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June 10, 2009
Middle-Class Modernism
There's an interesting article in the New Yorker this week by Louis Menand about the effectiveness creative writing programs. One thing in particular caught my attention with regard to the writer Raymond Carver:“The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization
of shame, a mode of self-retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver (he was from Oregon, where his father was a sawmill worker), deal with the highbrow world of the academy.”
I wonder if anyone has thoughts on how the paragraph above correlates to our chosen medium? Is there a musical equivalent to “middle-class modernism”?
Here's the rest of the article if you're interested:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=2
Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jun 10, 2009 at 11:48 AM