Jason Schwartz, ou la fiction brisée
Vanderhaeghe, Stéphane
Jason Schwartz, ou la fiction brisée - 2023.
2
Jason Schwartz’s two books so far, A German Picturesque (1998) and John the Posthumous (2013), have garnered very little criticism, which is no wonder if, as stated by Ben Marcus in his foreword to A German Picturesque, Schwartz’s fiction “slips from apprehension,” written as it is in “aphasic English cleansed of obvious meaning” (A German Picturesque viii, ix). The overly descriptive nature of the prose might in part account for this, lending the books ekphrastic contours that deprive them of properly narrative contents. Yet, far from making Schwartz’s books more transparent or immediate, this ekphrastic bias rather tends to obfuscate the texts, frustrating the reader’s understanding as soon as the descriptive belies its own pretenses and artificiality. By radicalizing its ekphrastics, Schwartz’s fiction enhances its own materiality, not to say ontology, and eventually foregrounds its brokenness, as it were.
Jason Schwartz, ou la fiction brisée - 2023.
2
Jason Schwartz’s two books so far, A German Picturesque (1998) and John the Posthumous (2013), have garnered very little criticism, which is no wonder if, as stated by Ben Marcus in his foreword to A German Picturesque, Schwartz’s fiction “slips from apprehension,” written as it is in “aphasic English cleansed of obvious meaning” (A German Picturesque viii, ix). The overly descriptive nature of the prose might in part account for this, lending the books ekphrastic contours that deprive them of properly narrative contents. Yet, far from making Schwartz’s books more transparent or immediate, this ekphrastic bias rather tends to obfuscate the texts, frustrating the reader’s understanding as soon as the descriptive belies its own pretenses and artificiality. By radicalizing its ekphrastics, Schwartz’s fiction enhances its own materiality, not to say ontology, and eventually foregrounds its brokenness, as it were.
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