Jonathan Franzen : the comedy of rage
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Jonathan Franzen : the comedy of rage
Bloomsbury Academic, 2016
- : pb
Available at / 1 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
First hardback ed. published in 2015
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.
Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?
Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introductory
Chapter One - Becoming Jonathan Franzen
Chapter Two - A Bugged World: The Twenty-Seventh City
Chapter Three - Something Wrong in the Underbrush: Strong Motion
Chapter Four - Status and Contract, Collapse and Arrival
Chapter Five - All in the Family: The Corrections
Chapter Six - Taking and Mistaking: Freedom
Chapter Seven - The New Yorker
Afterword - Hungering for Clean: Purity
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
