Word: first-person
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Ever since Americans first began visiting the People's Republic of China, the American public has been besieged by first-person accounts of their trips. There is, of course, a long history of such travelers' tales about China, starting with Marco Polo; the West doesn't seem to get tired of the genre, as if it were unable to comprehend the nature of Chinese society except from a personal viewpoint...
...props of the drama in their pictures do not represent the most significant aspects of their artistic progress. Many of the themes and subjects they used were Romantic holdovers. Their achievement was rather that they changed the dramatic narrative of art from a third-person to a first-person account; that they made the plastic means convey not only the emotions of the characters within the picture, but the emotions of the artist...
...this exposition constitutes one of the novel's main failings. Dialogue and action often take a back seat to first-person narration in contemporary fiction; still, when the narrator's chief preoccupation is his own lack of selfhood, the novelist faces an imposing task. In this case, he succeeds only in order to fail. Evoking Jed's self-confessed insubstantiality by equipping him with poetic phrases and intellectual rationalizations in place of emotions, Warren purposely forfeits the possibility of making his protagonist a fully rounded, artistically engaging human being. Jed is a small triumph of characterization, but a pyrrhic...
...Prescott Chromicles purports to be a collection of first-person source material--journals, letters, literary sketches, etc.--culled from the archives of one very prominent American family. According to Fried, the Prescotts go way back--all the way to pious Samuel Prescott, who penned a Book of Confessions startlingly similar to John Winthrop's famous Journal. Samuel's descendants apparently managed to maintain a unique historical proximity to many of the most prominent figures in American politicla history, from William Penn to FDR. Even more surprisingly, they left behind an invaluable set of documents to tell the tale...
RENATA ADLER'S SPEEDBOAT is less a novel in the conventional sense than a series of journalistic sketches of contemporary life. The anecdotes and scraps of dialogue that make up the book are loosely linked by the device of a first-person narrator, but the storyteller offers so little commentary on her material that we develop only a vague awareness of her personality. The narrator's carefully maintained neutrality works largely to good effect in Speedboat. It saves the book from let-me-tell-you-what-it's-all-about pretentiousness. Adler presents a catalogue of images and events...