Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the ImaginationSex 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. |
Contents
| 3 | |
A Book of Virtues for the Rightthinking Left | 17 |
Sacrificing Saul Bellow on | 26 |
Persecution and the Art of Painting | 48 |
How Artists Slyly Critique Their | 79 |
Barbara Kingsolvers Icy Virtue | 105 |
Television and the Pope | 131 |
Updikes Bech | 139 |
Queer Theory Literature and | 182 |
What the Critics Failed to | 215 |
García Lorca and the Flight from Desire | 232 |
Dante and the Subversive Ego | 243 |
Sundays with The Sopranos | 260 |
A Writer Who Is Good ForYou | 279 |
Bernard Malamud and the Comprehending Heart | 290 |
The Second Coming of Richard Yates | 301 |
The New King of Irony | 151 |
H Lawrence and the Romantic Option | 161 |
Who Is Carrie Bradshaw Really Dating? | 170 |
Chekhovs Cheap White Bone | 313 |
Acknowledgments | 323 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
actually aesthetic American appeared artists Austen Bech become begins Bellow called characters City comes course critics culture Dante dark death describes desire existence experience eyes face fact father feeling fiction figure finally gangster girl give hands happy hard Harry heart human idea imagination intellectual irony Jewish keep killed kind Kingsolver Komar leave literary live look lost meaning Melamid mind moral mother move movie nature needs never novel official once painting perhaps person plays poet political portrays qualities queer realism reality reason references Review Russian Sedgwick seems sense sexual side social socialist society Sopranos Soviet story style talk tells things tion true truth turned woman women writing York young