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was heaved in as an exemplum, but it is five years old, and is a world away from his delicate, entirely 'human' short stories and essays of the past two years, which shy away from the kind of totalizing theoretical and thematic arcs that Wood was gunning for. If anyone has recently learned a lesson
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art generally. In particular, Wood's attacks on DeLillo and
Pynchon clearly echo similar criticisms other critics had already lodged against them a generation earlier. The "hysterical" prose style is often paired with "realistic"—almost journalistic—effects, such as Pynchon's depiction of 18th
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and a few others was sweet enough to mention". Smith qualified the term, though, explaining that "any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna." She also noted:
138:, Moore for their (supposedly) small but, to me, significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation—brain and heart—present in their fiction. Even if you find them obtuse, they can rarely be accused of cliché...
59:. Wood uses the term pejoratively to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being."
30:
typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as
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He decried the genre as an attempt to "turn fiction into social theory," and an attempt to tell readers "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." Wood points to
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People continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV's colonization of all things soulful and human, and I would applaud all the youngish
Americans—Franzen,
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as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own
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about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is
Wallace.
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US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter, says James Wood,
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The Other Side of
Realism: David Foster Wallace & The Hysteric's Discourse
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as the forefathers of the genre, which continues, Wood says, in writers like
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Some books described as examples of hysterical realism are:
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E-rea. Revue Ă©lectronique d'Ă©tudes sur le monde anglophone
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Wood's line of argument echoes many common criticisms of
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Pejorative term to describe certain realist-genre books
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771:"Mannered, Pretty 'Upstate' Is Quiet To A Fault"
53:, which appeared in the July 24, 2000, issue of
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255:A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
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43:Wood introduced the term in an essay on
732:"The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace"
522:"The Year in Ideas; Hysterical Realism"
386:(B.A. thesis). University of Melbourne.
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74:. In response, Zadie Smith described
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730:Lorentzen, Christian (2 July 2015).
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717:Konstantinou, Lee (28 March 2016).
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308:You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
113:, and Don DeLillo's treatment of
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26:to describe what he sees as a
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377:Yates, Elliot J. (May 2014).
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482:PĂ©gon, Claire (2005-10-15).
423:"This is how it feels to me"
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421:Smith, Zadie (2001-10-13).
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228:The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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758:"Clearing away dead Wood?"
667:"Why Write Novels at All?"
126:Yet as Zadie Smith notes,
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584:"The Movies of My Life"
33:recherché postmodernism
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828:Postmodern literature
684:The American Interest
654:"The hysteric moment"
267:The Movies of My Life
181:Wallace, David Foster
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72:David Foster Wallace
838:2000s in literature
833:1990s in literature
172:Midnight's Children
671:The New York Times
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303:Kleeman, Alexandra
289:Eugenides, Jeffrey
134:, Foster Wallace,
76:hysterical realism
20:Hysterical realism
762:Prospect Magazine
590:. 12 October 2003
545:Prospect Magazine
464:. 25 January 2013
275:Franzen, Jonathan
158:Gravity's Rainbow
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569:2020-10-13
468:2018-09-21
432:2007-03-21
364:References
348:Maximalism
200:Underworld
24:James Wood
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500:1638-1718
439:archived.
294:Middlesex
317:See also
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39:History
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