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Portrait of the artist as a bad character: And other essays on writing
Book by Ozick, Cynthia
- GenresEssays
330 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1996
About the author
Cynthia Ozick
110 books431 followersRecipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 18, 2014
This collection of essays is exceptional, well showing Ozick's devotion to her craft as adept and acolyte. In the first third the essays are autobiographical, and Ozick describes how she became set on making literature her life. Subsequent essays are responses to different provocations (lectures, books, movements), which end up being further statements about Ozick's own view of how literature best works as a moral force, and the final essays are more expansive treatments of the ways we learn to fashion our values through language, metaphor, stories, and models.
Ozick is in every essay erudite and allusive, always concerned with style and a precision in her use of language. There are rhetorical flourishes in many, where the thrust of an argument is broached indirectly, the words and the images they conjure elaborating a point in several modes. Her prevailing manner is to subject the reader to a series of scenes, then to draw from them their emotional content to further an underlying sensation or thought. There is passion in Ozick's writing, and precision. Her writing is as controlled, calculated, and passionate as William Gass's literary criticism, but while Gass is expounding a reality that is only words, Ozick is always bringing to the fore the metaphor that energizes a life outside the novel, the metaphor that makes us moral beings.
The title essay is a trifle (but makes for a provocative and allusive title) as compared to "Ruth", "The Question of Our Speech", and "Metaphor and Memory," which were my three favorites. "Ruth" and "Metaphor and Memory" both draw on the Bible, the former a rhapsodic exegesis and the latter an explanation of the connection of metaphor, memory, and morality. "The Question of Speech" is an account of Henry James' exhortation to a class of Bryn Mawr students to serve as models for well-spoken American English, which exhortation was misguided, Ozick claims, because it is the written word itself which best ensures good thought and then good oral communication.
All the essays are worth their reading, and each holds in it the seed of Ozick's essential premise: the ability of literature to edify and even redeem the attentive reader.
Ozick is in every essay erudite and allusive, always concerned with style and a precision in her use of language. There are rhetorical flourishes in many, where the thrust of an argument is broached indirectly, the words and the images they conjure elaborating a point in several modes. Her prevailing manner is to subject the reader to a series of scenes, then to draw from them their emotional content to further an underlying sensation or thought. There is passion in Ozick's writing, and precision. Her writing is as controlled, calculated, and passionate as William Gass's literary criticism, but while Gass is expounding a reality that is only words, Ozick is always bringing to the fore the metaphor that energizes a life outside the novel, the metaphor that makes us moral beings.
The title essay is a trifle (but makes for a provocative and allusive title) as compared to "Ruth", "The Question of Our Speech", and "Metaphor and Memory," which were my three favorites. "Ruth" and "Metaphor and Memory" both draw on the Bible, the former a rhapsodic exegesis and the latter an explanation of the connection of metaphor, memory, and morality. "The Question of Speech" is an account of Henry James' exhortation to a class of Bryn Mawr students to serve as models for well-spoken American English, which exhortation was misguided, Ozick claims, because it is the written word itself which best ensures good thought and then good oral communication.
All the essays are worth their reading, and each holds in it the seed of Ozick's essential premise: the ability of literature to edify and even redeem the attentive reader.
Displaying 1 of 1 review