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Critical Essay by Joseph Bentz
SOURCE: "The Influence of Modernist Structure in the Short Fiction of Thomas Wolfe," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 149-61.
In the following essay, Bentz characterizes Wolfe as an experimentalist in short fiction whose use of non-traditional plot structure and thematic epiphany align his short stories with those of his modern contemporaries.
The most famous attack on the fiction of Thomas Wolfe is Bernard DeVoto's 1936 essay "Genius is Not Enough." In it DeVoto identifies three points of weakness in Wolfe's fiction that critics have returned to repeatedly over the years. The first criticism is Wolfe's lack of artistic control and looseness of form. DeVoto blasts Look Homeward, Angel for "long whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction, badly if not altogether unacceptably written, raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, grunts,...
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This section contains 5,876 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
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