Falling Upwards
Essays in Defense of the Imagination
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- US$21.99
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- US$21.99
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Sex and the City, Saul Bellow, Eyes Wide Shut, Dante and the American self, Barbara Kingsolver, acting in Hollywood, Soviet painting in Soho, Angels in America, Jane Austen in the present, J.K. Rowling -- nothing escapes Lee Siegel's incandescent eye. Siegel possesses an intellectual range and independent perspective unmatched by his peers, and Falling Upwards brings together the best of his essays, all of them rich with the trades mark wit and intelligence that have won him many friends and a few enemies. In these essential writings, Siegel deftly uses the occasion of a book, film, painting, or television show not merely to appraise it, but to make sense of life in a way that is more defiant of impoverished cultural "norms" than most contemporary artistic expression. Guided by the belief that a calculating self-interest in art-making diminishes the prospects for the imagination in life, Siegel celebrates authentic sensibilities and lambasts manufactured sentiments. With uncanny insight, yet also with incomparable logic and analytical rigor, he has invented a new idiom in which the language of criticism embodies the playful, creative, synthesizing power that has been largely abdicated by the arts in our time. In writing about works of culture, Siegel has created a standard by which to judge them.
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Is the increasingly permeable border between art and life leading to a world in which the arts can no longer create meaningful original experiences? Celebrated critic Lee Siegel tackles this question and others in a collection of essays that restore creativity and joie de vivre to the art of criticism. Sigel claims that in an age of irony, commodification and self-interest, "the work of art itself has come under suspicion," making it "harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to ... trivializing media." As a result, contemporary artists "have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end" and contemporary criticism is reduced to "a cautious blandness." As a corrective, Siegel's witty and piercing gaze meanders from J.K. Rowling to D.H. Lawrence, from Stanley Kubrick to Kevin Spacey, reinvigorating both over- (Harry Potter) and under-analyzed (Ilya Repin) topics with rare lan. Even in the heavily-tread territory of popular culture, Siegel uncovers fertile ground for new insight, criticizing the critics on their views of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and proposing a new method of understanding the popularity of Rowling's "children's" books. Siegel's focus ranges so far afield that few readers will be grabbed by every topic, but the strength of his writing will draw readers into such obscure subjects as Soviet social realist painting and Dante's career in Florentine politics. After all, the critic must operate not as a glorified reviewer, says Siegel, but as a true writer who is "witty, and course, and antic, and subtle." This collection should convince even the most cynical reader that such criticism is still possible.
