Joseph Heller, Catch-22 and the Literature of War: a Selective

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 and the Literature of War: a Selective Joseph Heller, Catch-22 and the Literature of War: A Selective Bibliography Compiled by Professor Christine S. Fagan and Adam Riccitelli In conjunction with the Eleventh Annual Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Lecture February 2011 Many of these titles were acquired through the Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Library Fund Joseph Heller and Catch-22: A Selective Bibliography CONTENTS Heller, Joseph .......................................................................................... 1 Works authored by Joseph Heller Heller, Joseph .......................................................................................... 2 Works about Joseph Heller War and Literature .................................................................................. 3 Works about War and Literature War in Literature ..................................................................................... 4 Works about War in Literature Heller, Joseph (Author) Catch-22. Dir. Mike Nichols. Prod. John Calley and Martin Ransohoff. Perf. Martin Sheen, Jon Voigt, Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, and Richard Benjamin. Hollywood:Paramount, 2001. DVD. Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Knopf, 1995. ---. Catch-22: A Dramatization. New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. ---. Catch-22: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. ---. Catch as Catch can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. ---. Closing Time: A Novel. New York. Simon & Schuster, 1994. ---. God Knows. 1st trade ed. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1984. ---. Good as Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. ---. Picture this. New York: Putnam, 1988. ---. Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. London, Scribner, 2000. ---. Something Happened. New York: Knopf, 1974. ---. We Bombed in New Haven; a Play. New York: Knopf, 1968. ---. We Bombed in New Haven: A Play in Two Acts. New York: S. French, 1969. 1 Heller, Joseph (Subject) Bloom, Harold. Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Philadelphia:Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Park Bucker. Joseph Heller: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller's Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Heller, Joseph. Now and Then: From Coney Island to here. 1st trade ed. New York: Knopf, 1998. Heller, Joseph and Speed Vogel. No Laughing Matter. New York: Putnam, 1986. Kiley, Frederick T and Walter McDonald, eds. A Catch-22 Casebook. New York: Crowell, 1973. Keegan, Brenda. Joseph Heller: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Merrill, Robert. Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Nagel, James. Critical Essays on Catch-22. Encino: Dickenson Pub. Co., 1974. ---, ed. Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984. Pinsker, Sanford. Understanding Joseph Heller. Rev. ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Potts, Stephen W. Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991. Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Sorkin, Adam J, ed. Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. 2 War and Literature (Subject) Acton, Carol. Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Beck, John. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Maravall, Jose A. Utopia and Counterutopia in the "Quixote". Trans. Robert W Felkel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Norris, Margot. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2006. Usandizaga , Aránzazu and Andrew Monnickenda, eds. Back to Peace: Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. 3 War in Literature (Subject) Adams, Jon R. Male Armor: The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Agnew, Kate and Geoff Fox. Children at War: From the First World War to the Gulf. Continuum, 2001. ebrary. Alexander, Caroline. The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War. New York : Viking, 2009. Baracchi, Claudia. Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato's Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Beidler, Philip D. Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in their Generation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Bonadeo, Alfredo. Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Carpenter, Charles A. Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945- 1964. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999. Coffee, Neil. The Commerce of War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Cooke, Miriam. War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. 1st Syracuse University Press ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. ---.Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Croft, Janet Brennan. War and the Works of JRR Tolkien. Westport: Praeger, 2004. Crotty, Kevin. The Poetics of Supplication: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 4 Dawes, James. The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the US from the Civil War through World War II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Echevarria, Antulio J. II. Imagining Future War: The West's Technological Revolution and Visions of Wars to Come, 1880-1914. Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007. Evans, Stephen S. The Lords of Battle: Image and Reality of the Comitatus in Dark-Age Britain. Rochester: Boydell Press, 1997. Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Foakes, R.A. Shakespeare and Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Rev. and expand ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Gannon, Charles E. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines : Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham: Rowman & Littefield Publishers, 2005. Goldberg, Nancy Sloan. "Woman, Your Hour is Sounding": Continuity and Change in French Women's Great War Fiction, 1914-1919. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Hackett, Robin, Fred Hauser, and Gay Wachman. At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the 1930s. Newark:University of Delaware Press, 2009. Haytock, Jennifer A. At Home, at War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. James, Jennifer C. