Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel
– current entire – (PDF)
Ringing endorsements for Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel – “ill written” – “extended denunciations” – “dispiriting” – “Dear, oh dear” – “pedantic and tone-deaf” – “deeply illiterate” – “hilarious” – “nonsense” – “ominous” – via Ready Steady Book:
Paul Griffiths says…
Two worries: about writing on literature (especially) that is so ill written, and about such extended denunciations of (especially) writing on literature.
Robin Durie says…
Spot on, Paul…&, btw, if you managed to plough your way through to the end, how dispiriting was the concluding “NOTE: No time to finish this “essay” currently. I hope to return to it in a few months to extend the analysis…”?
However, I’m absolutely sure “unstable multipurview meld (UMM). (Or, more simply put: unstable purview meld, UPM)” will be cropping up in a review near you all-too-soon…
Dear, oh dear.
Mark says…
Agreed Paul and Robin. This link — like many others on the site — is posted under the heading “potentially interesting” not “in complete agreement with”! This was posted because a critique of Wood is needed and I’m interested in any attempt made at such, but this is a curious piece — pedantic and tone-deaf in equal measure — that moves us forward hardly at all.
Abbeville Press says…
A deeply illiterate, though hilarious, piece of nonsense by an author who has clearly stuck his nose into the crazy glue of Marxist lit theory and inhaled deeply. Our favorite part (also the part at which we stopped reading) was the ominous suggestion that the Flaubertian trick of juxtaposing the terrifying and the trivial detail – often used, as Wood notes, in war reportage – is not an aesthetic effect at all but rather “an approach highly useful to the establishment” with their “criminal aggressions.” Bravo. –The Arbiters of Style, The Abbeville Manual of Style
A Practical Policy 