
- 337 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick
Following the collection
The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--
The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.
In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.
This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of
White Teeth and
Brick Lane.
The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.
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Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: Comedy and the Irresponsible Self
- Don Quixote’s Old and New Testaments
- Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling
- How Shakespeare’s “Irresponsibility” - Saved Coleridge
- Dostoevsky’s God
- Isaac Babel and the Dangers of Exaggeration
- Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Subversion of Hypocrisy
- Anna Karenina and Characterization
- Italo Svevo’s Unreliable Comedy
- Giovanni Verga’s Comic Sympathy
- Joseph Roth’s Empire of Signs
- Bohumil Hrabal’s Comic World
- J. F. Powers and the Priests
- Hysterical Realism
- Jonathan Franzen and the “Social Novel”
- Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information
- Salman Rushdie’s Nobu Novel
- Monica Ali’s Novelties
- Coetzee’s Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts
- Saul Bellow’s Comic Style
- The Real Mr. Biswas
- V. S. Pritchett and English Comedy
- Henry Green’s England
- A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory: David Bezmozgis’s Compassionate Irony
- ALSO BY JAMES WOOD
- Acclaim for James Wood
- Copyright Page