The Dirty Realism Duo: Charles Bukowski & Raymond Carver

by Michael Hemmingson, Charles Bukowski (Contributor), Raymond Carver (Contributor)

CHARLES BUKOWSKI & RAYMOND CARVER Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver were credited as the fathers of the "Dirty Realism" genre in the 1980s--branching out from minimalism, the stripping of fiction down to the least amount of words and a concentration on the subject's view of the object. The characters are usually run-of-the-mill, every day people--the lower and middle class worker, the unemployed, the alcoholic, the beaten-down-by-life. In this experimental monograph (in the vein of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Contemporary American Fiction), avante/pop literary critic Michael Hemmingson examines these dirty works of Bukowski and Carver through the lens of late twentieth-century American culture and the sociological observation of the self, questioning the authority of the "I" in fiction and poetry and its relation to the eye's gaze of the words on a page. Hemmingson offers close readings of selected texts, deconstructing iconic works by Bukowski and Carver to point out the elements of dirty realism and mastery of the language of the common folk, proving that these two writers are an institution in American literature. MICHAEL HEMMINGSON has written over 25 books of literary, western, SF, horror, noir, autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism, cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, and ethnography. He lives and works in Southern California.

Genres: Literary Criticism

184 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2008

About the author

A novelist, short story writer, literary critic, cultural anthropologist, qualitative researcher, playwright, and screenwriter. He died in Tijuana, Mexico on 9 January 2014.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Josh Sherman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I learned some things about Buk and Carver that I didn't know before, and I enjoyed the anecdotes that were woven into this. But overall, this book was really in desperate need of an editor. It's not just typos, which I'll overlook (and I myself make in my own work). At times, entire sentences were nonsensical. There was also a high-school quality to some of the essay writing, overstatements of the obvious, redundant bits like (not an actual quote) "In this section, I'm going to..." etc. I like the idea of this project, but its execution was a flop.

[Louis Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too cool.

[BaSila Husnain · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its not particularly a standard work of literary criticism but its personal narrative voice made an impact. Besides Bukowski is interesting subject. :)