Memorial Hall Library

The last samurai reread, Lee Konstantinou

eng

index present

non fiction

The last samurai reread

1313669066

Lee Konstantinou

Rereadings

"In 2018, New York magazine convened group of critics to name the best novel of the twenty-first century. Their selection of Helen DeWitt's comic, experimental novel, The Last Samurai, published in 2000, was hardly a conventional choice. In the novel, DeWitt charts the relationship between Ludo, who may or may not be a child genius, and his mother Sibylla, who encourages her son's intellectual interests by immersing him in the classics. The novel, which among other things includes Ludo's search for his father, combined a variety of genres and was published by Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Harvey Weinstein's film company. The novel went on to sell 100,000 copies and received critical and popular acclaim. However, while DeWitt and the novel have gained a passionate following, the book soon fell off the radar of critics, scholars, and most readers. In his rereading of The Last Samurai, Konstantinou examines the book in the context of its publication how it relates to the formal, aesthetic, and thematic qualities that makes the novel so distinct and rich. He argues that the novel's concern with learning and creativity in a capitalist society and the fate of art in the corporate marketplace comes out of DeWitt's own fraught experiences with the world of corporate synergy, agents, editors, and publicists and how these were sublimated into the novel itself"--, Provided by publisher