http://marcydermansky.com/2005/12/11/new-york-times-editors-choice-pick/ Sat, 06 Sep 2008 02:51:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1.1 http://marcydermansky.com/2005/12/11/new-york-times-editors-choice-pick/#comment-2 jürgen fauth’s muckworld » The Motel Fri, 24 Nov 2006 21:09:50 +0000 http://marcydermansky.com/2005/12/11/new-york-times-editors-choice-pick/#comment-2 [...] In my experience, pitching anything as “coming of age” story is instant death. Somehow, it reeks of overly familiar stuff that everybody is supposed to have moved past long ago. Bildungsroman has a slightly better ring to it, especially if you can hyphenate it somehow, but the idea is the same: teenagers learning about responsibility and identity and love and sex and death–ugh, right? Well, no. As Frederick Barthelme once told me, semi-cryptically: “It’s a rug.” Categorizing something doesn’t fully describe it yet, and it certainly doesn’t imply a value judgment. Most stories owe a huge debt to the major arcana and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but that doesn’t make them bad rugs, dig? [...] […] In my experience, pitching anything as “coming of age” story is instant death. Somehow, it reeks of overly familiar stuff that everybody is supposed to have moved past long ago. Bildungsroman has a slightly better ring to it, especially if you can hyphenate it somehow, but the idea is the same: teenagers learning about responsibility and identity and love and sex and death–ugh, right? Well, no. As Frederick Barthelme once told me, semi-cryptically: “It’s a rug.” Categorizing something doesn’t fully describe it yet, and it certainly doesn’t imply a value judgment. Most stories owe a huge debt to the major arcana and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but that doesn’t make them bad rugs, dig? […]

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