Saturday, February 28, 2015

Jane Eyre, Lizzy Bennet, and Jo March Walk Onto a Stage: Remixing a New Canon of Heroines

Jane Eyre, Lizzy Bennet, and Jo March Walk Onto a Stage: Remixing a New Canon of Heroines

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Last night I saw You on the Moors Now, an experimental play currently running in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which cannily combines characters and plot points from four novels: Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The story, such as it is, consists of the respective heroines banding together after spurning their various suitors. They end up camping out on the moors. Meanwhile, they are pursued by the rejected men, themselves united in an attempt at revenge, or requited love, or some other concession. The cast features a delightfully queered Mr. Darcy, a manic Jane Eyre who longs to travel in space, a Cathy Earnshaw with unexpectedly pronounced leadership qualities, and sundry twists and gimmicks which wouldn’t have worked if much of the audience didn’t have a basic understanding of at least a few of the four novels. … Read More
Kafka and the Crash of the System: An Interview with Tom McCarthy

Kafka and the Crash of the System: An Interview with Tom McCarthy

The British novelist Tom McCarthy — the author of CMen in Space, and the increasingly revered Remainder — is known primarily in the United States for Zadie Smith’s essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” wherein she cites McCarthy’s work as a future for literary fiction. In this mode, many critics now single out McCarthy as the torchbearer for avant-gardism, or at least they point to him as our most serious-minded critic of literary realism. This position was hardened, too, after McCarthy wrote a brilliant takedown of realism (as an obvious contrivance) for London Review of Books last year. … Read More

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