Freedom Reread (Rereadings)

At the end of 2020, came news of a new Jonathan Franzen novel. Perhaps not surprisingly, the announcement was greeted with both excitement and derision. Franzen is one of America's best-selling literary novelists and one of the most controversial commentators on the fate of the novel in contemporary culture. Freedom was the much-anticipated follow-up to Franzen's The Corrections and the book won critical acclaim but at the same time, the novel's reception cemented Franzen's position as a polarizing figure in American fiction. Gibson's reading of the novel and the story of the Berglund family focuses on the different kinds of storytelling it encompasses and Franzen's brand of realism. In addition, Gibson, often through a third-person narrator, mirroring a technique used in Freedom, describes his own often contradictory responses to Franzen as a novelist whose work he enjoys in some ways but whose statements about the novel have perplexed and angered him. Gibson also considers Franzen's pronouncements regarding the novel noting their contradictions and shifts from an adherence to a more experimental and elitist approach to the novel (best exemplified by his famous snubbing of Oprah) to a call for a new traditionalism and a return to an era when the novel enjoyed greater cultural dominance--

• | Author: Lane Gibson
• | Publisher: Columbia University Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 28, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 144 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0231188927
• | ISBN-13: 9780231188920