War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature

by Joy Press

Book Overview

Bringing together some of the most exhilarating writing from the Voice Literary Supplement, War of the Words delivers a fresh and complex new perspective. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609808532
• ISBN13: 9780609808535
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Twenty Years of the Village Voice Literary Sensibility

Since 1981, The Village Voice has published a separate book review known as the Voice Literary Supplement. "War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature" collects forty articles from the first twenty years of the VLS, all of them marked by the same edgy cacophony of highbrow and lowbrow culture that has typified what I would describe as the VLS sensibility. Joy Press, editor of the VLS and this collection, captures this sensibility when she describes how she felt upon first reading the VLS in the early 1980s, when many of the old-line literary reviews seemed to be caught in the throes of a kind of literary dotage:"I confess: VLS warped my young mind. Stumbling upon it as a teenager in the mid-'80s, I found a space in which you could be an intellectual and a punk; where it was okay to love Kafka and comic books, Anne Sexton and the Sex Pistols, Mary McCarthy and Mary Gaitskill. Back then, lit-crit institutions like the Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books-once breeding grounds for original minds-had settled into a stiff, stuffy worldview. Swapping highbrow snobbery for a seductive mix of downtown cool and zealot fervor, The Voice Literary Supplement discovered a new audience-readers like me who loved books but felt alienated by the way the established magazines treated literature as a sanctuary from the funky mess of the modern world.""War of the Words" is organized into five distinct sections, the title of each providing a good insight into the articles that follow.The first section, "Writers Reconsidered: New Takes on the Old Guard," contains seven revisionist readings of well-known authors. These articles include some of the most interesting writing in the collection, with Albert Mobilio providing a sympathetic and interesting take on Gertrude Stein, David Foster Wallace writing a footnote-laden, insightful reading of Dostoevsky, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. illuminating the real significance of Langston Hughes and the need to create an African-American literary canon. There is also a short, acerbic and largely correct assessment of John Cheever ("the most overrated American writer there is").The second section, "Rescue Me: Snatching Writers from the Dustbin of History," is an outstanding series of pieces on writers who have never quite had the audience or prominence that their writing deserved. Here we have characteristic explorations of the writing of Zora Neal Hurston, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Delany, Djuna Barnes, William Goyen, Albert Murray, and Angela Carter. "Signs of the Times: Capturing the Cultural Moment," is perhaps the most difficult and, in some respects, dated group of articles in this collection. The articles provide, however, a very good insight into the way the VLS has engaged the cultural clashes of the past twenty years, often publishing viewpoints that don't easily fit into categories of Right and Left, Highbrow and Lowbrow. The articles here explore such topics as queer theory,

Twenty Years of the Village Voice Literary Sensibility

Since 1981, The Village Voice has published a separate book review known as the Voice Literary Supplement. "War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature" collects forty articles from the first twenty years of the VLS, all of them marked by the same edgy cacophony of highbrow and lowbrow culture that has typified what I would describe as the VLS sensibility. Joy Press, editor of the VLS and this collection, captures this sensibility when she describes how she felt upon first reading the VLS in the early 1980s, when many of the old-line literary reviews seemed to be caught in the throes of a kind of literary dotage:"I confess: VLS warped my young mind. Stumbling upon it as a teenager in the mid-`80s, I found a space in which you could be an intellectual and a punk; where it was okay to love Kafka and comic books, Anne Sexton and the Sex Pistols, Mary McCarthy and Mary Gaitskill. Back then, lit-crit institutions like the Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books-once breeding grounds for original minds-had settled into a stiff, stuffy worldview. Swapping highbrow snobbery for a seductive mix of downtown cool and zealot fervor, The Voice Literary Supplement discovered a new audience-readers like me who loved books but felt alienated by the way the established magazines treated literature as a sanctuary from the funky mess of the modern world.""War of the Words" is organized into five distinct sections, the title of each providing a good insight into the articles that follow.The first section, "Writers Reconsidered: New Takes on the Old Guard," contains seven revisionist readings of well-known authors. These articles include some of the most interesting writing in the collection, with Albert Mobilio providing a sympathetic and interesting take on Gertrude Stein, David Foster Wallace writing a footnote-laden, insightful reading of Dostoevsky, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. illuminating the real significance of Langston Hughes and the need to create an African-American literary canon. There is also a short, acerbic and largely correct assessment of John Cheever ("the most overrated American writer there is").The second section, "Rescue Me: Snatching Writers from the Dustbin of History," is an outstanding series of pieces on writers who have never quite had the audience or prominence that their writing deserved. Here we have characteristic explorations of the writing of Zora Neal Hurston, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Delany, Djuna Barnes, William Goyen, Albert Murray, and Angela Carter. "Signs of the Times: Capturing the Cultural Moment," is perhaps the most difficult and, in some respects, dated group of articles in this collection. The articles provide, however, a very good insight into the way the VLS has engaged the cultural clashes of the past twenty years, often publishing viewpoints that don't easily fit into categories of Right and Left, Highbrow and Lowbrow. The articles here explore such topics as qu