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Steven Moore (1) (1951–)

Autor von The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

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Steven Moore (PhD Rutgers, 1988) is the author/editor of several books on William Gaddis, as well as of The Novel: An Alternative History (2010, 2013), the second volume of which won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism. From 1988 to 1996 he was managing editor of the Review of mehr anzeigen Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press. weniger anzeigen

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Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) — Nachwort, einige Ausgaben1,517 Exemplare
Complete Short Stories (1990) — Herausgeber, einige Ausgaben39 Exemplare
Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (2007) — Mitwirkender — 20 Exemplare

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1951-05-15
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Such a vast, erudite, ambitious, encyclopedic work as this deserves applause. Steven Moore was once the editor of Dalkey Archive Press, one of the best publishers around, and his goal of showing that many so-called "innovations" of modern novels are actually quite ancient might come as old news to many seasoned readers, but he handily succeeds at showing why this literary heritage matters in a reading environment where sophisticated fiction often struggles. His enthusiasm for the project, the vast range of material he's gone through, and his highlighting of countless forgotten or unknown books (sure to be news to even the most hardcore bibliophiles) will be extremely welcome to anyone whose reading list just isn't long enough, or who wants a quick tour through basically all of world literature until the year 1600.

Moore begins his introduction by defending the concept of "difficult fiction", as distinguished from more mass-market fare. I personally read a decent amount of stuff that would be in the first category and am fine with my marginal place in the broader bibliosphere. I have no interest in either justifying my tastes to YA readers, or, in the other direction, engaging in semantic quibbling with other niche readers about what "really" qualifies as high-end reading. Literature, like everything else, exists on a continuum, and so everyone will have their own definition of what's "difficult", and will also find their tastes shifting around on that spectrum from time to time. Many readers and even writers have an issue with those upmarket books, however, and Moore collects some fairly dim criticism from a few of our esteemed contemporary critics and authors like BR Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen complaining that authors of big experimental novels are being pretentious, alienating themselves from readers, engaging in obscurantism for its own sake, and so on.

Moore rightly points out that those criticisms are usually silly and typically motivated by either ignorance, a chip on the shoulder, or in the case of novelists like Franzen, perhaps professional jealousy. The flashy techniques and unconventional stylings of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Pale Fire, The Recognitions, etc. that can frustrate some readers aren't there specifically to intimidate anyone, they're there because the authors wanted to do something cool for those who would appreciate that sort of thing. Moore relates an amusing story of one of his students who exhibited that same skeptical spirit:

"I once taught Nabokov's story 'The Vane Sisters' to some undergraduates, and when I showed on the chalkboard how the initial letters of the words in the final paragraph of the story form an acrostic spelling out a message, a female student exploded with rage, as though a dirty trick had been performed on her. (I reacted with amazed delight when I first learned of Nabokov's gambit; imagine how difficult it must have been to compose that paragraph, even working in the word "acrostics" into his acrostic!)"

That student's reaction is, at its heart, identical to the sentiments of all these writers who just can't stand the thought of people producing art that not everyone will enjoy or appreciate. Perhaps it's better, from one perspective, to be a Dickens than a Joyce, but there's room enough on the bookshelf for both of them. While there are of course snobbier readers with the mirror-image disdain for anything mass market or too popular, not only are those people far fewer in number, but even the most devoted literary aesthete started off his career reading popular stuff, whereas very few anti-snobs even give the more challenging stuff a chance, perhaps due to lingering unpleasant school memories of being forced to dissect books like dead cats. The ultimate lesson is simple and obvious: if you don't like something, then don't read it, and don't waste your life pathetically writing tons of words about those who do.

Having dispatched those dullards, Moore devotes the main text to illuminating the surprising variety and innovation of novelists from most of the regions of the world. It's organized like so:

Chapter 1 is The Ancient Novel, covering Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian novels.
Chapter 2 is The Medieval Novel, covering Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, and Arthurian novels.
Chapter 3 is The Renaissance Novel, covering Italian, Spanish, French, and English novels.
The Interlude is The Mesoamerican Novel, which is a sadly brief chapter due to the unconscionable destruction of almost all indigenous literary works following European conquest.
Chapter 4 is The Eastern Novel, covering Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, and Persian novels.
Chapter 5 is The Far Eastern Novel, covering Japanese and Chinese novels.

In an occasionally repetitive but never boring fashion, Moore reviews the plots and stylistic innovations of a dizzying number of books, the vast majority of which I'd never heard of. The extensive space given to plot summaries seems to have struck some reviewers as unnecessary; I found them not only useful but crucial, given the difficulty of drawing connections between centuries of world literature without making it clear which elements subsequent generations found important. Without his explanation of what was important in The Book of Genji, for example, Japanese literature would be nearly unintelligible, and his discussion of its feminist legacy was fascinating. Even more familiar literary histories get dazzlingly detailed investigations; his discussion of the links between the Arthurian mythos and the Tristan and Isolde story is a marvel of scholarship and insight, to say nothing of his explication of the origins of the famous Thousand and One Nights, so vital not only to Arabic fiction but also our own. I'm going to need a wheelbarrow to cart all the Chinese novels he mentions away from the library.

There are only two minor weaknesses of the book. One is that Moore is anti-religious to the point of obnoxiousness. I'm an atheist, so I agree with him about the cloying sanctimony of a lot of religious works, but his constant editorializing was frequently pointlessly juvenile in that "I'm 15 and I hate going to church" kind of way. It detracted from his efforts to discuss the literary values of things like Bible episodes or other religious works and came off as a poor imitation of Gibbon's sarcasm in his Decline and Fall. Another minor flaw was that he enjoys when novels under discussion use explicit content so much that it sometimes shades into weirdness. I like sex as much as anyone else and concur with him that the Puritan-esque censorship that so many authorities have practiced throughout history has been actively harmful to art; all the same, his enthusiasm for anything even mildly prurient at times crosses the line between laudable embrace of artistic freedom and odd fetishism (I'm thinking primarily of his effusive praise for books that mention menstruation).

Those quibbles aside, the book is an incredible work of scholarship. The introduction alone should be required reading for anyone tempted to partake in one of those interminable is-it-pretentious-or-is-it-superior debates. It's always useful to be reminded just how vast the literary universe really is, and though Moore only wrote one more entry in this series (volume 2 covers 1600 through 1800, tantalizingly ending right when the novels most people will have heard of begin), the work he does here is as close to essential as can be imagined. Be warned though: your reading list might grow exponentially between the beginning and the end of this magisterial work. Great criticism not only illuminates its subject, it also enlightens the reader, and this is some of the best criticism I've found in a long time.
… (mehr)
 
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aaronarnold | 4 weitere Rezensionen | May 11, 2021 |
You will want to use the updated annotations, which are online for free:
https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml

I own this book as a collector’s item.
Moore is THE Gaddis authority.
 
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chrisvia | Apr 29, 2021 |
I will include this as part of the "literature review" portion of my upcoming J R and The Recognitions videos.
 
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chrisvia | Apr 29, 2021 |

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