Reading John McGahern's "Love of the world" a fistful of images
This paper focuses on McGahern's particular use of images and metaphors as a means of concentrating the energy of a short story. This double entendre of McGahern's is also part and parcel of his use of irony and paradoxes. He was a great one for humour but could also use scathing irony whe...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2010
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | This paper focuses on McGahern's particular use of images and metaphors as a means of concentrating the energy of a short story. This double entendre of McGahern's is also part and parcel of his use of irony and paradoxes. He was a great one for humour but could also use scathing irony when he disapproved of his contemporaries. “Love of the World” bears traces of this. I will try to show that a central image condenses the whole story perhaps true to one of McGahern's only critical texts about his work: “The Image”. This fine text written years before “Love of the World” perfectly applies here. It holds under the reader's eyes a Medusa's mirror in which “the totally intolerable” is reflected. In this text he develops one of his favourite ideas, that of the link between image and imagination and how one strong image often triggers the writing of a story or a novel. |
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