all fiction is critical fiction
Posted in Joseph Conrad, Wendy Walker, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 27th, 2011
Temporary Culture is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of MY MAN & OTHER CRITICAL FICTIONS by Wendy Walker Publication date : 25 October 2011 Original frontispiece portrait of Joseph Conrad and Wendy Walker by Joanna Ebenstein. 128 pp. Oblong 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches. Twenty numbered copies will be specially bound by hand for subscribers […]
Posted in definitions, distinctions, influence, Tom La Farge, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 20th, 2011
Tom La Farge writes: Here’s what I’d say about critical fictions: that all writers are readers, that most writers are magpies, reading for the shiny threads they snatch up and carry off to their hoards, to be used in something they write sooner or later. You can’t call this “critical” on their part, even though […]
Posted in Charles Dickens, distinctions, echoes, influence, Joseph Conrad, Tom La Farge, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 18th, 2011
To discern the influence of an earlier text is not sufficient grounds to identify a literary work as a critical fiction (except in the broadest sense of the subtitle of this project, that all fiction is critical fiction and addresses earlier texts). To discern traces of influence in a literary work is analyzing seed and […]
Posted in Anthony Powell, examples, Guy Davenport, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 16th, 2011
In the course of writing yesterday’s post on Guy Davenport I pulled an offprint from an attic shelf, and this morning, leafing through it, I find the following: “I’m reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, an hilarious and very good work. The only book I know that takes Proust’s habitual narrative […]
Posted in Collision, Guy Davenport, Technique, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 15th, 2011
“ I would go so far as to say that all modern writing is about some other text, and that this is so much the case that many writers are guardedly furtive about it, while knowing that their only hope of meaning is in our ultimately finding that other text. ” — Guy Davenport, “The Critic as […]
Posted in Allusion, Marcel Schwob, Robert W. Chambers, Technique, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 12th, 2011
‘ Is the door like the threshold ? Is the grate like the fire ? Is the mask like the face ? ’ Today, « criticalfiction.net » is pleased to publish an original work of critical fiction : — — — Follow the link to read the story, The Man in the Yellow Mask by Lucien Verval (pdf with illustrations : 1.7 Mb) ; « criticalfiction.net » […]
Posted in Allusion, Precursors, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 10th, 2011
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Thomas Dilworth, writing in the TLS for 22 April 2011, discusses Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, written in May 1819 (and shown above in the first edition of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. […]
Posted in Jean Rhys, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 8th, 2011
— Jean Rhys [pseudonym of Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, 1890-1979]. Wide Sargasso Sea. Introduction by Francis Wyndham. André Deutsch, 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, Creole heiress to lands in Jamaica and Dominica, who grows up almost a feral child on the ruined estate of Coulibri in Jamaica. It is a […]
Posted in definitions, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 7th, 2011
A critical fiction is a piece of fiction* where form (story) and critical content are inseparable (and which explicitly addresses itself as a critique of another work of literature) * or poetry A reader asked for a definition of critical fiction in plain speech, and offered the following : — Would an even simpler definition […]
Posted in definitions, ‘I disdain “categories”’ on May 7th, 2011
Critical fiction is the literary equivalent of what happens when a visual artist creates a work in direct response or hommage to another artist’s work. One example: in 1985, when the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted a retrospective of American artist Red Grooms, his relief painting William Penn Shaking Hands with the Indians […]