Pieces of Resistance

"Criticism, as I understand and practice it, is evaluative as well as interpretive", writes Eugene Goodheart. Pieces of Resistance is a collection of Goodheart\'s essays and reviews written between 1960 and 1985. The book responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes expressed during this period by novelists, critics, and journalists. Goodheart\'s exemplary figures include Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V. S. Naipaul: writers he believes share a particular sensitivity to literary and cultural ideologies that distort and diminish our understanding of the world. Goodheart\'s book is divided into three parts. The first section discusses critics Trilling, Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Geoffrey Hartman, David Bleich, and Susan Sontag - to name a few. The second part devotes itself to contemporary culture and includes essays on journals such as The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and The Evergreen Review, which in the 1960s and early 1970s provided a well-lit playground for various political, cultural, and literary themes. Finally, Goodheart examines the work of many modern writers with essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, Daniel Fuchs, Ralph Ellison, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Bernard Malamud, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Goodheart does not pretend to impersonal objectivity; his commitment to evaluative criticism - seeing a text in its relationship to political and cultural movements - is a deliberate response to current, increasingly specialized forms of criticism.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Autobiographical; Part I. Critics and Criticism: 1. William Chace\'s Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics; 2. Philip Rahv and Image and Idea; 3. Joseph Frank\'s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821–1849; 4. Leslie Fiedler and the mythic life; 5. The \'radicalism\' of Susan Sontag; 6. Paul Goodman\'s neolithic conservatism; 7. Geoffrey Hartman\'s Criticism in the Wilderness: the Study of Literature Today; Part II. Contemporary Culture in Conflict: 8. The New York Review: a close look; 9. The new Apocalypse; 10. Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review; 11. The deradicalized intellectuals; 12. The New York Review loves an Englishman; Part III. Writing in America and Elsewhere: 13. The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America; 14. Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs; 15. The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer; 16. The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben\'s Justice Hunger and Nine Stories; 17. Bernard Malamud\'s A New Life; 18. Ralph Ellison\'s Shadow and Act; 19. William Styron\'s The Confessions of Nat Turner; 20. Donald Barthelme\'s The Dead Father; 21. Raymond Carver\'s Cathedral; 22. Saul Bellow\'s Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories; 23. The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer; 24. V. S. Naipaul: virtuoso of the negative.