Research Catalog

Title

Tilting at mortality : narrative strategies in Joseph Heller's fiction / David M. Craig.

Author

Craig, David M., 1948-

Publication

Detroit, Mich. : Wayne State University Press, [1997], ©1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

330 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

• While most studies of Joseph Heller focus on his two primary works, Catch-22 and Something Happened, Tilting at Mortality considers Heller's entire career, including his latest work, Closing Time. David Craig pursues two complementary tracks: first, he explores the evolution of Heller's essential subject, human mortality; and second, he delineates Heller's artistic development as a novelist.
• Mortality - in particular the death of children or, alternatively, of wounded innocents - provides Heller with his core story. Each novel emerges as another gesture of comic defiance, each constituting a strident, insistent, angry, sometimes eloquent protest against mortality.
• Craig's approach - yoking subject matter and narrative strategies - distinguishes this book from others about Heller's work, which essentially thematize. By contrast, Craig uses Heller's abiding concern with mortality to open previously unexplored areas of his fiction.
• He examines unpublished writings, especially short stories written in the 1940s, for the way in which they anticipate the novels; looks at aspects of Heller's novels that have never been studied; links more systematically Heller's narrative methods and strategies to his authorial intentions; and traces the development of such characteristic concerns as writers and artists, their artistic artifacts, as well as Heller's own authorial self-consciousness.
• Craig's book scrutinizes Heller's entire career by examining each novel on its own terms and not by measuring it against Catch-22.

Series Statement

Humor in life and letters series

Uniform Title

Humor in life and letters.

Subject

• Heller, Joseph > Technique
• Humorous stories, American > History and criticism
• Narration (Rhetoric)
• Fiction > Technique

Note

• Folded large page in the pocket.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 308-323) and index.

Contents

1. The Short Stories: Uncertain First Steps -- 2. Catch-22: Locating the Wound, Telling the Tale -- 3. Something Happened: Heller's Great Monologue -- 4. Good as Gold: "Writing is Really Performing for People" -- 5. God Knows: Possibility and Constraint -- 6. Picture This: Analogical Relationships and Complementary Truths -- 7. Closing Time: Sequel and Personal Reflection -- App. A. Summaries of Unpublished Short Stories -- App. B. Joseph Heller's Schematic Outline for Catch-22.

ISBN

0814326536

LCCN

96044560

OCLC

• 35741385
• ocm35741385

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries