… Weimann also paradoxically hangs on for dear life to the immutability and virginal inviolability of literary genres. Everything else in human life is supposed to be transformed in the name of human ‘progress,’ and humankind is invited (ordered?) to participate in the mutation with whoops of joy, but hands off the sacrosanct rules of narrative art! ‘The loss of the temporal dimension,’ he writes warningly, ‘means the destruction of the specific narrative effect, namely the representation of temporal processes, development, mutation, changes, etc.’ And this is reprehensible because, ‘in back of the aesthetic negation of narrative stands the ideological negation of self-transforming reality, the negation of the historicity of our world.’ … Weimann thinks it is morally inadmissable for mankind, even if it prefers to do so, to take refuge in art from ‘historicity’…
…The Russians… [have] brought out bulldozers… to break up outdoor exhibitions of abstract art by their younger painters, who were curiously indifferent to the glories and achievements of the historical process.”
Joseph Frank, who here takes down a stodgy Marxist critic of literary modernism, has died, age 94.