num_pages: 349
description: Literature, despite bad chances, seems to be surviving the Age of McLuhan, Inc., which is surely passing. What is it that keeps some of us reading despite the collapse of practically everything about us? What is the relation between literature and history, between fictions and events? And how does "the news that stays news" become a sustaining tradition? These are some of the questions that Professor Berthoff raises and responds to in his banquet book of essays. A number of common themes and arguments give this rich volume a special character. There are two major parts to the book, and in the first the author takes up the more general phenomena of literature and its connection with reality or with the different kinds of reality. Some of the chapters here "The Study of Literature and the Recovery of the Historical," "Modern Literature and the Condition of Exile," and "The Novel in a Time of Troubles." In these Professor Berthoff develops a fascinating and important argument about literary art and the flow of events. This part ends with some incisive reflections on the fortunes of the novel as illustrated in the work of Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. The second part of the book concentrates on American Literature, "its traditions and talents." Some of the chapters here "Building The Genesis of Emerson's Nature," "Melville's Later Fiction," :Edmund Wilson and His Civil War," and "Witness and Two Contemporary Classics," an essay on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Armies of the Night. A concluding section, "American Notes," offers a gathering of brief, sharp perceptions of, among others, E.E. Cummings, Van Wyck Brooks, Henry Adams, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. Throughout this part of the book the reader is led deeply into works of imagination without having to leave the sustaining world. Literary criticism often seems to be written by people who hate books and reading. Here are essays that will be a pleasure and a benefit to people who actually love those things. Much literary criticism seems to be done out of presumption, opportunism, idleness, or an urge to punish authors and readers. Here is work that has "the substance of thought" and the civility of sympathetic discourse. Those are rare enough today.
language: English
title: Fictions and events;: Essays in criticism and literary history
titlecomplete: Fictions and events;: Essays in criticism and literary history
publisher: Dutton