PARLOIR

ELLIS, Bret Easton

2010-08-03T07:23:00.001-04:00

p. 236

"You had this list, Raymond," you say, causing more trouble. "Who else was on it? It was quite a list: Shakespeare, Sam Shepard, Rob Lowe, Ronald Reagan, his son -"
"Well, his son," Donald says.
"But isn't this the century no one cared?" Harry asks.
"About what?" you all ask back.
"Huh?" Steve asks after the Brazilian leaves.

The Rules of Attraction, 1987.

FRANZEN, Jonathan

2010-08-03T07:21:00.001-04:00

p. 307

And Ted's right on top of that, he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We've bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is what he says, and he refuses to be a part of it. He wants to eat "real" food and go to "real" places and talk about "real" things like business and science. So he and I don't really agree at all anymore on what's important in life.

The Corrections, 2001.

MOODY, Rick

2010-08-03T07:14:00.003-04:00

p. 229

They proceeded by guesswork. Here is how Benjamin Hood reached the Williamses' house. The long way, because of the power lines. Power lines down everywhere.

The Ice Storm, 1994.

MOODY, Rick

2010-08-03T07:08:00.003-04:00

p. 211

Look, he was not a brilliant kid.

p. 259

Look, Elena knew that apology was the impossible paragraph, its words were like the secret names of God.

The Ice Storm, 1994,

DELILLO, Don

2010-08-03T06:38:00.003-04:00

p. 11

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

p. 280

"There's a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It Means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event."
"They need this science. I don't need it."
"I don't need it either. I'm just telling you."
"I'm an American. I go to ball games," he said.
"The science of dark forces. Evidently they feel this science is legitimate enough to require a name."
"People who need this science, I would make an effort to tell them we have real sciences, hard sciences, we don't need imaginary ones."
"I'm just telling you the word. I agree with you, Sims. But the word exists."
"There's always a word. [...]"

p. 542

"The tag or aglet."
"The aglet," I said.
"And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We're doing the physics of language, Shay."
"The little ring."
"You see it?"
"Yes."
"This is the grommet," he said.
"Oh man."
"The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it."
"I'm going out of my mind."
"This is the final arcan knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs - a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?"
"I don't know."
"A last."
"My head is breaking apart."
"Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said.
"Quotidian."
"An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace."

p. 827

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice [...].

Underworld, 1997.

CHABON, Michael

2010-08-03T06:33:00.003-04:00

p. 119

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world [...] was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring recital, and kabbalistic chitchat - was, literally, talked into life.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 2000.

PLATH, Sylvia

2010-08-03T06:28:00.001-04:00

p. 33

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr Manzi's special red chalk.

The Bell Jar, 1963.

BAKER, Nicholson

2010-08-03T06:23:00.003-04:00

p. 80

I didn't think about the vending machines as I passed them, but I acknowledge their presence in some grateful part of my consciousness, a part equivalent in function to the person in movie credits charged with "continuity", who makes sure that if an actor is wearing a Band-Aid and sitting in front of three pancakes on one day of shooting, the pnacakes and the Band-Aid look exactly the same the next day.

The Mezzanine, 1988.

BAKER, Nicholson

2010-08-03T06:13:00.002-04:00

p. 41

But other things, like gas pumps, ice cube trays, transit buses, or milk containers, have undergone disorienting changes, and the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too far for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory - and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of lost emotion.

The Mezzanine, 1988.

HARTE, Bret

2010-08-03T06:07:00.002-04:00

p. 18

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering campfire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by piney — storytelling. [...] Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem — having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words — in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canyon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the fate of "Ash-heels," as the Innocent persisted on denominating the "swift-footed Achilles."

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" dans The Luck of Roaring Camp & Other Stories, 1968.

MORRISON, Toni

2010-08-03T06:00:00.003-04:00

p. 200

"What did daddy say to you at that AME Zion picnic? The one held for colored soldiers stationed at the base in Tennessee. How could either of you tell what the other was saying? He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must have been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since - no matter what business venture he thinks up."

Paradise, 1997.

BAKER, Nicholson

2010-08-03T05:55:00.002-04:00

p. 58

"This is a miracle," he said.
"It's just a telephone conversation."
"It's a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone."
"Well I like it too," she said. "There's a power it has. [...]"

Vox, 1993.

WALLACE, David Foster

2010-02-07T08:45:00.004-05:00

p. 14

If one can stomach a good dose of simplification, though, there can be seen one deep feature shared by all the cutting-edge fiction that resonates with the post-Hiroshima revolution. That is its fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread. Its unblinking recognition of the fact that the relations between literary artist, literary language, and literary artifact are vastly more complex and powerful than has been realized hitherto. And the insight that is courage’s reward—that it is precisely in those tangled relations that a forward-looking, fertile literary value may well reside.

("Futuristic Fiction and the Conspicuously Young" dans Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1988 - theknowe.net)

McINERNEY, Jay

2009-11-03T21:52:00.002-05:00

p. 22 :

The people in the Verification Department tend to look down on fiction, in which words masquerade as flesh without the backbone of fact. There is a general sense that if fiction isn't dead, it is at least beside the point.

Bright Lights, Big City, 1984.

PALAHNIUK, Chuck

2009-11-01T22:00:00.001-05:00

p. 117 :

Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

Diary, 2003.

PALAHNIUK, Chuck

2009-11-01T21:59:00.001-05:00

p. 67 :

What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.

Diary, 2003.

PALAHNIUK, Chuck

2009-11-01T21:49:00.004-05:00

p. 27 :

He leans into the wall, his face twisting hard against the hole, and says, "This handwriting is so compelling. The way he writes the letter f in 'set foot' and 'fat fucking slob,' the top line is so long it overhangs the rest of the word. That means he's actually a very loving, protective man." He says, "See the k in 'kill you'? The way the front leg is extralong shows he's worried about something."

p. 45 :

Watching any woman talk to Peter Wilmot, you could see her frontalis muscle lifted her forehead into wrinkles, proof she was scared. Peter's top eyelids would be half shut, more like someone angry than looking to fall in love.

Diary, 2003.

McCAFFERY, Larry

2009-11-01T21:47:00.002-05:00

p. xxv :

The ultimate goal, of course, is to be able one day to record - thus capturing it, making it susceptible to human reason and control - everything.

After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, 1995.

McCAFFERY, Larry

2009-11-01T21:42:00.003-05:00

p. xix :

Like the avant-garde, Avant-Pop often relies on the use of radical aesthetic methods to confuse, confound, bewilder, piss off, and generally blow the fuses of ordinary citizens exposed to it (a "deconstructive strategy") - but just as frequently it does so with the intention of creating a sense of delight, amazement, and amusement ("reconstructive").

After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, 1995.

McCAFFERY, Larry

2009-11-01T21:39:00.003-05:00

p. xv :

According to the leading experts of the PoMod Squad, not only had serious art died but so had a lot of other things - including meaning, truth, originality, the author (and authorality generally), realism, even reality itself.

After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, 1995.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T21:35:00.002-05:00

p. 37 :

Le passé simple et la troisième personne du Roman, ne sont rien d'autre que ce geste fatal par lequel l'écrivain montre du doigt le masque qu'il porte.

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T21:33:00.001-05:00

p. 33 :

Le "il" manifeste formellement le mythe [...].

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T21:31:00.001-05:00

p. 33 :

[L'écriture romanesque] a pour charge de placer le masque et en même temps de le désigner.

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T21:27:00.002-05:00

p. 31 :

[L]orsque le Récit est rejeté au profit d'autres genres littéraires, ou bien, lorsqu'à l'intérieur de la narration, le passé simple est remplacé par des formes moins ornementales, plus fraîches, plus denses et plus proches de la parole (le présent ou le passé composé), la Littérature devient dépositaire de l'épaisseur de l'existence, et non de sa signification.

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T21:23:00.003-05:00

p. 30 :

Le passé simple est donc finalement l'expression d'un ordre, et par conséquent d'une euphorie. Grâce à lui, la réalité n'est ni mystérieuse, ni absurde; elle est claire, presque familière, à chaque moment rassemblée et contenue dans la main d'un créateur; elle subit la pression ingénieuse de sa liberté.

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

BARTHES, Roland

2009-11-01T17:21:00.004-05:00

p. 21 :

Ce qui oppose l'écriture à la parole, c'est que la première paraît toujours symbolique, introversée, tournée ostensiblement du côté d'un versant secret du langage, tandis que la seconde n'est qu'une durée de signes vides dont le mouvement seul est significatif. Toute la parole se tient dans cette usure des mots, dans cette écume toujours emportée plus loin, et il n'y a de parole que là où le langage fonctionne avec évidence comme une voration qui n'enlèverait que la pointe mobile des mots; l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est contre-communication, elle intimide.

Le degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953.

WOLFE, Tom

2009-08-20T20:48:00.002-04:00

p. 5 :

"This morning," said Charlie, "I'm only gonna shoot the bobs." Morning came out close to moanin', just as something had come out sump'm. When he was here at Turpmtine, he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was... a man.

A Man in Full, 1998.

STEINBECK, John

2009-06-30T08:00:00.002-04:00

p. 426 :

The last clear definite function of man - muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need - this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take clear lines and forms from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. [...] And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

(The Grapes of Wrath, ch. 14, cité dans The Portable Steinbeck, 1971)

GELBER, Steven M.

2009-06-16T09:33:00.001-04:00

p. 67 :

The metamorphosis of the restrained and distant Victorian father into the engaged and present suburban dad was one of the more significant changes in the structure of the modem family, and the male use of tools around the house was a critical component of that change. Historians Mark Carnes and Clyde Griffen recently asked, « When did Mr. Fixit and the master of the barbecue appear and did these circumscribed modifications in role alter the older division of gender spheres significantly? » This article answers part of that question; « Mr. Fixit » put in his first formal appearance just after the turn of the century, although there had been calls and precursors as early as the 1870s. Furthermore, his appearance did indeed indicate an important alteration of the male sphere. By taking over chores previously done by professionals, the do-it-yourselfer created a new place for himself inside the house. In theory it overlapped with a widening female household sphere, but in practice it was sufficiently distinct so that by end of the 1950s the very term « do-it-yourself » would become part of the definition of suburban husbanding.

("Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity" dans American Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Mar., 1997))

LEWIN, Herbert S.

2009-06-16T09:25:00.002-04:00

p. 169 :

The paragon of the successful, self-reliant, courageous, and self-made man is a traditional American ideal. It is quite certainly the educational ideal of the Boy Scouts of America. But the virtues, which were of vital importance in the frontier period, have lost much of their meaning in a world in which the opportunities for individual achievement and initiative are clearly limited by an economic and social structure, which in spite of fluctuations is pretty well-organized and patterned. Today most youngsters are forced to work under conditions that demand a mechanical and standardized performance rather than individual resourcefulness. Nor is in this society as much opportunity left as heretofore to realize the adventurous and enterprising spirit so often advocated in the Scout literature. Individual achievement in our society is usually based on competition. It does not mean the type of territorial or economic expansion as in the days of unlimited frontier opportunities, rather it means an unrelenting weeding-out of the rival.

("The Way of the Boy Scouts" dans Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Nov., 1947))

SEGAL, Eric J.

2009-06-16T09:17:00.001-04:00

p. 639 :

Having recognized the need to manage adolescence, and bolstered by a tenable theoretical framework, boys’ workers found further incentive for their mission in the nationalistic rhetoric of expansionism that followed the closing of the American frontier. F. J. Turner's 1893 address, « The Significance of the Frontier in American History, » held that the unique national character of the American people was the product of their evolution in confronting the ever-present, though now bygone, frontier. In its place the city increasingly defined American social life at some peril to values established in the conquest of the frontier. Echoing sentiments of the frontier thesis – its nostalgic acknowledgment of the passing of the untamed West and the consequent need for new kinds of frontiers to secure manliness – Daniel Carter Beard, an early BSA leader, argued :

« The Wilderness is gone, the Buckskin Man is gone, the painted Indian has hit the trail over the Great Divide, the hardships and privations of pioneer life which did so much to develop sterling manhood are now but a legend in history, and we must depend upon the Boy Scout Movement to produce the MEN of the future. »

The Boy Scout movement, then, aimed to counteract the debilitating influences of women, the city, and modern life, taken to be the antithesis of the uniquely American experience of the frontier.

("Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity" dans The Art Bulletin, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec., 1996))

SEGAL, Eric J.

2009-06-16T09:14:00.003-04:00

p. 638 :

Other observers characterized city life itself as an enervating influence and a threat to masculinity. One commentator wrote in 1902 that urban parents « are frequently pained to find that their children have less power and less vitality to endure the rough side of life than they have themselves. […] Families who live in the city without marrying country stock for two or three generations […] later are unable to rear strong families. » New working patterns for urban industries drew middle-class men from the home, subjected them to enfeebling work environments, and interrupted traditions of father-son apprenticeships through the intervention of corporations. Medical discourse, too, substantiated fears of modern urban life, identifying neurasthenia as an affliction affecting both men and women of « the in-door-living and brain-working classes. » In boys the disorder was treated with outdoor physical exercise.

To counter the influence of these perceived social developments, a variety of groups sought to shape the character of the nation’s youth, through the general rubric of boys' work. Boys' works organizations in American cities and towns included the popular Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), founded in 1851 to ease the transition of young men arriving for the first time in large cities, and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), formed in 1910. Concerned adults – by profession « boys’ workers » – in urban, rural, and farming communities formed extrascholastic organizations to benefit and manage boys from various classes. Character building, a narrower term than boys’ work, focused specific attention on preparing white, middle-class boys to become responsible men. Through extrascholastic activity designed to discipline youths, character-building groups sought to instill in middle-class boys in particular probity, rectitude, and robust physical health.

("Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity" dans The Art Bulletin, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec., 1996))

TWAIN, Mark

2009-06-16T08:05:00.002-04:00

p. 58 :

[…] and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures, a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping. [...] It was a sore blight to find out afterward that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me until he had come to believe it himself. (p. 58)

(Old Times on the Mississippi, cité dans The Portable Mark Twain, 1985)

PORTELLI, Alessandro

2009-06-16T08:01:00.001-04:00

p. 81 :

America’s fluid frontiers, its composite, mobile, egalitarian democracy, the degree to which it seems, more than any other nation, to live in the present : all these traits are intentionally evoked in American literary writing by the improvisational, digressive, expansive, fluid and time-bound mark of the voice.

(The Text and the Voice, 1994)

HAZARD, Lucy Lockwood

2009-06-16T07:58:00.002-04:00

p. xviii :

[L]ife in America has been conditioned by the perennial rebirth of the frontier. The successive frontiers present a moving picture of American life – moving geographically and chronologically from the Atlantic settlements of the 17th century to the California mining camps of the 19th century ; moving economically from the pathfinder, the trapper, to the exploiter, the land-speculator.

(The Frontier in American Literature, 1967)

KOUWENHOVEN, John A.

2009-06-16T07:56:00.001-04:00

p. 5 :

The least mechanized of all aspects of our society – the lives of men and women on the advancing frontier – depended upon the machine-made rifles and revolvers which enabled the pioneers to kill game and outfight the Indians, upon the steamboats and railroads which opened up new country for settlement, and upon the telegraph which made rapid intercommunication possible.

(The Arts in Modern American Civilization, 1967)

KOUWENHOVEN, John A.

2009-06-16T07:51:00.003-04:00

p. 132 :

These new “folk arts” are […] the product of people directly involved with the dynamic forces of contemporary life […]. In order to distinguish them from the more familiar folk arts, I labeled these the vernacular arts – meaning by that the empirical attempts of ordinary people to shape the elements of their everyday environment in a democratic, technological age. Specifically, I meant the books, buildings and artifacts of all sorts whose forms have been shaped as a direct response to the new elements which democracy and technology have introduced into our environment within the past hundred and fifty years.

(The Beer Can by the Highway : Essays on What’s “American” about America, 1961)

COOVER, Robert

2009-06-16T07:44:00.002-04:00

p. 6 :

Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment – « slick, » as the Evangels put it, « as a snake out of a black skin! » Young Sam, « lank as a leafless elm, » already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse : « Who – Whoo – Whoop! Who’ll come gouge with me? Who’ll come bite with me? Rowff – Yough – Snort – YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon – swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I’m in fer a fight, I’ll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I’ll have to be salted down to save me from spilin’! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin’ to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler – I can ride on a flash of lightnin’, catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-insructabullize the heatin Chinee […]! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a-mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b’ar to death, and made a grizzly sing « Jesus, Lover of My Soul » in a painful duet with his own arsehole – and I have not yet begun to fight! Yippee! I’m wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain’t never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident : […] that nothing is sartin’ but death, taxes, God’s glowin’ Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!

(The Public Burning, 1977)

EGGERS, Dave

2009-06-06T06:04:00.004-04:00

p. 47 :

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the backside of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what's coming to us, each day we're being paid pack for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration - we are owed, goddammit - and so we are expecting everything, everything. [...]

[...] Try to stop us, you pussy! You can't stop us from singing, and you can't stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats. You cannot stop me from having Toph, who is eight, steer, on a straightaway, while I take off my sweatshirt because suddenly it's gotten really fucking hot. [...]

To our right is the Pacific, and because we are hundreds of feet above the ocean, often with nothing in the way of guardrail between us and it, there is sky not only above us but below us, too. Toph does not like the cliff, is not looking down, but we are driving in the sky, with clouds whipping over the road, the sun flickering through, the sky and ocean below. Only up here does the earth look round, only up here does the horizon dip at its ends, only up here can you see the bend of the planet at the edges of your peripheries. Only here you are almost sure that you are careening on top of a big shiny globe, blurrily spinning - you are never aware of these things in Chicago, it being so flat, so straight - and and and we have been chosen, you see, chosen, and have been given this, this being owed to us, earned by us, all of this - the sky is blue for us, the sun makes passing cars twinkle like toys for us, the ocean undulates and churns for us, murmurs and coos to us. We are owed, see, this is ours, see. We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we've ever seen - it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop - hilltops! - every turn on the roads of Berkeley, of San Francisco -

(A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000)

SCHOLES, Robert

2009-05-31T12:43:00.003-04:00

p. 189 :

Les Américains du Nord sont obsédés de leur propre histoire - peut-être parce qu'ils vivent dans un pays qui était lui-même une fiction fabuleuse qui germa dans l'esprit d'hommes tels que Colomb, Hudson et John Smith avant qu'ils ne le découvrent et ne le fondent, et dans l'esprit d'autres hommes tels que Paine, Jefferson et Franklin qui inventèrent ses structures politiques et sociales à partir de leurs idéaux et de leurs espoirs, puis entreprirent, en tant qu'acteurs sur la scène historique, de forger une nation réelle sur la base de leur rêves fabuleux.

En Amérique, le mythe a toujours été plus fort que la réalité, le romantisme plus fort que le réalisme. Ce que Barth, Pynchon et Coover ont tenté de nous donner dans leurs livres n'est rien d'autre que le genre de réalisme que cette culture mérite. [... Leurs livres] nous sont offerts en rémission d'une faute : avoir créé une fable et fait semblant de croire qu'elle était vraie.

(cité dans CHÉNETIER, Marc, Au-delà du soupçon, 1989)

CHASSAY, Jean-François

2009-05-31T12:34:00.002-04:00

p. 9 :

On a peu traité de la littérature américaine en français, dans la perspective qui m'intéresse ici. Il y a à cet égard plusieurs cliché à renverser. Par exemple que, surtout dans sa phase récente, c'est une littérature au mieux "agréable". De Stephen King à John Irving, de Michael Crichton à Gore Vidal, du roman d'horreur au roman historique en passant par le polar, elle serait intellectuellement pauvre et se cantonnerait dans des genres stylistiquement codés, aux frontières claires. Curieusement, l'affirmation selon laquelle la culture américaine serait superficielle vient souvent de ceux-là mêmes qui se piquent de la défendre. On évoque alors son primitivisme, le symbolisme ingénu des grands espaces, la simplicité du vécu qu'elle suit de près. [...] La défense du rock et de la télé devient, chez des critiques hargneux en mal de reconnaissance, une défense des États-Unis contre les intellectuels. Comme si, d'ailleurs, les intellectuels n'écoutaient pas de rock et ne regardaient pas la télé. L'opposition entre littérature française et littérature étasunienne, culture européenne et culture américaine, fait partie de ces manichéismes auxquels on a parfois du mal à s'arracher.

(Fils, lignes, réseaux : Essai sur la littérature américaine, 1999)

COOVER, Robert

2009-05-31T12:29:00.002-04:00

p. 78 :

[T]o this day young authors sally forth in fiction like majestic - indeed, divinely ordained! - picaros to discover, again and again, their manhood.

(Pricksongs & Descants, 1975)

ARENDT, Hannah

2009-05-31T09:29:00.003-04:00

p. 20 :

[L]e passé, dont la portée s’étend jusqu’à l’origine, ne tire pas en arrière mais pousse en avant, et c’est, contrairement à ce que l’on attendrait, le futur qui nous repousse dans le passé. Du point de vue de l’homme, qui vit toujours dans l’intervalle entre le passé et le futur, le temps n’est pas un continuum, un flux ininterrompu; il est brisé au milieu, au point où « il » se tient; et « son » lieu n’est pas le présent tel que nous le comprenons habituellement mais plutôt une brèche dans le temps que « son » combat, « sa » résistance au passé et au futur fait exister.

(La crise de la culture, 1972; cité dans CHASSAY, Jean-François, Dérives de la fin : Science, corps & villes, 2008, p. 57)

CHASSAY, Jean-François

2009-05-29T22:07:00.002-04:00

p. 77 :

En réalité, c'est la radicale nouveauté [du téléphone] comme mode de communication qui fait problème dans le contexte romanesque américain de la fin du siècle. Les présupposés de la "réaction réaliste", dont le développement commence dans le courant des années soixante et étend ses ramifications jusqu'aux publications des "muckrackers" (Upton Sinclair, D. G. Philips) au début du siècle suivant, intégrant un naturalisme à l'américaine, rendent malaisée la présence d'un moyen de transmission de l'information qui ne laisse pas de traces. La volonté de dépeindre, de décrire le plus précisément possible la société américaine, que ce soit pour en faire la critique ou l'apologie, s'oppose à l'immatérialité de la transmission téléphonique.

(Fils, lignes, réseaux. Essai sur la littérature américaine, 1999)

McCARTHY, Cormac

2009-05-29T20:29:00.002-04:00

p. 163 :

Maybe we could give him something to eat.
He stood looking off down the road. Damn, he whispered. He looked down at the old man. Perhaps he'd turn into a god and they to trees. All right, he said.

(The Roads, 2006)

McCARTHY, Cormac

2009-05-28T21:08:00.003-04:00

p. 86 :

At a crossroads they sat in the dusk and he spread out the pieces of the map in the road and studied them. He put his finger down. This is us, he said. Right there. The boy wouldn't look. He sat studying the twisted matrix of routes in red and black with his finger at the junction where he thought that they might be. As if he'd see their small selves crouching there. We could go back, the boy said softly. It's not so far. It's not too late.

(The Road, 2006)

SALINGER, J.D.

2009-05-28T20:54:00.002-04:00

p. 98 :

[...] I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))). I suppose, most unflorally, I trluy mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged - buckle-legged - omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.

(Seymour - An Introduction, 1981 [1963])

KUEHL, John

2009-05-28T20:40:00.006-04:00

p. 62 :

The main characteristics of metafiction are the irrelevance of the individual author and the assumption that literature is collaborative/plagiaristic; the borrowing of characters from one's own and others' work; the fictionalization of the author, who appears in the "unreal"domain of the characters, and the actualization of the characters (often writers), who appear in the "real" domain of the author; the treatment of history as fictitious; the inclusion of unreliable documentation; the projection of linguistic heterocosms or substitute worlds; the tendency to unmask and defamiliarize dead conventions through parody; the employment of arbitrary beginning and multiple endings; the introduction of frames and tales-within-tales, leading to circularity and regressus in infinitum; and the focus on fiction as process rather than product.

(Alternate Worlds, 1989)

KUEHL, John

2009-05-28T20:34:00.004-04:00

P. 289 :

Game-playing is central to this kind of fiction because the world is perceived as verbal rather than phenomenal.

(Alternate Worlds, 1989)