Synopses & Reviews
Review
“This is impressive work on one of the four or five major contemporary novelists and on the cultural conditions under which he writes, and it will attract many readers interested in contemporary American literature and culture.”—Patrick O’Donnell, author of
Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative and editor of
MFS: Modern Fiction StudiesReview
“This will become the standard study of Gaddis.”—Steven Moore, author of
William GaddisSynopsis
This book is the first scholarly work to discuss all four of Gaddis's novels. While not dismissing the inclination of many scholars to view Gaddis's fiction as postmodern, Christopher Knight moves critical response in another direction, toward a discussion of Gaddis's significance as a satirist and social critic.
Synopsis
States of Desire Revisited looks back from the twenty-first century at a pivotal moment in the late 1970s: Gay Liberation was a new and flourishing movement of creative culture, political activism, and sexual freedom, just before the 1980s devastation of AIDS. Edmund White traveled America, recording impressions of gay individuals and communities that remain perceptive and captivating today. He noted politicos in D.C. working the system, in-fighting radicals in New York and San Francisco, butch guys in Houston and self-loathing but courteous gentlemen in Memphis, the "Fifties in Deep Freeze" in Kansas City, progressive thinkers with conservative style in Minneapolis and Portland, wealth and beauty in Los Angeles, and, in Santa Fe, a desert retreat for older gays and lesbians since the 1920s.
White frames those past travels with a brief, bracing review of gay America since the 1970s ("now we were all supposed to settle down with a partner in the suburbs and adopt a Korean daughter"), and a reflection on how Internet culture has diminished unique gay places and scenes but brought isolated individuals into a global GLBTQ community.
"
Synopsis
The author of four truly important novels—
The Recognitions in 1955,
J R in 1975,
Carpenter’s Gothic in 1985, and
A Frolic of His Own in 1995—William Gaddis is considered by many literary scholars to be one of the most outstanding novelists of the twentieth century, to be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce, Robert Musil, and Thomas Pynchon.
Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing is the first scholarly work to discuss all four Gaddis novels. While not dismissing the inclination of many scholars to view Gaddis’s fiction as postmodern, Christopher Knight moves critical response in another direction, toward a discussion of Gaddis’s significance as a satirist and social critic. Knight investigates Gaddis’s predominant thematic interests, including those of contemporary aesthetics, Flemish painting, forgery, corporate America, Third World politics, and the U.S. legal system. What Knight finds is an author not only acutely sensitive to post-war social realities but also one whose critique carries with it an implied utopian dimension.
About the Author
Christopher Knight, author of The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality, has taught at several universities, including New York University, University of Texas at Austin, Lublin University, Warsaw University, and Miami University. At present, he teaches at the State University of New York at Albany.