#oneohfive

Admit it. This day is not yours, Marieee. Have a good night werld. #oneohfive #ItsThursdayAfterAll #ItsWorkDay4Period

Admit it. This day is not yours, Marieee. Sad. Have a good night werld. #oneohfive #ItsThursdayAfterAll

This was my last read of 2016 and it was a perfect way to conclude a year of so many books. Cynthia Ozick is very serious abt lit criticism and she opens her essay collection arguing that the dearth of real critics (and not just reviewers) today is threatening to kill the modern novel. She extends the assumption that art and criticism have a necessary relationship to purport that w/o criticism, there is no art. She then takes a subsection of the Western canon and classifies the authors as monsters, fanatics, icons, and souls to suggest how that classification informs and problematizes their influence and reach. For example, Ozick writes that Orwellian and Kafkaesque have become meaningless descriptors in that the mythos of the authors they reference supersedes their actual work; people use the terms to connote a general feeling or mood in a piece and not an allusion to specific texts. To the extent that we only understand literature through precision of language and we can only get at that precision through criticism, we do ourselves a disservice (if not real harm) in not demanding that criticism continue. If all that sounds too theoretical for real world consumption, Ozick invokes Auschwitz in two essays toward the end of the book to explore how crisis in language (and the death of metaphor) has very real consequences. Given our current crisis in language and instability of meaning ("take him seriously not literally"), the stakes are then considerably raised from the death of the novel to the death of life as we know it. A note: this was the only library book I borrowed this year of which I then bought my own copy to have as a reference. #bookworm #nonfiction #litcrit #december2016reads #playingcatchup #lastoneoftheyear #oneohfive #andscene