Wednesday, July 22, 2015

E. L. Doctorow: Kleist’s only student – ZEIT ONLINE

created in his novels E. L. Doctorow own era. The writing itself he considered socially acceptable variant of schizophrenia. An obituary

answer: the historians tell what happened, the novelist, what it felt like.

In Ragtime , his most successful novel, he linked the early history of film, Freud’s lectures in New York, the maternal love of the escape artist Houdini, the prehistory of the American labor movement, the women’s movement and the history of tabloid journalism with an American revenant of Heinrich von Kleist’s Kohlhaas, who bears the name Michael Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime .

In Billy Bathgate , Doctorow’s response on Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities , he illustrates the seduction of a young man. The story of the messenger boy from the Bronx reflects the rampage of the “greed is good” philosophy of Wall Street bankers in a role model from the years of the Depression, the gangster Dutch Schultz.

In his last novel Homer & amp; Langley he tells the story of two brothers who transform their large Upper West Side house on Fifth Avenue in a messie landfill. Langley acts as a harbinger of Internet Ausdruckers, not only collects every available newspaper, but also pianos, typewriters, tapes, weapons, television – iconic representations of American culture. At the same time the novel tells the story of New York in the 20th century. The acquisitiveness Langley is a harbinger Google, Langley is a thing aggregator.

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