Word: manifestoes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long, sharp-witted article subtitled "A literary manifesto for the new social novel," Wolfe lambastes the current crop of U.S. novelists, as well as academic critics, for leading American fiction since about 1960 further and further from traditional realism. Young writers, he complains, are being cajoled into an avant-garde wilderness populated by exponents of bizarre genres: absurdists, magical realists, even K mart realists. They have been persuaded by the likes of Philip Roth that American life has become too absurd to write about in a realistic...
Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature...
...there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing ((Wolfe)) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast...
...dolorous men, o dolors of omens--and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day." This phrase could be the bad opening of a bad novel, the unwieldy preface to an overbearing descriptive work, the sort of thing the Surrealists objected to in their first manifesto. Except, in this case it is intentional...
...Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic offers of support. When the broadcast ended at midnight, excited participants remained in the Tallinn studio to draft a manifesto...