Wood's Opinions
Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is making aesthetic judgments."
Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth".
Read more about this topic: James Wood (critic)
Famous quotes containing the words wood and/or opinions:
“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”
—Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970)
“A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)