Aspects of the Novel - by E.M. Forster, 1956
Open at random, and find your attention utterly sandbagged. Forster’s book is a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as “People,” “The Plot,” and “The Story.” It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: “Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad.” Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster’s critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that readers often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably paints. As he himself points out in the introductory note, “Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows.”
Posted by beanybabe at 8:32 PM PST
