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#12
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
Has this happened in fiction before, and/or is it common where an
author seems to take aim at another? Obviously in Academia, dissenting ideas get published regularly, but what about fiction? And of coiurse, one could consider George Orwell's 1984, Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon, and Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich as responses to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Vladimir Lenin's What Is To Be Done... Those were all responses to Stalinist practice rather than to anything Marx or Lenin wrote, and in Orwell's case you'd be hard put to find any major disagreements with Marx at least. I don't think any of them even quotes or alludes to anything *Stalin* wrote. Anyway the OP was more interested in ideological fiction vs. other ideological fictions rather than ideological fiction vs. a manifesto or political system. (Voltaire's _Candide_ might be the earliest of those). Some more that come to mind: - Cervantes's _Don Quixote_ vs. any number of chivalric romances - Christine de Pisan's _The Book of the City of Ladies_ vs. _The Romance of the Rose_ ============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ============== Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975 stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557 |
#13
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
Those were all responses to Stalinist practice rather than to anything Marx or Lenin wrote BEEEEPP!!! I'm sorry, you don't win the microwave! Anyone actually familiar with Lenin's writings would realize he was every bit as bloodthirsty and ruthless as Stalin, he just didn't have time to kick the Gulag up into high gear the way Old Joe did, though its outline can already be found as earky as 1918 when the firwst Soviet forced labor camps were set up, or even earlier in the purge of the Menshaviks right after seizing power. And don't forget his famous quote in response to relief efforts for the volga famine: "Psychologically, this talk of feeding the starving is nothing but an expression of the saccharine-sweet sentimentality so characteristic of our intelligentsia." The idea that evil Stalin corrupted Lenin's pure vision is a self-serving fantasy by those who still believe in Marxism. But thanks for playing! As a consolation prize, please pick up a copy of Adam SMith's The Wealth of Nations, available at a Project Gutenberg repository near you! Lawrence Person Lame Excuse Books http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html |
#14
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
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#15
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
Dave wrote:
On 26 Jun 2006 17:16:52 -0700, wrote: ... Warren Zevon's "All Night Long"... . Quite a talent lost. "Dolan, the Headless Thompson Gunner" and the rest. I believe you mean "ROLAND, The Headless Thompson Gunner," n'est ce pas? http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/rolandth.htm |
#16
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
Jack Campin - bogus address wrote: wrote: An Anonymous Coward wrote: That is utterly offensive ****e. I have my real name, postal address, and phone number in my signature, and have had it there for more than 20 years and something like 20,000 Usenet posts. Can you say as much, you gutless little slime? Having read a lot of the anarchist literature about Lenin, I am well aware of what he was like, and I'm none too impressed with Orwell either. Well, then maybe YOU can write one of the most famous novels of the twenty-FIRST century to show him up. But I don't see that as a justification for portraying Orwell as a sort of prefigurative Richard Perle, which I guess is what you're up to. There are some ascertainable historical facts about what he thought. People always make a mistake when they drag in a novelist's politics, or what they think is his politics. Anyone who is in the used book business can likely tell you that 1984 remains one of the most requested novels by a Twentieth Century author who has been gone a couple of generations -- and for 'the most part is read by people who could care less about Orwell's politics. In a sense, people make the same mistake with "1984" that they make with Heinlein's "Puppetmasters." In the case of the latter, people often take a simplistic approach holding that Heinlein was merely commenting on communism. The reality is that he was likely commenting -- if we want to take his terrifying story as anything beyond sheer entertainment -- on a pernicious tendency in human nature, a tendency which became overt not only in communism, but also in Nazism, and, I suspect, Heinlein would agree, in the terrorist groups of today. When people start making suicide attacks on innocent people, then something just as pernicious as Heinlein's Puppetmasters (a novel which should be required reading for anyonce seeking a better understanding of Al Quaida) .has gotten hold of their nervous systems... But getting back to 1984, technology being what it is today, any sort of totalitarian government could institute a surveillance system far more through than what Orwell depicted. That is very basic knowledge to likely all "1984" readers, which is one good reason why the novel remains scary stuff.. [Memo from the upstairs office.] ============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ============== Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975 stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557 |
