Consuming Silences

J. D. Salinger was an author in 1951 when he published The Catcher in the Rye. Is he one now? Was Henry Roth an author during the sixty years that separated Call It Sleep, his literary debut, from his second novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream? To show us how silence can be produced and consumed as a literary text, Myles Weber takes a provocative look at four revered authors who battled writer's block or simply ceased publishing. The careers of Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth, J. D. Salinger, and Ralph Ellison suggest that an unproductive twentieth-century author could command serious critical attention and remain a literary celebrity by offering the public volumes of silence, which became read and admired like any other text. Weber sees periods of nonpublication as texts that are consumed by the literary public - and sometimes produced deliberately by inactive writers and their handlers. However, his aim is not to criticize individual authors but to reveal connections between literature as a commodity and authorship as a profession. As Weber looks at the particular circumstances of each author's silence, he brings to them an understanding of such topics as the cult of celebrity, intellectual property law, the complicity of the media and the academy in engendering and then maintaining an author's silence, and mass production and distribution. By helping us to look in new ways at authorial silence not just as a biographical fact or a creative problem but also as a marketing opportunity, Consuming Silences injects energy into debates about the nature of literary production and the cultural place of authors who do not publish.

ISBN 0820326992   Pages 168 ISBN13 9780820326993 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher University of Georgia Press   Weight (grammes) 277 Imprint University of Georgia Press   Published in Georgia Format Paperback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 30 Apr 2005   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2004018186   Spine width (mm) 13 DEWEY 813.509   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

Ch. 1		Tillie Olsen and the question of silenced literature		14
Ch. 2		Henry Roth's second high-modernist masterpiece		45
Ch. 3		The revised edition of Henry Roth's silence		66
Ch. 4		Augmenting the Salinger oeuvre by any means		88
Ch. 5		Subsequent thresholds to Invisible man		117

"For anyone who has ever wondered: What ever happened to... you know, that guy who wrote...? Miles Weber's Consuming Silences has an answer. This deliciously nasty study dissects why and how authors create 'careers of silence,' sustaining reputations for decades without publishing anything new." - Paula Rabinowitz, author of Black & White & Noir"

 Be the first to write a customer review