John Hawkes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Albert J. Guerard

Critical Essay by Albert J. Guerard

[Guerard, often considered the most knowledgeable critic on Hawkes, has had a lengthy literary and social relationship with Hawkes. The two met at Harvard in the late 1940s when Hawkes was enrolled in Guerard's writing class.]

Without question Hawkes has been, like Faulkner, one of the great liberating maieutic influences on contemporary literature, John (Clendennin Burne) Hawkes (Jr.) 1925– Photograph by John Forasté; courtesy of John Hawkesin the astringent bite of his psychology and the audacity of his invention. But I would like to make a case for the primacy of poetry, of language—language in the largest sense to include intricate structure and what Hawkes calls "chordal insistences", but also language as simply rhythm and words, words from which the strangeness has not been rubbed away.

One of the obvious things any academic survey might undertake would be to...
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