Sunday, August 03, 2003
I'm aware that blogging on this site gets more and more scattered. It must be like this at the moment for fairly obvious reasons: summer, heatwave, unemployment and DIYing, as well as computer break-down which means that at the moment I am blogging on an almost useless lap-top. This also means an inability to link to anything, for which I must apologise.
Last episode of the Story of the Novel concentrated on the differences between the American and the British novel. Where the standard of the British plummeted rapidly, the American rose to greatness, culminating in the authorships of Ralph Ellison (well, not authorship, strictly speaking, since he only wrote one novel) and Saul Bellow, significant in the way in which they underlined that the Great American Novel was more likely to rise in the outskirts of white America, being written, as it were, by the so-called minorities; the African-Americans, the Jews, the women. From the wonderful, pain-inducing language of Ellison's Invisible Man to Philip Roth's humorous, eloquent Zuckerman-trilogy, it is the gender, race and class differences that lie at the heart of the post-war American novel.
In contrast, Evelyn Waugh did not care for the working class (just like Virginia Woolf didn't) and set his novels among the rich and privileged. The program went on to look briefly at the Amis' (Kingsley and Martin), and Angela Carter, who returns to an interest in Modernism that has otherwise been ignored for a couple of decades.
It has been an interesting trip through the novels of four decades - some have been missed, some I could have done without - and there has obviously not been room for any kind of in-depth analysis. TV may be superficial and easy to dismiss, but in capable hands, as introduction and interest-awakener, TV is one of the best media. As long as there is an awareness of its limitations and manipulations, TV-programmes like this can only be educational and inspirational and hopefully it will raise awareness in more people of the wonderful history of literature.
Things I Don't Know, 6:
Why people like Kingsley Amis so much.
Last episode of the Story of the Novel concentrated on the differences between the American and the British novel. Where the standard of the British plummeted rapidly, the American rose to greatness, culminating in the authorships of Ralph Ellison (well, not authorship, strictly speaking, since he only wrote one novel) and Saul Bellow, significant in the way in which they underlined that the Great American Novel was more likely to rise in the outskirts of white America, being written, as it were, by the so-called minorities; the African-Americans, the Jews, the women. From the wonderful, pain-inducing language of Ellison's Invisible Man to Philip Roth's humorous, eloquent Zuckerman-trilogy, it is the gender, race and class differences that lie at the heart of the post-war American novel.
In contrast, Evelyn Waugh did not care for the working class (just like Virginia Woolf didn't) and set his novels among the rich and privileged. The program went on to look briefly at the Amis' (Kingsley and Martin), and Angela Carter, who returns to an interest in Modernism that has otherwise been ignored for a couple of decades.
It has been an interesting trip through the novels of four decades - some have been missed, some I could have done without - and there has obviously not been room for any kind of in-depth analysis. TV may be superficial and easy to dismiss, but in capable hands, as introduction and interest-awakener, TV is one of the best media. As long as there is an awareness of its limitations and manipulations, TV-programmes like this can only be educational and inspirational and hopefully it will raise awareness in more people of the wonderful history of literature.
Things I Don't Know, 6:
Why people like Kingsley Amis so much.
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