This week, my number one link will come--in a gesture completely lacking in any humility whatsoever--from me. Recently I published an essay on Creative Writing programs and 'political' fiction entitled 'Engaging Fiction: Literature, Life and How Creative Writing Programs are Ruining Everything, Apparently', which is in the most recent issue of Kill Your Darlings. Although I wrote it back in August, it's part of an ongoing discussion with the good folks at Overland about the role of fiction in relation to the social (or, more specifically, if literature should have any such role at all). OK, enough about me; here are this week's other links:
- This next link again comes from Overland, where Ben Eltham's modest proposal to dismantle the Australia Council has generated quite a bit of discussion. Initially, Christopher Madden responded with a critique, which Eltham then rebutted on his blog. Then, OzCo CEO, Kathy Keele, wrote a response highlighting some errors in Eltham's essay. I'll be honest: there's something about Eltham's proposal that really creeps me out. I don't know enough about the specific policy issues to say whether his facts are right or not, but my concerns lie at the level of ideology; particularly, I think his idea (as I noted in the comments section of his blog, albeit not very articulately), broadly speaking, reflects the logic of neo-liberalism in a pretty terrifying way. I need to think about this a bit more, but expect a post on it soon...
- Daniel Wood reviews Tom McCarthy's C for Kill Your Darlings. He ended up liking the book much more than I did, but it's a thoughtful and interesting review, and comes from a position I'm very sympathetic to: 'Maybe it’s true that fiction is now on death’s door. If there’s life left in it yet, however, it lies in fiction that upsets popular notions of what fiction should be and instead illustrates what else it is capable of...'
- Yet another negative review of Franzen's Freedom has appeared. It's interesting that the reviews seem to run so hot and cold on this book (probably due to the fact that Franzen is such a jackass. . . er . . . a divisive figure). My ultimate suspicion is that, with the passage of time and the waning of his particular celebrity, Franzen will be remembered as he should be: a very good--but not great--novelist (see also Norman Mailer and John Updike).
- The Guardian has run an article pointing out that characters in novels don't have to be nice to be interesting. That this is newsworthy in and of itself says something very sad about the contemporary novel. In particular, I liked this line: ' Literature, after all, is not some cosy textual coffee morning populated solely with friends we haven't met yet.' But despite a few good one-liners and a solid basic point, this article predictably ends with the banal: 'Great art is challenging and sometimes uncomfortable: we might not like Patty in Franzen's Freedom or Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady and we certainly don't like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, despite his seductive, "fancy prose style", but these are characters through whom we may learn something of the human soul.' Oh, God. Do people still really believe that literature works like this? Apparently so...
No comments:
Post a Comment