Publisher's Synopsis
The Web of What Is Written has two parts. The first consists of a reading of eight novels--Madame Bovary, A Raw Youth, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Crying of Lot 49, The Castle, In Search of Lost Time, and them--in which the reader sees a common pattern, centering on the writer's relation to the reader and the community, a pattern which she relates to a decline both of literature and of social coherency. The second part brings together writings of Peter Kropotkin, Simone Weil, and Laura (Riding) Jackson with Black Elk Speaks, various Hasidic stories, and Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, to suggest an alternate, more constructive pattern of relations among writer, reader and community. The book has an element of reader-response criticism, but it also focuses on the writer's relation to the prospective reader, particularly the female reader, so that there is also an element of feminist criticism. Present throughout the book are the influences of Dante, Paul Celan, and the Jewish tradition.
