Imagen del autor
4 Obras 195 Miembros 4 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Mark McGurl is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA
Créditos de la imagen: Stanford University

Obras de Mark McGurl

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Conocimiento común

Miembros

Reseñas

Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.
½
 
Denunciada
rivkat | otra reseña | Mar 3, 2023 |
A short book,but dense and aimed at readers with an understanding of theories of literay criticism. The author starts from the some of same observations of other writers (e.g. John Thompson in Book Wars) on that the Interet tech platforms including Google and Amazon have done to bookstores and publishing - They have taken the revenue and has done nothing for content creators (except a few writers of romances, science fiction and mysteries & thrillers. The author focuses on Amazon's inability to create memorable and engaging content.… (más)
 
Denunciada
BraveKelso | otra reseña | Dec 9, 2021 |
This book is not the book I thought it would be. I didn't like it very much as a result. I don't know if that's Mark McGurl's fault or mine. I expected a history of American creative writing programs, their tenets and philosophies, and an overview of how that had shaped American fiction post-1945. Instead I got a series of interpretations of post-1945 American novels I hadn't read, through the lens of the fact that their authors had gone to college and taken creative writing courses. I was looking for something general, but the book turned out to be too specific for me to engage with in an interesting way. I kind of think it's McGurl's fault, because at one point he says his book wants "to track a period in which institutions, not individuals, have come to the fore as the sine qua non of postwar literary production" (368). Except that his book talks about individuals a whole lot and institutions barely at all.

The book also includes a lot of goofy charts. They have a lot of arrows on them, but never illuminated a concept for me. The Venn diagrams were in particular impenetrable, and seem to have been drawn by someone who had no idea how Venn diagrams work.
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Denunciada
Stevil2001 | otra reseña | Aug 11, 2017 |
An awesome book if you're already interested in the premise: exploring most of 20th century American literature through the lens of the creative writing program, and how many can be easily and beneficially understood as reactions to that program. However, it's a rough ask if you aren't, since the chapters are incredibly long—up to 70 pages in length—and constitute a free-flowing narrative on the different elements of creative writing programs and how they're instantiated in up to a dozen cases each chapter. If you think you might be interested, I'd first recommend reading the unexpectedly-large amount of reaction commentary in "mainstream" lit journals: n 1, London Review of Books, and even the New Yorker.

A pretty rad book all told, but not quite rad enough or well-constructed enough to recommend to a general audience.
… (más)
1 vota
Denunciada
gregorybrown | otra reseña | Oct 18, 2015 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
4
Miembros
195
Popularidad
#112,377
Valoración
½ 3.3
Reseñas
4
ISBNs
9

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