I think in part because we are so accustomed to receiving life through the mediation of a screen. What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without... See more

The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life. This passivity... See more

When writing about the modern novel, she declares “let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall” in an attempt to “come closer to life”

What I mean is that for the writers of this new era, conveying the contents of a thought or even depicting the process of thought itself in language that does not aspire to the visual has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts.