By Michael Stephens
Certainly one of America’s top younger writers presents a serious appreciation of voice in brief fiction, utilizing drama and poetry to border his discussion. Discussing modern voice in American fiction, Stephens says: “There is a cadence which the author steals from the particular, shaping this rhythm into the voice of fiction. whilst pressure enters into the equation of speech and voice, dramaturgical moments take place. Actors transform phrases into dwelling moments. So do writers.” Stephens attracts on global literature to demonstrate his thought of voice. He discusses early impacts similar to Beckett, Kafka, Borges, and Babel. He makes a speciality of Paul Blackburn, Joel Oppenheimer, Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, Jr., Vietnam conflict fiction writers (Larry Heinemann, Gustav Hasford, Stephen Wright, W. D. Ehrhart, Robert Auletta, between others), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Stephen Dixon, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and a bunch of others.
Read or Download The dramaturgy of style: voice in short fiction PDF
Similar criticism & theory books
Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics
Peter Szondi is commonly considered as being one of the so much unusual postwar literary critics. this primary English version of 1 of his such a lot lucid and engaging sequence of lectures, translated via Martha Woodmansee and with a foreword through Joel Weinsheimer, opens up his paintings in hermeneutics to English-speaking readers.
Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture)
This learn represents the 1st accomplished learn of Iain Sinclair's writing, overlaying his key texts from the early Nineteen Seventies as much as London Orbital. It situates Sinclair's paintings with regards to quite a number significant London writers, from Blake and Dickens via to Peter Ackroyd, and provides cutting edge readings from a cultural Marxist viewpoint.
It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006
Across the world famous as essentially the most cutting edge writers in the United States this day, Leslie Scalapino repeatedly demanding situations the bounds of many kinds during which she works—poetry, prose, performs, and extra. This striking quantity comprises paintings from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years.
What Poets Used to Know: Poetics Mythopoesis Metaphysics
From the times of the 1st shamans, via Homer, Dante, the conventional ballads, Rumi, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Lew Welch, poetry has been rooted in metaphysics. In What Poets Used to grasp, Charles Upton provides poetry either as a collection of contemplative ideas and as a key to the accrued lore hoard of the human race.
- In Search of Chaucer
- Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry, vol.9
- John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain
- The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative
Extra info for The dramaturgy of style: voice in short fiction
Example text
Page 15 Poetry is an ultimate sound, and that is why this study of short fiction is bracketed by it. The drama is partly spectacle, a visual extravaganza; it is where the greatest depth illusions occur. But fiction is utterance, too, and fictioneven when inward and stillstrives, like drama, for depth illusion. The best fiction lives within a push and pull with poetry and drama. Finally, this thing about short fiction, its voice and allI want to paraphrase from a short story by Flannery O'Connoris as obvious as a pig on the sofa.
By making fiction voice-centered, the stress goes away from representational toward the presentational. It becomes gestural, human voice-activated, and the body is the soul because what you see is what you get. The poet Louis Zukofsky wrote about a time in China when names were omitted from literature. '" I tend to agree with Faulkner that a fiction writer is a failed poet. But I also tend to think that maybe the poet is a failed dramatist. Someone ought to write a study of the public reading styles of contemporary poets and stand-up nightclub co- Page 8 medians, both of whom often share uncanny resemblances in their public uncertainties and how they use language.
But upon the publication of my novel Season at Coole I left New Haven and spent a few hermetic years in Wellfleet and Provincetown, and I did not go back to Yale until the late seventies, more at the urging of my wife, Okhee, a singer and actress. The Drama School is a professional conservatory, so that its emphasis is not merely academic excellence but instead combines academics and professionalism. Its greatest advantage for a writer is that you work with actors and directors and other theater people constantly, around the clock, for three years.