Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors who Don't Publish
- ISBN-10
- 0820325600
- ISBN-13
- 9780820325606
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 180
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2005
- Publisher
- University of Georgia Press
- Author
- Myles Weber
Description
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 brings to them an understanding of 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Silences injects energy into debates about the nature of literary production and the cultural place of authors who do not publish.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. LevenbackI owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
-
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
-
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. ClementsHENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
-
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
-
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William ShakespeareThompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
-
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura FrostIn The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
-
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura WhiteSimilarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
-
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura BrownRenew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
-
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura OlcelliD'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
-
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...