"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.---------
Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."
Sunday, March 20, 2011
A Great Neglected 1979 Book that Every English Graduate Student Ought to Own
Chapter 13 of this book is the only treatment of the creative process that fits perfectly with what I learned from studying the way novelists compose and revise. Why has it been neglected? Because Rothenberg believes in the author as the creator of art, not the reader. Rothenberg at one or two points is too deferential to the founders of the New Criticism, his older colleagues at Yale, but Chapter 13 regards the New Criticism as wholly invalid and irrelevant and describes the arc of creativity in ways that perfectly match all the biographical information I mustered about American authors.
Chapter 13 of this book is the only treatment of the creative process that fits perfectly with what I learned from studying the way novelists compose and revise. Why has it been neglected? Because Rothenberg believes in the author as the creator of art, not the reader. Rothenberg at one or two points is too deferential to the founders of the New Criticism, his older colleagues at Yale, but Chapter 13 regards the New Criticism as wholly invalid and irrelevant and describes the arc of creativity in ways that perfectly match all the biographical information I mustered about American authors.
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