"Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling."
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Essayists from EnglandAcademics from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesAcademics from the United KingdomCritics from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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"A Moral Problem" (1974), p. 88
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Sheed
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Wilfrid Sheed
Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed (born December 27 1930 – 19 January 2011) was an English-born American novelist and essayist.
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