Finding a form : essays / by William H. Gass.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gass, William H., 1924-2017.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literary form.

Penn Provenance:

Gass, William H., 1924- (autograph) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

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

Physical Description:

352 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

Uncorrected proof.

Place of Publication:

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1996.

Summary:

William Gass writes about literary language, about history, about the avant-garde, about minimalism's brief vogue, about the use of the present tense in fiction (Is it due to the lack of both a sense of history and a belief in the future?), about biography as a form, about exile - spiritual and geographical - and he examines the relationship of the writer's life to the writer's work. With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.

Contents:

Pulitzer: the people's prize

A failing grade for the present tense

Finding a form

A fiesta for the form

Robert Walser

Ford's impressionisms

The language of being and dying

Nietzsche: the polemical philosopher

At death's door: Wittgenstein

Ezra Pound

Autobiography

The vicissitudes of the avant-garde

Exile

The story of the state of nature

Nature, culture, and cosmos

The baby or the Botticelli

Simplicities

The music of prose

The book as a container of consciousness.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy signed by the author.

OCLC:

937392639