D. J. ENRIGHT - Fields of Vision. Essays on Literature, Language and Television

Great Britain, Oxford University Press, 1988. First Edition, Binding: Cloth, Fine/Very Good/fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 019212269X Hardback The poet and critic D. J. Enright begins by surveying our daily diet of television, from adaptations of the classics through the pains and pleasures of soap opera to chat shows and commercials. He muses on the notion of 'realism' in the arts, the self-referring tendencies of television and its performance in the role of St George confronting the dragon of AIDS. Unconvinced that an agency so ubiquitous and unrelenting can have no effect at all, he rasies the hazardous question of television's influence on our attitudes and actions. Other chapters in this highly personal book concern the disappearance of the word 'evil' at a time when what looks much like evil is exceptionally rife, and the curiously heartening persistence in popular entertainment of the Frankenstein and Dracula myths. As a contrast to the screen's meagre involvement of the imagination, the second section is given to books which, by virture of the demands and responsibilities they enforce on the reader, do not lend themselves to other media, and to writers, such as Grass, Kraus, Singer, Milosz, and Robertson Davies, unafraid of employing fantasy in their exploration of reality, who depict worlds still inhabited by 'wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder'. In public life, and not only in the empire of television, language commonly features as a poor relation, a maid rather than a mother, and here it is treated to a festive outing, a display of its magnificence, potency, double-dealing, and squalor. Very slight wear to top corner of D/J.