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A carregar... Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006por E. L. Doctorow
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Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Doctorow's collection of essays--mostly on authors and their works, with a couple of notable exceptions--is a fine idea, but not very compellingly executed. In any individual essay, his tone might be described as lofty, or academic. But consistent as it is throughout the collection, it takes on a rather imperious, even arrogant cast. These are a series of judgemental (rather than critical) essays, most of them composed in the thoroughly presumptuous first-person plural. Do "we" really see these things this way? Yes, we do; E.L. Doctorow said so. It's probably no coincidence, also, that Doctorow concerns himself almost exclusively with men in this collection (again, with a notable exception), and that when he does speak of women (even in the aforementioned exception) he does so dismissively. He tosses away Dickinson in half a sentence. I'm nor a particularly ardent fan of hers, but I have to admit that he never won me back over after that. I can't recommend the book, but since I keep mentioning exceptions, let me carve one out. The penultimate essay on Einstein is very good. It's insightful and illuminating, and ironically tells more about the act of writing than any of the previous essays--all of which are devoted to literature. This essay also eschews the plural form of the first person which I mentioned above, and that helps immensely. I get the feeling that Doctorow found an old box in his attic containing his notebooks from high school English class and decided to publish the contents. Apparently, that semester they were reading only American or German authors. So we learn, among other things, that Poe was a very unusual man who wrote not well but memorably, Hemingway believed that life was a test of manhood and individualism, Fitzgerald had a brilliant youth but flamed out too early, and Kafka took familiar situations and made them seem fantastic in some odd way. What did they all have in common? Well, they created things. So why not start the collection with an essay on Genesis, in which we learn that God created the world, and end with a couple of essays in which we learn that Einstein created concepts that led to the Bomb, which will in turn dis-create the world. Some of these essays read easily and some of them read in a very difficult way. It seems that critics often get into the heads of those they are critiquing and they end up writing in a similar style and use similar convolutions. The piece about Herman Melville didn't flow easily but the one about Mark Twain did. I liked the piece about Harpo Marx and the one about nuclear weaponry was thoughtful and I understood it. All-in-all I liked his other book of essays, "Reporting the Universe", better. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Distinctions
E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow's rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that "we know by what we create." Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick? And how did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as Huckleberry Finn? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar-but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It's a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight. Among the essays collected here are Doctorow's musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our "greatest bad writer"; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise. In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)808.4Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric of essaysClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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Rating: 4 stars
The title is maybe just there to get your attention. It's not a religious diatribe. However, he does open with an essay on Genesis, namely the story problem in Genesis: What story could these authors come up that would explain their world? And he closes with an essay on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust - which fits with our modern version of Judgment Day. But despite these touches of religion in the book ends, all Doctorow claims he means by "creationists" are those who create.
The book doesn't get much love and the audio version gets comments about how he can put you to sleep, since he reads himself. Knowing that may have made me more patient with it. What I got out of it was several terrific essays on mostly 19th century and early 20th century American writers. His essays on Genesis, Moby Dick, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway and John Dos Passos stood out.
2015
https://www.librarything.com/topic/191940#5254865 ( )