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Views | Duration | ||
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151. John Updike: ‘He rarely made a vulgar error’ | 767 | 01:39 | |
152. The Updike Beck books | 1 | 643 | 00:28 |
153. What tells you a book's not right for you? | 701 | 00:41 | |
154. 'I catch them where they're weak' | 408 | 03:39 | |
155. Everyman | 296 | 00:51 | |
156. Indignation | 215 | 00:41 | |
157. The Humbling | 191 | 01:03 | |
158. Nemesis and the destruction of the strong man | 260 | 02:36 | |
159. The inner ear | 428 | 03:21 | |
160. Dialogue | 461 | 01:09 |
The dialogue. The dialogue is different from... from the narrative proper and there you rely on your... on your other ear, your ear for speech and what... you're not really imitating human speech, you're approximating it and you're, in a strange way, each writer invents human speech differently so that it approximates human speech but then if you read it aloud, it doesn't. For instance, if you read Hemingway... that speech aloud, that speech with structure is so right when you read it in the book; it's not the way people talk. It's not the way people talk. But that's something else. So you're... you're judging the speech by another standard than the one you're using to judge the effectiveness of the narrative sentences.
The fame of the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018) rested on the frank explorations of Jewish-American life he portrayed in his novels. There is a strong autobiographical element in much of what he wrote, alongside social commentary and political satire. Despite often polarising critics with his frequently explicit accounts of his male protagonists' sexual doings, Roth received a great many prestigious literary awards which include a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997, and the 4th Man Booker International Prize in 2011.
Title: Dialogue
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: dialogue, human speech, narrative
Duration: 1 minute, 9 seconds
Date story recorded: March 2011
Date story went live: 18 March 2013