Word: selfhood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Later on the ex-wife publishes a book called Marriage, Divorce and Selfhood in which she unforgivingly exposes his every flaw. Appalled, he protests. But true to the spirit of her times, she regards confession not as an extension of the gossip column but as a value to be treasured more deeply than tact or taste. "Nothing I wrote was untrue," she snaps, when he accuses her of humiliating him deliberately. She closes the discussion by citing her work's endorsement by contemporary society's highest authority: "I think I'd better warn you that I've had interest...
...classes, "the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs." Perhaps readers have wearied, Vidal suggests, of novelists who insist that only the immigrant story deserves to be told or devote themselves to tedious proclamations of selfhood while ignoring the class whose legend is writ in the Social Register. Despite his considerable failings as a novelist, Auchincloss does for that class what John O'Hara did for the country-club set: observes its workings with the tireless zeal of a behavioral scientist...
...particulars of her honest, direct entries seem to elevate her to a principle. As Ruth Whitman has intended: "I thought of the journey in its literal sense as a typical American sequence, moving from innocence to disaster; and as a woman's history, moving from dependence to courageous selfhood." (quoted from Radcliffe Quarterly...
...latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives...
...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...