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 5 Johnston, Ian C. The Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad. Lanham: University Press of America, 1988. Jones, Peter G. War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Jordan, Heather Bryant. How Will the Heart Endure?: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Leonard, Thomas C. Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Materer, Timothy. James Merrill's Apocalypse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. McLoughlin, Kate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Melling, Philip H. Vietnam in American Literature. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Meron, Theodor. Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ebrary. ---. Henry's Wars and Shakespeare's Laws: Perspectives on the Law of War in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. Middleton, Peter and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing. New York:Manchester University Press, 2000. Murrin, Michael. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Paris, Michael. Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000. London: Reaktion, 2000. Rossi, Andreola. Contexts of War: Manipulation of Genre in Virgilian Battle Narrative. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Ryan, Maureen. The Other Side of Grief: The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the Vietnam War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. 6 Talley, Sharon. Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Tatum, James. The Mourner's Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Tylee, Claire M. The
Recommended publications
  • Jonathan Greenberg
    Losing Track of Time Jonathan Greenberg Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation tells a story of doing nothing; it is an antinovel whose heroine attempts to sleep for a year in order to lose track of time. This desire to lose track of time constitutes a refusal of plot, a satiric and passive- aggressive rejection of the kinds of narrative sequences that novels typically employ but that, Moshfegh implies, offer nothing but accommodation to an unhealthy late capitalist society. Yet the effort to stifle plot is revealed, paradoxically, as an ambi- tion to be achieved through plot, and so in resisting what novels do, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends up showing us what novels do. Being an antinovel turns out to be just another way of being a novel; in seeking to lose track of time, the novel at- tunes us to our being in time. Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.1 For a long time I used to go to bed early.2 he first of these sentences begins Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novelMy Year of Rest and Relaxation; the second, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. More ac- T curately, the second sentence begins C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, whose French reads, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” D. J. Enright emends the translation to “I would go to bed”; Lydia Davis and Google Translate opt for “I went to bed.” What the translators famously wrestle with is how to render Proust’s ungrammatical combination of the completed action of the passé composé (“went to bed”) with a modifier (“long time”) that implies a re- peated, habitual, or everyday action.
    [Show full text]
  • Reciprocity in Experimental Writing, Hypertext Fiction, and Video Games
    UNDERSTANDING INTERACTIVE FICTIONS AS A CONTINUUM: RECIPROCITY IN EXPERIMENTAL WRITING, HYPERTEXT FICTION, AND VIDEO GAMES. A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2015 ELIZABETH BURGESS SCHOOL OF ARTS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 2 LIST OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Materially Experimental Writing 30 1.1 Introduction.........................................................................................30 1.2 Context: metafiction, realism, telling the truth, and public opinion....36 1.3 Randomness, political implications, and potentiality..........................53 1.4 Instructions..........................................................................................69 1.41 Hopscotch...................................................................................69 1.42 The Unfortunates........................................................................83 1.43 Composition No. 1......................................................................87 1.5 Conclusion...........................................................................................94 Chapter Two: Hypertext Fiction 96 2.1 Introduction.........................................................................................96 2.2 Hypertexts: books that don’t end?......................................................102 2.3 Footnotes and telling the truth............................................................119
    [Show full text]
  • "Palinodes and Palindromes"
    "Palinodes and Palindromes" STAN FOGEL, University of St. Jerome's College An interesting phenomenon in contemporary fiction, or at least that strain of it variously called metafiction, surfiction, or postmodernism, and practised by, among others, John Barth, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, is the proliferation of palinodes and palindromes, both literal and figurative. In Letters, for instance, Harold Bray writes that he longs to discover "History's palindrome."1 In Snow White, Paul is said to be "writing a palinode." 'Perhaps it is wrong to have favorites among the forms,' he reflected, 'But retraction has a special allure for me. I would wish to retract everything, if I could, so that the whole written world would be .. .'"2 Certainly, retraction has a special allure for those writers who eschew linear, sequential narrative, what might be called teleological fiction; who reject the notion that language is a window onto the world; who are sensitive to the poststructuralist tenet enunciated by Michel Foucault in "The Discourse on Language" that discourse is not a neutral conduit between reality and its meaning. Retraction, then, is a way of debunking the whole theory of representation: "We must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of speech altogether."' The palinode and palindrome, in which one ends where one begins, are excellent media of retraction. In them nothing has been displaced; all has been erased, and this without disappearing. In the palinode one writes or says something, then one denies it; in the palindrome one traverses a series of letters only to turn around when one reaches the end of that series in order to return to the beginning.
