Writers and Thinkers: Selected Literary Criticism

by Daniel Fuchs

Overview

This is a collection of critical essays that integrate literature and ideas. Daniel Fuchs presents the writer's individuality as artist and thinker, focusing on the writer's interaction within a wide range of cultural, political, and historical periods and situations representative of the modern period. The essays reflect a progression that goes beyond chronology or historical survey in the consistency and interrelation of the literary and cultural themes explored and the references within them.

The book is built around writers who are of central concern to the author. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive framework for analysing modernism. Fuchs first deals with high modernism, in discussions of Hemingway and Stevens, who in different ways critique tradition and collapsing values. The essays that follow deal with the "contemporary," and here the focus is mainly on American Jewish writers and their cultural impact after modernism.

The author's stance is in relation not only to these traditions but to others that might be thought antagonistic: the formalism of the New Critics and the deconstructionism that reduces the author to a replaceable variable in the dialects of cultural power relations. Fuchs pays tribute to the former, illustrating wider points in literary, socio-cultural, and political history. The overall emphasis on these "extrinsic" matters underscores the book's appeal to a wide audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412862660
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/30/2015
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel Fuchs is emeritus professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of
New York. He is author of The Limits of Ferocity, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, and The
Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Ernest Hemingway, Literary Critic 1

2 Wallace Stevens and Santayana 27

3 Saul Bellow and the Example of Dostoevsky 73

4 Bellow and Freud 109

5 Literature and Politics: The Bellow/Grass Confrontation 143

6 Malamud's Dubin's Lives: A Jewish Writer and the Sexual Ethic 157

7 More Die of Heartbreak: The Question of Later Bellow 169

8 Identity and the Postwar Temper in American Jewish Fiction 191

9 The Holocaust and History in Bellow and Malamud 225

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

Daniel Fuchs is a distinguished critic in what is now a beleaguered humanist tradition. With its focus on a writer's character and cultural situation, Writers and Thinkers gives us a rich flow of insight, elegantly phrased, into the moral imagination of three major novelists (Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow an Bernard Malamud) and a major American poet (Wallace Stevens). As the title of the book promises, Fuchs writers are thinkers. Fuchs is particularly illuminating in his pairings of Stevens and Santayana, Bellow and Freud, Bellow and Dostoevsky and their affinities and disaffinities in their views of self and world.” —Eugene Goodheart, Brandeis University, and author of Mostly Grave Thoughts and Holding the Center

From the Publisher