Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is John Gardner's argument in his essay On Moral Fiction. It sounds simplistic, and--of course--it is. Gardner poses as the Gabriel for a new artistic responsibility, sternly blasting forth on the trumpet, calling on the forces of "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" to regroup...
...amazing thing about On Moral Fiction is that, despite the naivete of its fundamental tenet, it is filled with acute, valuable observations on contemporary art. Gardner's ideas make a lot more sense when he applies them to contemporary culture than when he states them in the abstract...
...takes guts today to write about the old virtues; Gardner obviously knows this himself. Every time he introduces one of the hallowed concepts he cherishes, he selfconsciously mentions how embarassed he is to be talking about "love," or "morality." Yet talk about them he does, and usually without giving us concrete definitions of what he means by them...
...Gardner tries hard; he struggles every now and then to pin down exactly what he means by one of these terms--"love," for example...
Admirable, but not convincing. Here Gardner side-steps the logical problem, defining love in terms of art and then repeating the same thing backwards. More often he resorts to metaphor. His metaphors are quirky, personal, often drawn from the Northeastern countryside of his youth or the Greek and Anglo-Saxon myths of his beloved Homer and Beowulf. They're catchy, too; but usually in On Moral Fiction Gardner presents us with a serious question, flings a captivating metaphor at us, and hurries away to some other problem before we have time to ask for answers...