Comments by Commenter
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Charles Roland Berry
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Freya
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great! thanks a lot for this really informative and cleverly written chapter.
(A struggling PhD student)
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greg
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will there be a section dedicated to the sopranos?
the show seems to me structured more like a novel than a television program.
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Helen Branton
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Hi,
just read this page but will order the book, the themes are fascinating.
I have a background in media studies but more than twenty years on have more esoteric leanings. (Do you know Linda Sussmans Speech of the Grail) In simple exercises with nature, are used to coutner the direction our senses are taken toward a more goethean sensory perception. I am fascinated by how we work with narrative and visual (how I found this site), if change is more likely to come from our understanding and working with the form as much as the story – in film and television.
An aside – I am asking my children to read one novel a month of my choice, as even what they read has become defined by eposodic visual media, and I worry about their ability to go outside this kind of narrative. Thank you I look forward to reading the book and hopefully getting it into the bookshop where I work in Australia. -
Is there a distinction between the novel and popular fiction, serious novelists and women’s fiction? Art and mass production? History and herstory?
As bookseller for twenty years the interest in journalling – Julia Camerons of the world – the act of writing for its own sake is a new phenomenon. Once people wrote letters, now we email, have direct contact with an author, the speed of our communication and feedback. The development of the interior dialogue of writing for the sake of the act, for myself, not to be read by another. To see this development of toward the desire to write, to write a novel, to act into the world through words, either with purpose or for entertainment. Do older women create web sites and blogs, do they journal? What is the creative process for the elite male author compared to the woman who writes for women’s fiction? The romance genre has reinvented itself repeatedly over the last twenty years by taking its limits and challenges and incorporating them, it now just keeps creating new sub genres. If we live in a time of individuation, we each can think for ourselves, if we write who do we write for, who do we want to read our words. (Oprah’s audience or not?) If each person wrote their story who would be the reader, what is our context? Does fifteen minutes of fame look different for each generation, class, political history?
It is odd in itself to be able to share response directly without having read the whole book in my hands and allowed time to think and digest the ideas.One thing that does strike me in reading different exerpts it how the language is similiar to esoteric literature. A lot of talk about death.
Recently I have had many discussions and come accross the idea of the conscious midwife. Aspects of our lives, culture are dying or trying to be born, the old matriachal/patriachal models contain death within them and are unworkable from the economic to how we raise our children. What the new looks like? Something far more personal, individual, the part to the whole.
So in the context of what is dying –
what is living?
I now have to click on chapter 5.
Thank you so much for having this on the web. Helen
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James Evers
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And what would be the route of argument against a Habermasian argument of the sort found in “Transformation of the Public Sphere”?
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Jon
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I would like to say that I think that you have more in common,or,importantly, could be perceived as having more in common – by the broad mass of the telly-viewing,or Oprah-viewing public – with the solitary,intellectual,besieged male writer.Even if you aspire otherwise.This doesnt matter to me particularly as I was hungry to read these chapters as I am besotted with you,Jonathan Franzen,Delillo….ie with contemporary literature and criticism ( I like Oprah too).I dont have even a degree in English.It took an enormous amount of work to get through these pages,my views changing vertiginously,uncomfortably,everyday,as I sought to get to grips with complex issues that require a lot of careful thought.When I idealistically,passionately, sought to explain these issues to my cousin, who is a feminist,she lambasted me for elitism,being patronising,being over-intellectual.And male.It almost caused an irreparable rift.It’s as if she believes that such learned,inaccessible language and thinking and “concepts” are an inhuman stab through the good/liberal/democratic/collectivist/non-elitist/non-ivory beating heart.I suspect that,to her, such knowledge of such culture wars,that threatens to shake the foundations of deeply-held and well-intentioned beliefs, is almost machiavellian.I despair at the divide.It hurts at a personal and intellectual level.But also,hell was I angry at the price for my well-intentioned efforts : to read,to learn,to empathise,to attempt to get a bird’s eye view of issues ( heaven forbid an omniscient one) – and to optimistically communicate ideas,to explain.Oprah-like.
In the long-run, I’m an optimist about literature and the attendant invisible,colourless yet forceful cognitive processes involved in trying to understand it – not politics.Even if the obsessive,often solitary,pursuit of it is a minority one.
Really fascinating read,thank you.
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kf
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This is a comment on the whole page.
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This is a reply to the comment above, indicated by the slight indent.
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This is a comment on paragraph 1.
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Alas, no; I’m really focused throughout on analyzing writing about television, so I don’t do any direct televisual analysis. There’s a lot of great work about The Sopranos out there, though.
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Lonnie
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I still think it amazing that people continue to say the novel is dying. There are millions of people wanting to write new ones, which means that there are millions of people (plus) reading them.
For those wanting to write them, I think that the course at http://zero2novel.com would be a huge help!
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I am reading your articles with great enthusiasm! Here is my view, as a composer of symphonies and concertos, in a time when those art forms are irrelevant to most everyone: the definitions of “Postmodernism” all seem like university professors trying hard to justify their paychecks, to themselves, to their students, and to the deans of colleges. As a composer of music no one cares about, I can say–the discussion is irrelevant to any act of creation on my part. I write these large works because I have an internal need to do so. There is no financial benefit to me, and no social or political benefit, and never has been. Which contemporary novelists are devoid of social, political or economic ambition? If I could write soundtracks for films and make lots of money–I certainly would do so. But that is a closed system. And my own needs for artistic expression are not satisfied by any film music. I do earn money from Hollywood, but that has nothing to do with creating what I consider to be Art.
I know this is a lot of chatter…but you started it with your good and interesting writing…Thank you.
Charles