    [Show full text]
  • OLD TESTAMENT SURVEY Lesson 26 – Part 1 David – the Bathsheba Affair
    OLD TESTAMENT SURVEY Lesson 26 – Part 1 David – The Bathsheba Affair On July 21, 1683, the University of Oxford issued a Judgment and Decree…against certain pernicious Books, and damnable Doctrines, destructive to the sacred Persons of Princes, their State and Government, and of all human Society. This publication was the basis for the last government-sanctioned book burning in England (also occurring in Oxford). Among those books burned was Lex, Rex, written by the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford. The book was cited by Oxford for the dangerous doctrine that “if lawful governors become tyrants, or govern otherwise than by the laws of God and man…they forfeit the right they had unto government.”1 Rutherford’s book was alarming to the realm because even its title was against the King’s interest. Lex is Latin for “law,” and Rex is Latin for “king.” The title Lex Rex puts the law as over the king rather than the king over the law. Within the book, in response to the question “whether the king be above the law,” Rutherford wrote, “The law hath a supremacy of constitution above the king.”2 In part of his argument, Rutherford reached back to the Biblical account of King Saul noting, God, in making Saul a king, doth not by any royal stamp give him a power to sin, or to play the tyrant.3 Rutherford is right for Saul, and also for his successor, King David. As we consider David in this lesson, we see that he found a time where he violated in rapid succession three of the Ten Commandments, but not without dire consequence to him and to his family.
    [Show full text]
  • Language and the System: the Closed World of Joseph Heller's Fiction
    Nalional Library Bibliothèque nalionale .+. of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions et Bibliographie Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Streel 395. rue Wellinglon Ottawa. Q:ltario Ottawa (Ontario) K1AON4 K1AON4 NOTICE AVIS The quality of this microform is La qualité de cette microforme heavily dependent upon the dépend grandement de la qualité quality of the original thesis de la thèse soumise au submitted for microfilming. microfilmage. Nous avons tout Every effort has been made to fait pour assurer une qualité ensure the highest quality of supérieure de reproduction. reproduction possible. If pages are missing, contact the S'il manque des pages, veuillez university which granted the communiquer avec l'université degree. qui a conféré le grade. Some pages may have indistinct La qualité d'impression de print especially if the original certaines pages peut laisser à . pages were typed with a poor désirer, surtout si les pages typewriter ribbon or if the originales ont été university sent us an inferior dactylographiées à l'aide d'un photocopy. ruban usé ou si l'université nous a fait parvenir une photocopie de qualité inférieure. Reproduction in full or in part of La reproduction, même partielle, this microform is governed by de cette mlcroforme est soumise the Canadian Copyright Act, à la Loi canadienne sur le droit R.S.C. 1970, c. C-30, and d'auteur, SRC 1970, c. C-30, et subsequent amendments. ses amendements subséquents. Canada LANGUAGE AND THE SYSTEM: THE CLOSED WORLD OF • JOSEPH HELLER'S FICTION By René Rojas A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS • Approved: Yehudi Lindeman Professor of Literature McGill University Montreal, Quebec • June 1994 National Ubrary Bibliothèque nationale .+.
    [Show full text]
  • 6637 Caws & Delville.Indd
    The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem 66637_Caws637_Caws & DDelville.inddelville.indd i 110/09/200/09/20 11:28:28 PPMM Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Published The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf Edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria and the Arts Nikolajeva Edited by Maggie Humm The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Studies Literatures in English Edited by Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott Edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Literatures in English Isobel Baxter Edited by David Johnson and Prem Poddar The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literature, Culture and the Arts Literatures – Continental Europe and its Edited by Josephine M. Guy Empires Edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke and The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Lars Jensen Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth- Century British and American War The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Literature Narrative Theories Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rowlinson Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope and the Arts Edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton and Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Ortwin Graef Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett in English and the Arts Edited by Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter Edited by S.
