vox and The Fermata. In Understanding Nicholson Baker, Arthur Saltzman engages these provocative fictions as well as Baker's renowned nonfiction to show how his seemingly disparate works derive from and demonstrate an unremitting zeal for explicit detail, along with descriptive obsessiveness and linguistic virtuosity.
Through close readings of Baker's work -- including his 1998 novel, The Everlasting Story of...
In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Nicholson Baker is widely viewed as a bes...
Saltzman (English, Missouri Southern State College) explores the use of metaphor in representative novels by writers such as Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo, William Gass, John Updike, and Paul West. He argues that even as these authors reveal metaphor as unreliable, they use it to structure modes of moral inquiry. The resolution of moral and aesthetic gratification, he argues, is one of the major purposes of metaphor in contemporary American fiction.
Saltzman (English, Missouri Southern State College) explores the use of metaphor in representative novels by writers such as Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo,...
There is never a dull phrase in Arthur Saltzman's OBLIGATIONS OF THE HARP, his fourth book of essays. The writing in these twenty-five pieces is by turns wry and satirical, sensually descriptive, playfully punning-but always nuanced and illuminating. Reference points range from Kobe Bryant to John Updike, from geology to Jewish ritual. One essay is a fanciful treatment of the history of the human cannonball; another provides a deeply humane and humorous account of preparing middle-schoolers for History Day. Varied in topic and tone, Saltzman consistently revels in and re-imagines the...
There is never a dull phrase in Arthur Saltzman's OBLIGATIONS OF THE HARP, his fourth book of essays. The writing in these twenty-five pieces is by tu...
