Quotes About Leslie Fiedler

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

In the late 1950s Leslie Fiedler observed that the Jewish-American novelist had internalized the stereotype of the Jew in American literature. When he sat down to write, he had trouble shaking off the hostile or sentimental images that appeared regularly in the work of gentile writers. It is impossible to overestimate the value of such an insight.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.