    [Show full text]
  • The Theme of Wwii in Joseph Heller's Novel “Catch-22”
    European Journal of Research and Reflection in Educational Sciences Vol. 8 No. 2, 2020 Part II ISSN 2056-5852 THE THEME OF WWII IN JOSEPH HELLER’S NOVEL “CATCH-22” Maftuna Do’sqobilovna Suyunova, Ubaydullayeva Maftunakhon Omonboyev kizi Lecturers of Chair of Foreign languages for the direction of Natural Science. National University of Uzbekistan, Tashkent e-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT This article is devoted to the theme and time –structure of the American writer Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22”. In addition, the author uses black humor in his novel in order to highlights that with the help of humor the author demonstrates the absurdity, anxiety and bureaucracy of the war. As well as the time and structure are also arguable thing in this novel. Keywords: WWII, Joseph Heller, Catch-22, anachronies, time, structure, black humor or dark humor. INTRODUCTION World War II began in 1939 and lasted for 6 years until 1945. It is important to say that WWII was the deadliest conflict in all of human history. It involved more countries, cost more money and killed more people than any other war in the human history. It is obvious from history not only the Uzbeks but also the Ukrains, Russians, Kazakhs, Americans, British and other nations fight against the enemies courageously. It is generally estimated that more than fifty million people lost their lives in the Second World War. Gruesome acts, in which both soldiers and civilians were dying because of absurd desire of some individuals to gain control over the whole world, are not rare in the novels and the way such deeds are depicted is almost breath-taking.
    [Show full text]
  • Z:\1UIL\Litcrit\Litcrit Concepts Books\Concepts 2
    Literary Criticism Concepts Volume 2: Terms eee Jennifer Bussey eee © 2010 HEXCO ACADEMIC • PO Box 199 • Hunt, Texas 78024 • 1-800-391-2891 Congratulations! We salute you! You are traveling down the road that will clarify some of the complexities of the multitude of literary terms competitors should know! For students seeking expertise in Literary Criticism, this edition of our Literary Concepts makes getting the "big picture" a breeze with easy-to-understand lists, tables, and charts. Volume 1, Literary History, gives context with at-a-glance overviews of periods and major writers in each period. Volume 2, Literary Terms, is organized by genre, with chapters on poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and more. Volume 3, Essay Skills, makes "sizing up" selections less daunting and can help turn shaky writers into concise, creative ones. This volume also helps students understand what judges are expecting and includes how-to's for pulling an essay together from beginning to end. The author, Jennifer Bussey, is the author of all of our Literary Criticism products for UIL as well as our Ready Writing products. She completed her undergraduate degree in English and has a Master's Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. Bussey is currently an independent writer specializing in literature; her work appears in reference books released nationally by major educational publishers, including Contemporary Authors, Poetry for Students, Novels for Students, Epics for Students, Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, and Literature of Developing Nations. Her work also appeared on the Web and in national magazines, and she recently completed her second anthology for Events that Shaped History.
    [Show full text]
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Morality-Myth in the Antinovel
    Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Morality-Myth in the Antinovel DAVID MYERS, University of Adelaide In his seven novels to date, from Player Piano to Breakfast of Champions,1 Vonnegut has contributed to the creation of a mythology .of our times.2 In much the same way as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises captured the mood of the lost generation, and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath the bitterness of the thirties depression, Vonnegut has expressed the authentic spirit of the nuclear age generation. World-weary, pessimistic, cynical, and flippant, Vonnegut is tolerant of human behavior to the point of being overindulgent, sadly convinced that human beings cannot be otherwise than the monsters that they are, and yet paradoxically given to both satire and sermon as though driven on by a hope beyond hopelessness that he may yet turn man from his stupidity and evil. It is the aim of this article to examine the morality myth that Vonnegut has created and at the same time to characterize features of the antinovel with which he expresses this myth. By means of this analysis I hope to demonstrate that Vonnegut's popularity is not to be ascribed to a mere fad, but that in content and form he has represented an important aspect of the outlook of our age. Aesthetically, Vonnegut's early works owe much to science fiction and the canons of Pop Art,3 but his art transcends their hackneyed conventions and should be regarded as serious and original literature. Fiedler contends that we should regard Vonnegut's novels as Pop Art because they focus on fantasy, myth, plot, and entertainment rather than on characterization and demanding symbolism.
