![]() ![]() As its title suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character, dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the greatest novels of the past two centuries.īut Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices and conventions. This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how fiction "works" in the functional sense of the word. For at the heart of Wood's criticism is a quarrel with formalism. His admiration does not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next breath as "interesting but wrong-headed". Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel are "the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes". ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |