BLOG   ABOUT   MY-BOOKSHOP   ALL POSTS  MORE   

John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

The contextualist critic admits that the writer does indeed have, as the didactic critics insist, strong convictions and deep feelings about moral questions. And these convictions and feelings are often at the centre of his creative impulse. But he also sees that, when the writing is at its best, when the writer is caught up in his creation, these personal convictions and feelings are usually shaken. As W.H. Auden has said, the writer's beliefs are "sacrificed to the poem." As a result, when a modern critic examines the poem or the novel, he usually finds ambiguity and irony, ambivalence and paradox. To do otherwise, to insist as some critics still do, that a great work must furnish us with a noble idea, or an unambiguous morality, usually implies that we must sacrifice the poem to our beliefs. Lawrence H Hyman

Latest Posts

Five things Feminism has done for me

Crimeficreader has done tagged me again. My first impulse was to run, and I did, round and round and ended up in the same position, but panting. I’m not going to tag anyone else.

Thanks for a continuing parade of new things to read, and especially for Charlote Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wall-Paper.

Thanks for improving my quality of life and stripping away some of the veils that forced me to look at our existence with archaic perceptions. And for challenging long established conceptions of gender, sex rolls, etc.

For improving my sense of self and fostering the certainty that the things you don’t like about life can be changed.

For encouraging me to live with an equal partner instead of the infantalized construct I was brought up to expect.

For giving my daughters the knowledge that it is possible to do anything regardless of gender and for allowing them to be treated on an equal footing in law. For granting them the right to vote. For allowing them to own their own money, house, furniture, etc.

For widening the spectrum of women’s work from teacher, housewife, nun, nurse, whore, skivvy and cook, to almost anything.

For changing the culture in which we live.

For allowing us to dream.

Is that five?

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed

Must reads

Out Stealing Timber I
Looking to be understood?
A Writer’s Notebook I
(La Peste) The Plague by Albert Camus - a review
Saddest Books Revisited
The Glass Menagerie - a review
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Bhagdad Burning
Five things Feminism has done for me
Learning to Write I
Read extracts from my novels

Recent Comments