    [Show full text]
  • Closing Time: a Novel Free
    FREE CLOSING TIME: A NOVEL PDF Joseph Heller | 464 pages | 25 Sep 1995 | SIMON & SCHUSTER | 9780684804507 | English | New York, United States The New York Times: Book Review Search Article If your first novel happens to have been "Catch" -- 10 million copies sold and a phrase added to the language -- just about any follow-up will be judged a letdown. Joseph Heller's fate was to have his four successor novels in variably compared, usually unfavorably, to their mighty predecessor. Now, 33 years after his literary debut, Mr. Heller has given us not just a successor, but the sequel to "Catch Yet, surprisingly enough, he has more than got away with it. Although "Closing Time" won't astonish readers with its inventive brilliance and surprise after all, they've read "Catch"it contains a richness of narrative tone and of human Closing Time: A Novel lacking in the earlier book. Best to admit, however, that I am far from the ideal reader of "Catch"; I didn't and still don't find its black humor as the phrase used to be all that humorous, compared, say, to that of Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth or Lenny Bruce. Its length and relative shapelessness are also problems. Norman Mailer wrote that you could cut "Catch" anywhere, like yard goods, and that if you removed pages from its middle not even Mr. Heller himself would know Closing Time: A Novel were gone. Several academic essays have since been written, proving the novel is full of "structure," but that's what English professors like to do.
    [Show full text]
  • An Exploration of Cather's Early Writing
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 1982 An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing Bernice Slote University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Slote, Bernice, "An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing" (1982). Great Plains Quarterly. 1636. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1636 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING BERNICE SLOTE Willa Cather has been fairly well studied as a thought, the design grander, the problems novelist of the Nebraska pioneer, a writer more complex. whose books have a lyric nostalgia for other Perhaps we are better equipped to address times that were nicer than ours. This maybe those problems now. More than a half century an oversimplification. One might say, for exam­ has passed since she did her major work, but ple, that she wrote about Nebraska no more the gap that sometimes comes between the than she wrote about Rome; that it was not artist's creation and the reader's understanding man's retreat that concerned her so much as may be a time for the tuning of the ear. Critical man's extension into other planes, other powers; terms and concepts now at hand seem curiously that she may belong not with Sinclair Lewis appropriate: alienation and the search for and Edith Wharton but with Marcel Proust, identity, archetype and myth, antinovel and James Joyce, and Thomas Mann.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael C. Scoggins Joseph Heller's Combat Experiences in Catch-22
    Michael C. Scoggins Joseph Heller’s Combat Experiences in Catch-22 n the forty-one years since the initial publication of Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s best-selling 1961 novel about World War II, the book has been a favorite subject for analysis and commentary, and an enormous bodyI of literary criticism on the work has been published. There have been numerous essays on the novel’s structure, its debt to other works of literature, its humor and logic, its moral and ethical values, and its religious themes and mythical overtones (Nagel 4). However, Heller’s treat- ment of the war itself has received scant attention by most critics. A few writers have compared Catch-22 to other war novels, especially the novels of Ernest Hemingway (Nolan 77-81; Aubrey 1-5), and David M. Craig has written two essays for War, Literature and the Arts demonstrating how Catch-22 incorporated some of Heller’s own combat experiences (Craig “Revisited,” 33-41; Craig “Avignon,” 27-54). But the majority of Heller’s crit- ics have taken the stance that Catch-22 has very little to do with World War II and is in fact not a war novel at all (Kiley and McDonald v; Merrill Joseph Heller, 11). Heller himself consistently minimized the war’s influence on the novel in many of his statements and interviews. For instance, in a 1970 speech in New York City, he told his audience that “Catch-22 is not really about World War II” (Heller “Translating,” 357), and in a 1975 interview he reiterated those sentiments: “As I’ve said, Catch-22 wasn’t really about World War Two.
    [Show full text]