In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (A Chicago Classic) - Hardcover

Sukenick, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809311909 ISBN 13: 9780809311903

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985

Synopsis

Sukenick, Ronald. In Form, Digressions on the Act of Fiction. Carbondale / Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. 22.5cm x 13.8cm. xxii, 247 pages. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket. Very good condition with only minor signs of wear. Includes for Example: Form, a dynamic force that must never be taken for granted, but must be created as the work itself is shaped/ The writer struggles to escape pre-existing ideas, inventing as he writes: The next word is always a surprise/ Writing - an action that becomes literary only in retrospect/ The variables involved in the act of fiction, considering the theory, criticism, lived experience, and even the publication process as they form/ Proposal that that primary concern of the writer is liberation from the stage formulas that falsify our experience/ The novel must change or die, Sukenik asserts/ The form of the traditional novel as a metaphor for a society that no longer exists/ Digressions toward a study of comosition/ Digressions in the politics of language/ Digressions on narrative authority/ The Finnegan digression/ Film digression/ Wallace Stevens: theory and practice/ Castaneda: Upward and Juanward/ Innovative fiction/ Innovative criteria etc. Sukenick is one of the most original contemporary novelists/ He describes these essays as the comments of a fiction writer about writing, not those of a critic on what has been written.

About this title

Product Description:

Form must never be taken for granted, but must be created as the work itself is shaped: The writer works not from a priori ideas about what will happen and what form it will take, but in and through the text. Sukenick, one of our most original contemporary novelists, describes these essays as the comments of a fiction writer about writing, not those of a critic on what has been written. They are more or less reports on experiencethose of one engaged in the ongoing struggle with the angel of form, rather than of one studying its consequences from a cool distance: in form, not on form. The difficulty of creative works no longer accessible to traditional reading habits has threatened us with an age of criticism in which interpretation has become more imposing than invention. One of the tasks of modern fiction, therefore, is to displace, energize, and re-embody its criticismliterally to reunite at with our experience of the text. "

Synopsis:

Argues that fiction must be freed from stale formulas in order to reflect the complexity of the contemporary world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0809311909
• ISBN 13: 9780809311903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272