Consuming silences : how we read authors who don't publish / Myles Weber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weber, Myles.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010--Authorship.

Salinger, J. D.

Ellison, Ralph--Authorship.

Ellison, Ralph.

Olsen, Tillie--Authorship.

Olsen, Tillie.

Roth, Henry--Authorship.

Roth, Henry.

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Authors and readers--United States--History--20th century.

Authors and readers.

History.

Authorship.

United States.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

159 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2005]

Summary:

J. D. Salinger was an author in 1951 when he published The Catcher in the Rye. Is he one now? Was Henry Roth an author during the sixty years that separated Call It Sleep, his literary debut, from his second novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream? To show us how silence can be produced and consumed as a literary text, Myles Weber takes a provocative look at four revered authors who battled writer's block or simply ceased publishing. The careers of Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth, J. D. Salinger, and Ralph Ellison suggest that an unproductive twentieth-century author could command serious critical attention and remain a literary celebrity by offering the public volumes of silence, which became read and admired like any other text.

Weber sees periods of nonpublication as texts that are consumed by the literary public-and sometimes produced deliberately by inactive writers and their handlers. However, his aim is not to criticize individual authors but to reveal connections between literature as a commodity and authorship as a profession. As Weber looks at the particular circumstances of each author's silence, he explores such topics as the cult of celebrity, intellectual property law, the complicity of the media and the academy in engendering and then maintaining an author's silence, and mass production and distribution.

By helping us to look in new ways at authorial silence not just as a biographical fact or a creative problem but also as a marketing opportunity, Consuming Silences injects energy into debates about the nature of literary production and the cultural place of authors who do not publish.

Contents:

Tillie Olsen and the question of silenced literature

Henry Roth's second high-modernist masterpiece

The revised edition of Henry Roth's Silence

Augmenting the Salinger oeuvre by any means

Subsequent thresholds to Invisible man.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-148) and index.

ISBN:

0820325600

0820326992

OCLC:

56104163