Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...motto "the personal is political" in a new light. Atwood once described herself in an interview as a "de facto feminist," taking the position that every intelligent woman is a feminist--but she can also argue from the standpoint of a crusader for women's rights, a poet, a novelist, a pioneering critic of Canadian literature, a Canadian nationalist, and an Amnesty International activist. The essays in Second Words emanate from all these Atwoods. But the tone and approach of each essay strikes one note over and over again--the personal. She remains determinedly anecdotal, specific, and sardonic throughout...
...just a woman in funny clothes and a jock strap. They don't think the same, except about things like higher math. But neither are they an alien or inferior form of life. From the point of view of the novelist, this discovery has wide-ranging implications....But first, a small digression, partly to demonstrate that when people ask you whether you hate men, the proper reply is "Which ones?"--because, of course, the other big revelation of the evening is that not all men are the same. Some of them have beards. Apart from that, I have never been...
...German Democratic Republic, a nation as distinct from West Germany as are two other German-speaking nations, Austria and Switzerland. But after 40 years of division the yearning to transcend the ideological boundaries that divide East and West Germany is still strong. Ulrich Plenzdorf, an East German novelist and playwright whose works sell on both sides of the Wall, argues that "no matter how many adjectives the system may use to describe itself, the 'German' remains." When a West German border guard once asked Leipzig Painter Bernhard Heisig how long he intended to stay in "Germany," Heisig promptly...
KUNDERA IS A CAPABLE narrator but a puzzling novelist; it seems his sensibility is more mature than his technique. For a novel which takes as its theme vicissitude and secular vanity. Kundera uses surprisingly little imagery of change, transformation, and decay. The narrator is highly intelligent; but his intelligence is not fully lent to any of the characters. Their dialogue is not as witty or engaging as the narrator's, we are never told how everyone in the novel became conscious of lightness. Unreasonably, no one who makes religious or metaphysical assumptions is allowed on stage; one gets the feeling...
...Press next month. Faulkner's opinion of himself as "a failed poet" is unlikely to be challenged by the volume's 14 linked poems (sample: "The wind grows louder about me, shrill with pain,/ And blows the petalled faces from my heart"). But scholarly assessments of the novelist are already being revised to include a deepened appreciation of the poetic influences on his prose style...