Word: readerly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...what she always calls the liberation movement. Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty...
...Instead, there is a miasma of literary criticism and historical analysis: in both genres, Gordimer chooses summary over insight. In References: The Codes of Culturemaking fun of the title would be shooting fish in a barrel we come to the hardly surprising realization that There is no generic reader, out there; in Our Century, Gordimer is a long distance from shocking us with the information that The mushroom cloud still hangs over us, and the unbearably trite corollary question: will it be there as a bequest to the new century...
...great thing about Gordimers fiction has always been her success in stripping away the layers of pretense and denial and dishonesty that are built up around contemporary lives and societies. She shows the reader universal truths that are nonetheless elusive: her talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimers practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid through redemption...
...reader happens to have spent his or her life, as I have, writing fictional and nonfictional stories of his own, he may soon find himself mulling his deductions from Mark and the other Gospels and producing a usefully expanded narrative. It will not, of course, be a narrative for which one can begin to claim spiritual, doctrinal or historical authority, but since restrained imagination--as it thinks its way into the lives of others--remains our strongest means of human understanding and compassion, such an expansion seems an honest reaction to the Gospels' limited provisions. My attempt is always...
...going, and remember why you wanted the job in the first place." Concludes Clymer: "A son of privilege, he has always identified with the poor and the oppressed. The deaths and tragedies around him would have led others to withdraw. He never quits, but sails against the wind." The reader is left to wonder just what gives Kennedy the strength...