Word: fiction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FICTION...
...French truth seekers known as New Novelists, the trouble with traditional hesaid, she-said fiction is that it creates only the cozy illusion of life, not the awesome awareness of it. True awareness, they say, lies in the endless inner space of consciousness, and that can only be approximated in literature, just as iron filings can indicate but never duplicate a magnetic field. New Novelists also agree that plot, characterization and psychology are outmoded: Freud is forsaken for Heidegger's phenomenology and the cold squint of the behaviorists...
...turns fragments of the imagination into poetry rather than into the monotone prose that is the mark of most New Novels. Histoire should be read as poetry, which means it should be read aloud. Speed readers, trained to sop up information and the dull acknowledgments of psychological and sociological fiction, will have to shift into low. Histoire has the dream's unquestioned authority to exist without having to justify itself in time, space or in man's rickety categories of experience...
Postwar German fiction has its mea culpa school, its black-humor crowd and its how-did-it-happen-to-us hand wringers. Heinrich Boll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine) constitutes a school of his own. His writing skills seem at first oldfashioned, but they always turn out to be just right for hitting his targets: hypocrisy, his countrymen's haste to forget the Hitlerite period, the greed of the fat-cat crowd. In this short caper, set in today's Rhineland, a German army Jeep is burned by an intelligent young soldier with the active help...
While the script's vagueness could have been eliminated, perhaps the production's lack of technical proficiency was unavoidable. A house show cannot possibly have the financial resources necessary to supply all the special effects a science-fiction entertainment requires. Rarely do we find projects such as The Invention of Morel on any stage, partly at least because the cost of doing them right is prohibitive...