The din in the head : essays / Cynthia Ozick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ozick, Cynthia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Physical Description:

x, 243 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.

Summary:

One of America"s foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, she investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and more. In a posthumous and hilariously harassing "(Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James," Ozick"s hero is shocked by a lady reporter. In "Highbrow Blues" and in reflections on her own early fiction, she writes intimately of "the din in our heads, that relentless inner hum," and the curative power of literary imagination. The Din in the Head is sure to please fans, win new readers, and excite critical controversy and acclaim.

Contents:

On discord and desire

What Helen Keller saw

Young Tolstoy : an apostle of desire

John Updike : Eros and god

Throwing away the clef : Saul Bellow's Ravelstein

Washington Square : so many absent things

Smoke and fire : Sylvia Plath's journals

Kipling : a postcolonial footnote

Delmore Schwartz : the willed abortion of the self

Lionel Trilling and the buried life

Tradition and (or versus) the Jewish writer

Henry James, Tolstoy, and my first novel

Highbrow blues

The din in the head

The rule of the bus

Isaac Babel : "Let me finish"

In research of lost time

The heretical passions of Gershom Scholem

And god saw literature, that it was good : Robert Alter's version-

An (unfortunate) interview with Henry James.

ISBN:

0618470506

OCLC:

60603185

Publisher Number:

9780618470501

Online:

Publisher description