Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Clare Colquitt

Critical Essay by Clare Colquitt

SOURCE: Colquitt, Clare. “The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in ‘Death in the Woods.’” Modern Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (summer 1986): 175-90.

In the following essay, Colquitt observes the connection between Anderson's polarization of male and female and the narrative techniques of “Death in the Woods.”

Like most writers, Sherwood Anderson was vitally concerned with the workings of the imagination and the creation of art. For Anderson, these concerns were also inextricably linked to questions of personal salvation. In letters to his son John, himself a painter, Anderson asserted that “The object of art … is to save yourself”: “Self is the grand disease. It is what we are all trying to lose” (The Letters of Sherwood Anderson 166, 167). Given Anderson's faith in the redemptive possibilities of art, it is not surprising that the writer frequently compared “literary [and nonliterary] composition to the experience of pregnancy and deliverance,...
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