A Public Shaming

Melvin Jules Bukiet looks at the role "wonder" plays in the works of young popular novelists, to almost indescribably hateful results:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/wonder-bukiet.html


Wow! That's not literary criticism, that's the Old Boy hammer fight!

Warning: contains spoilers of just about every popular book published in the last five years. I can't believe that's what The Lovely Bones is really about. And The Secret Life Of Bees! Kisses "like moth wings brushing [her] lips"...Jesus Christ, even JK Rowling laughed at that line.

(Not to be missed in the article is Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch: “The translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”)