Quarrel and Quandary Essays

Zusatztext "Her best collection to date." -- The Boston Globe "I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is! for my money! the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays." --John Sutherland! The New York Times Book Review "Full of arresting turns of phraseÉ. Even when you disagree with her! she electrifies your mind." -- The New York Times "I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is! for my money! the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays." --John Sutherland! The New York Times Book Review " Full of arresting turns of phrase... Even when you disagree with her! she electrifies your mind." -- The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Cynthia Ozick Klappentext Quarrel & Quandary showcases the manifold talents of one of our leading and award-winning critics and essayists. In nineteen opulent essays, Cynthia Ozick probes Dostoevsky for insights into the Unabomber, questions the role of the public intellectual, and dares to wonder what poetry is. She roams effortlessly from Kafka to James, Styron to Stein, and, in the book's most famous essay, dissects the gaudy commercialism that has reduced Anne Frank to "usable goods." Courageous, audacious, and sublime, these essays have the courage of conviction, the probing of genius, and the durable audacity to matter. Forethoughts "But you are engagé," the famous and energetic man who four years ago directed my play remarked the other day. I say "my play," and not "a play of mine," which may suggest more than one, because it is the only work for the theater I have ever written; I feel certain I will never write another. I had not seen the director since the play closed, and his comment -- that once-faddish, Sartre-sounding word -- startled me. My one play had, in fact, been political, even polemical; it was about Holocaust denial. And though I had always longed to try my hand at drama, I had supposed it would find its shape, if the time ever came, in something literary or satiric, or both; my secret mnemonic model was Simon Gray's frivolously melancholic The Common Pursuit, which had, decades ago, enthralled me. So I was surprised when a congeries of circumstances, not all of my own manufacture, resulted in a play that was indisputably "engagé." I had been driven to it like a wheel the spokes of which were being nailed into place, even while it ran, by mechanics in unfamiliar uniform. I mean by all this that I resist the political, and am reluctant to take on its spots and stripes: the focus and deliberateness of political engagement, its judgments and its zeal, are so much the opposite of loafing and inviting one's soul. This collection, for instance, includes an essay on essays, wherein the form of the essay is defined, and defended, as follows: "If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use." This was only the latest in a string of similar formulations -- or call them wardings-off; what was being warded off was any tincture of the topical or the tendentious. In 1983, in a foreword to my first non-fiction collection, I wrote, comparing essays to stories, "Sometimes even an essay can invent, burn, guess, try out, hurtle forward, succumb to that flood of sign and nuance that adds up to intuition, disclosure, discovery. The only non-fiction worth writing -- at least for me -- lacks the summarizing gift, is heir to nothing, and sets out with empty pockets from scratch." In a 1988 preface, this time dubbed a "forewarning," I continued along the same line, or tightrope: "Nearly every essay, l...

Product details

• Authors: Ozick, Cynthia Ozick
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.11.2001
• EAN: 9780375724459
• ISBN: 978-0-375-72445-9
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Education and learning