In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the American belief in personal growth and healing through literature.
Hanya Yanagihara highlights the profound themes often present in American novels, specifically the journey of redemption alongside an essential focus on personal growth and healing. This reflects a broader cultural narrative in America that values self-improvement and the aspiration to 'get better' in life, suggesting that literature can be a powerful catalyst for such transformations.
In practice
A book club discussion on the themes of personal growth in modern American literature.
It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
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