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The Recognitions Summary & Study Guide Description
The Recognitions Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:
This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion on The Recognitions by William Gaddis.
The Recognitions Plot Summary
Preview of The Recognitions Summary:
In this sprawling and largely-forgotten novel of 1952, author William Gaddis takes as his theme the fake, the flaky, the fraudulent, and the phony in religion, the art world, academia and every nook and cranny he can put under his satirical microscope. In its scope, the novel is as broad as Balzac, as beat as Kerouac, and as rhapsodic as Thomas Wolfe. The characters, an always-changing stream of individual egos pitted against an absurd world, are by turns funny, desperate, deluded, and myopic. Gaddis bites off a huge chunk of the world but does a masterful job of breaking it down for the reader so that in its particulars, the human comedy unfolds in all of its compulsive reactions to fear in a post-war nuclear age. By carefully excavating all the manifestations of fear on human behavior, Gaddis succeeds in showing the reader how corrosive the need to adopt a...
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This section contains 474 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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