On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
> And Juri wrote:
> >But Eliot really seems and reads more
English/British than American.
> >Chandler is unmistakably American in style and
context.
> But does that make him an American writer? Or just a
good mimic?
> Would a foreign writer working in an "unmistakably
American... style
> and context" therefore automatically become an
American writer?
I see your point - one can think just of James Hadley Chase
(I assume no one presumes Peter Cheyney was an American). But
the conversation is going nowhere - just because Chandler
spent his early years in England, does that make him an
English writer? This is absurd to me. Eliot was adopted into
English culture and he clearly wanted to escape the American
practicalism (even though his imagism is of the American
root, coming from someone like Ezra Pound). His poems
couldn't have been written in the US.
> And if there is some sort of American style, what is
it? And how does
> it correspond with such different "unmistakably
American" writers
> as,say, Norman Mailer, James Fenimore Cooper, Erica
Jong, Mark Twain,
> Anne Tyler, John Updike and Danielle
Steele?
One could argue about Cooper and his roots in the European
Romantic philosophy, but I'll pass...
> I can see certain themes and issues constantly
recurring in a
> society's literature, but an actual literary
style?
I was merely thinking about the syntax and vernacular
Chandler used. I know he was very British about it, i.e.
accurate. I just wanted to say that his speech is
> And likewise, what is an American context? Do you
mean setting?
No, I mean the social and historical context, in the sense of
cultural studies. The thirties' and fourties' moral climax,
its sociological implications, the mood of the era, the
speech people use, and so forth. Of course the setting is
part of the context (and Chandler's use of Los Angeles is
marvellous - no James Hadley Chase could do that), but not
everything.
> The only thing Chandler is, truly and unmistakably,
is Chandler.
If Chandler, like other writers, is a sum of his experience,
then how can he be unmistakably him/herself? In the human
experience other voices come forward so forcefully that it's
sometimes pretty hard to tell what's one's own.
Juri
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