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Critical Review by A. Alvarez
SOURCE: Alvarez, A. “Critic on the Hearth.” Spectator, no. 7150 (9 July 1965): 52-3.
In the following review, Alvarez acknowledges the sharpness of the essays collected in Doings and Undoings but stresses that he is uncomfortable with Podhoretz's evolution from a literary critic to a moral sentinel.
In one of the most intriguing essays in an immensely intriguing collection [Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and after in American Writing] Norman Podhoretz sets out to defend “The Article as Art”:
Why should the magazine article, of all things, have become so important and fertile a genre in our day? Why have so many writers … found it possible to move around more freely and creatively within it than within fiction or poetry?
His slightly anti-climactic answer is that the article chimes with our taste for the functional, as in architecture or painting. But clearly there is more to it than that....
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This section contains 1,340 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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