Pieces of Resistance

This collection of essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985 are a deliberate response to the current, increasingly specialized forms of criticism.

Eugene Goodheart (Author)

9780521020183, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 September 2005

212 pages
21.5 x 13.9 x 1.3 cm, 0.282 kg

Pieces of Resistance is a 1988 collection of Eugene Goodheart's essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985. The book responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists. Goodheart's book is divided into three parts. The first section discusses critics Trilling, Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Geoffrey Hartman, David Bleich, and Susan Sontag - to name a few. The second part devotes itself to contemporary culture and includes essays on journals such as The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and The Evergreen Review, which in the 1960s and early 1970s provided a well-lit playground for various political, cultural, and literary themes. Finally, Goodheart examines the work of many modern writers with essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, Daniel Fuchs, Ralph Ellison, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Bernard Malamud, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Goodheart does not pretend to impersonal objectivity; his commitment to evaluative criticism is a deliberate response to increasingly specialized forms of criticism.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Autobiographical
Part I. Critics and Criticism: 1. William Chace's Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics
2. Philip Rahv and Image and Idea
3. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821–1849
4. Leslie Fiedler and the mythic life
5. The 'radicalism' of Susan Sontag
6. Paul Goodman's neolithic conservatism
7. Geoffrey Hartman's Criticism in the Wilderness: the Study of Literature Today
Part II. Contemporary Culture in Conflict: 8. The New York Review: a close look
9. The new Apocalypse
10. Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review
11. The deradicalized intellectuals
12. The New York Review loves an Englishman
Part III. Writing in America and Elsewhere: 13. The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
14. Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs
15. The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer
16. The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben's Justice Hunger and Nine Stories
17. Bernard Malamud's A New Life
18. Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act
19. William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
20. Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
21. Raymond Carver's Cathedral
22. Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
23. The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
24. V. S. Naipaul: virtuoso of the negative.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]