Selby Wynn Schwartz
Autore di After Sappho: A Novel
Sull'Autore
Selby Wynn Schwartz is Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University.
Fonte dell'immagine: Selby Wynn Schwartz
Opere di Selby Wynn Schwartz
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Schwartz, Selby Wynn
- Nome legale
- Schwartz, Selby Wynn
- Data di nascita
- 1975
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- USA
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 6
- Utenti
- 292
- Popolarità
- #80,152
- Voto
- 3.5
- Recensioni
- 13
- ISBN
- 16
- Lingue
- 1
I can imagine that many readers will not like Wynn Schwartz's style, because it is very dry, almost purely matter-of-fact and encyclopedic, and told by a collective personality ("we") that has a time-and- place-transcending agency, suggesting a movement of militant women and especially lesbians. And so not only the subordination of women in that period, and the open or covert struggle against it, comes into focus, but also the breaking of sexual conventions through the focus on women's love (also open or covert). And then the link with Sappho is not far to seek. Very subtly, but well thought out, Wynn Schwartz brings the impenetrable poetry of Sappho (we only have fragments of sentences from her entire oeuvre) to life.
Nicely done, for sure. But as far as I'm concerned, way too cerebral and therefore not really captivating or resonating. And inevitably, Wynn Schwartz has been very selective. Her selection of women she portrays is limited to aristocratic and bourgeois epigones, wealthy and privileged, and almost all of them writers, artists and actresses; a select club (almost exclusively European by the way). And, of course, it is also a conscious choice to interpret Sappho's poetry as lesbian, following the classical, 19th century interpretation; but historically this is not entirely uncontroversial, and from a gender perspective, in turn, this is a limitation. But hey, those might be snide comments from a heterosexual, older man. The biggest shortcoming of this book, however, is that the remarkable women who are portrayed, in my opinion, do not really come to life. Due to the deliberately fragmentary approach of Wynn Schwartz, they remain very ephemeral, unfortunately like Sappho herself.… (altro)