THE CONFUSION OF REALMS

by Richard Gilman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 1969

The Sixties have been a programmatic era, there have been revolutionary rallying cries in art as well as in politics, and any critic wishing to make himself heard has had to point to the liveliness, relevance, experimentation, or authenticity of anything he happens to be talking about. Richard Gilman began his journalistic career writing for Commonweal during the Fifties, the decade of accommodation, settled opinions, and Cold War theology; then with the advent of the Kennedy years he passed from the detachment of one decade to the volubility and commitment of the next. Aside from some dim reflections on Ibsen and Strindberg, the other, subjects of the essays in The Confusion of Realms are spankingly contemporary: McLuthan, Barthelme, Sontag, Mailer, Updike, MacBird!, City of Night, Omensetter's Luck, the Living Theatre, and Eldridge Cleaver. These essays are extremely uneven, both in style and thought, but they are all very much witnesses to the times, passionately engaged in debating or defending the humanist tradition, probing the possibilities of the genuinely iconoclastic work of art or its bogus imposture, filled with forensic power and that rhetoric of immediacy which, though so fashionable nowadays, is here used with obvious conviction and flair. A spirited collection, if a bit muddled.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION