Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
|
Buy Now
The Written World - Essays & Reviews (Paperback)
Loot Price: R385
Discovery Miles 3 850
You Save: R36
(9%)
|
|
The Written World - Essays & Reviews (Paperback)
(sign in to rate)
List price R421
Loot Price R385
Discovery Miles 3 850
You Save R36 (9%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
|
Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even - perhaps
especially - when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is
hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the
motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who love
art and who hate to see it traduced. Hence the critic's sempiternal
cry: You're doing it wrong. What the critic wants is for you to do
it better. Since 2008, acclaimed novelist Kevin Power has reviewed
almost three hundred and fifty books. Power declares, 'Even now,
cracking open a brand-new hardback with my pencil in my hand, I
feel the same pleasure, and the same hope. That's the great secret:
every critic is an optimist at heart.' Art that thinks and feels at
the same time - 'good art' - requires explication. The writing of
criticism in response to such art is an activity that has taken
place since Aristotle first sat down to figure out what made
tragedy work. It is in the pursuit of this question - what makes
good art 'good' - that Kevin Power found his vocation. During a
ten-year stint as a regular freelance reviewer for the Sunday
Business Post, Power fell in love with the writing of criticism,
and with the reading of it, too, particularly by talented novelists
who review books on the side. His conclusion is that criticism is
absolutely an art. But it is never more so than when practiced by
an actual artist. These pieces, ranging from reviews of Susan
Sontag to the meaning of Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic politics, and
literary theory, represent a decade's worth of thinking about
books; a record of the author's attempts to honour art, and through
art, the world. In The Written World, Power explains how he became
a critic and what he thinks criticism is. It begins and ends with a
long personal essays, 'The Lost Decade', written especially for
this collection, about his mental and writing block after
publishing Bad Day in Blackrock and his decade-long journey to
White City. The pieces gathered by Power are connected by a theme -
this is a book about writing, seen from various positions, and
about growth as an artist and a critic.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.