#17
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
Dave wrote: On 26 Jun 2006 17:16:52 -0700, wrote: Tsk, I should have remembered 1984 at least from Lit class, but it was always scheduled in the morning .... That strikes me as a bit bizarre, because almost any person of normal reading ability EXPERIENCES "1984" and could not forget the story if he wanted to. We are not talking about multiple story lines and dozens of characters to keep track of, after all. You have never experienced the novel, or you would be thoroughly ashamed to post such a comment (though you are to be preferred to the literary poseurs -- too many of which hang out in misc.writing -- trying to impress others by pretending to have read and understood books that their posted comments reveal them to be little-acquainted with). [Memo from the upstairs office] Lawrence Person Lame Excuse Books Stock available online at www.tomfolio.com (searched by www.bookfinder.com), or at: http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html Thanks again, Dave |
#18
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
On 27 Jun 2006 15:43:02 -0700, wrote:
Dave wrote: On 26 Jun 2006 17:16:52 -0700, wrote: Tsk, I should have remembered 1984 at least from Lit class, but it was always scheduled in the morning .... That strikes me as a bit bizarre, because almost any person of normal reading ability EXPERIENCES "1984" and could not forget the story if he wanted to. That's a pretty broad generalization. I consider myself to be a person with 'normal reading ability' and I didn't "experience 1984". I slogged through it, hating every minute. Maybe it would have been more powerful had I read it at a different stage in my life (I think I was in freshman high school English, so I was, oh, about 13. Might have been sophmore year, that would make me 14.) I slogged through Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 the same year. Hated them, as well. I don't think I was ready for overt socio-political commentary in my fiction yet. Barb -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com |
#19
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:06:11 GMT, Dave wrote:
... Warren Zevon's "All Night Long"... . Quite a talent lost. "Dolan, the Headless Thompson Gunner" and the rest. Minor quibble: "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." Easy error to make. |
#20
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Dueling authors.... well, ideas anyway.
Barbara Bailey wrote: On 27 Jun 2006 15:43:02 -0700, wrote: Dave wrote: On 26 Jun 2006 17:16:52 -0700, wrote: Tsk, I should have remembered 1984 at least from Lit class, but it was always scheduled in the morning .... That strikes me as a bit bizarre, because almost any person of normal reading ability EXPERIENCES "1984" and could not forget the story if he wanted to. That's a pretty broad generalization. I consider myself to be a person with 'normal reading ability' and I didn't "experience 1984". I slogged through it, hating every minute. Maybe it would have been more powerful had I read it at a different stage in my life (I think I was in freshman high school English, so I was, oh, about 13. Might have been sophmore year, that would make me 14.) I slogged through Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 the same year. Hated them, as well. I don't think I was ready for overt socio-political commentary in my fiction yet. Interesting. I have never understood "1984" to be socio-political commentary, though. For me, it is more like science fiction with a terrifying warning. After all, I think few people would deny that there is a tendency in human nature toward the creation of a "big brother (or "big sister," for that matter) state. The technology of today is already far advanced over what the ruling elite of Orwell's novel employed to acheive their means. It's very scary, and it certainly could still happen. That is characteristic of a type of science fiction when successful. "Fahrenheit 451" is one of my favorites. Would you deny that there is also a tendency in human nature toward thought control through means such as book burning? Neither of us was around when the Nazi's were burning books in the 1930's, but I have certainly seen horrifying photos of it. And we have had all sorts of attempted censorship in the U. S., from Dr. Wertham's anti- comic book crusade of the early 1950's, to people demanding that Huckleberry Finn be removed from the library (to cite only a couple of drops in the attempted-censorship bucket). So why is "Fahrenheit 451" with its fireman who burn books instead of putting out fires such a stretch for you? [Memo from the upstairs office] Barb -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com |
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