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Tag Archives: “Why Bother?”
Jonathan Franzen on Robinson Crusoe, the novel, and David Foster Wallace
“Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude” is a quite interesting article that Jonathan Franzen published in The New Yorker last April. Wallace, and specifically his suicide, is a major focus of the essay. Though … Continue reading
Posted in Link, Of Interest
Tagged "Why Bother?", David Foster Wallace, jonathan franzen, Robnison Crusoe, The New Yorker
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The challenges faced by the modern novelist aspiring to write serious fiction that impacts the larger culture have continued to grow since the publication of “Why Bother?”. Not only has more and more writing migrated to the internet but complex … Continue reading
Books, media, and society issues
I found Jonathan Franzen’s essay “How to be Alone” slightly depressing, i feel the way he attempts to challenge his community ultimately led to his ‘depression’; l but i understand where he is coming from. He is trying to enlighten … Continue reading
Franzen “Why Bother”
In Franzen’s essay “Why Bother”, the one quote that stood out the most to me was one at the very beginning of the peice. He says, “the novelist has more and more to say to the reader who has less … Continue reading
The Grass Is Always Greener…
“I spent the early nineties trapped in a double singularity. Not only did I feel different from everyone around me, but I felt like the age I lived in was utterly different from any age that had come before.” (Franzen … Continue reading
Posted in Reading Response
Tagged "Why Bother?", jonathan franzen, Midnight in Paris
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Franzen “Why Bother?”
I understood Franzen’s essay as a description of the struggle the novel now faces. The end of the long paragraph on page 65 summarizes the questions posed in the essay: “How to design a craft that can float on history … Continue reading
First Post: Movies, Books, Violence and Subjectivity
In the essay by Franzen, he stated that, “the novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read…”. People in this day and age are becoming less interested in what should be … Continue reading
Why Bother?
From the media clips and the reading excerpts that we were assigned, there were two things that stuck out to me the most, both from Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Why Bother?’ First, was the correlation that Franzen built between the black lesbian … Continue reading
avoidance of the “now”
“Why Bother?” and “Postmodernism as Liberty Vance” seemed to be working towards the same goal of defining some aspect of the novel within contemporary times. The way both essays were written describes the styles available to a writer then. Franzen’s … Continue reading
Post-Modernity and Self-Awareness
While reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay, I got the odd sense that he was expressing my own thoughts and feelings with more frankness and lucidity than I could manage any time soon. That said, I’m not sure whether my vague “telepathic” … Continue reading
