To confuse a ’balanced portrayal’ with a novel is finally to be led into absurdities. ”Dear Fyodor Dostoevsky — All the students in our school, and most of the teachers, feel that you have been unfair to us. Do you call Raskolinkov a balanced portrayal of students as we know them? Of Russian students? Of poor students? What about those of us who have never murdered anyone, who do our schoolwork every night?” ”’Dear Mark Twain — None of the slaves on our plantation has ever run away. But what will our owner think when he reads of Nigger Jim?'” ”Dear Vladimir Nabokov — The girls in our class…” and so on. What fiction does and what the rabbi would like it to do are two entirely different things. The concerns of fiction are not those of a statistician — or a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, ”What do people think?”; the PR man asks, ”What will people think?” <\/i><\/p>\n
Philip Roth: Reading Myself and Others<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To confuse a ’balanced portrayal’ with a novel is finally to be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"platta":{"numLikes":0,"numComments":1,"category":null,"themes":[],"commercial_partner":null,"thumbnail":false,"blog_id":38},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.apu.fi\/antiaikalainen\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}