Innovations of the republic of uzbekistan gulistan state university

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND
INNOVATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN


GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY



COURSE WORK
Theme:JOHN GARDNER AND HIS NOVELS
Submitted by:
Supervisor:
Gulistan 2023
CONTENTS
Introduction


I CHAPTER THE ELUSIVE AMERICAN WRITER JOHN GARDNER
1.1 Brief biography of John Gardner
1.2 Lifetime creativity, activity and famous works of the writer
II CHAPTER A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL GRENDEL
2.1 Analysis of John Gardner's novel Grendel
2.2 The writer's main themes and plot, his genre style


Conclusion


Reference


Introduction

John Gardner was an American writer, literary critic, essayist and a university professor. His prolific writings include the 1971 novel Grendel which narrates the Beowulf myth from the monster point of view. He was born and raised in New York to a dairy farmer and a lay preacher father. His mother was an English teacher at a local school. Gardener parents were fond of Shakespeare and mostly recited Shakespeare literature together. As a child, the author attended public schools and most times worked at his father farm where his younger brother was accidentally killed y a cult packer which Gardener was driving. He carried the blame for his brother’s death which resulted in him experiencing flashbacks, nightmares his entire life. This incident formed a foundation of Gardner’s criticism and fiction.

FICTION
Gardner's best known novels include: The Sunlight Dialogues, about a brooding, disenchanted policeman who is asked to engage a madman fluent in classical mythology; Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view with a philosophical underlying; and October Light, about an aging and embittered brother and sister living and feuding together in rural Vermont. This last novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976.
TEACHING AND CRITICISM
Gardner was a lifelong teacher of fiction writing. He was a favorite at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His two books on the craft of writing fiction—The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist—are considered classics. He was famously obsessive with his work, and acquired a reputation for advanced craft, smooth rhythms, and careful attention to the continuity of the fictive dream. At one level or another, his books nearly always touched on the redemptive power of art.
He was alternately a realist and a fabulist, a novelist of ideas and a writer who maintained that characters and human situations are always more important than philosophy. He was, as well, an academically inclined New Novelist whose work is formally innovative, stylistically extravagant, openly parodic, and highly allusive; yet, at the same time, he was an accessible, popular storyteller, one whom some critics, in the wake of On Moral Fiction, have labeled a reactionary traditionalist. It is perhaps best to think of Gardner not as a writer who belongs to any one school but instead as a writer who, in terms of style, subject, and moral vision, mediates between the various extremes of innovation and tradition, freedom and order, individual and society. He employed the metafictionist’s narrative tricks, for example, not to show that fiction—and, by extension, life—is mere artifice, meaningless play, but to put those tricks to some higher purpose. His fiction raises a familiar but still urgent question: How is humankind to act in a seemingly inhospitable world where chance and uncertainty appear to have rendered all traditional values worthless? As different as his characters are in most outward aspects, they are similar in one important way: They are idealists who feel betrayed when their inherited vision of harmony and purpose crumbles beneath the weight of modern incoherence. After being betrayed, they abandon their childlike ideals and embrace the existentialist position that Gardner deplores for its rationalist assumptions and pessimistic moral relativism. His antidote to the modern malaise in general and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “nausea” in particular is a twentieth century version of the heroic ideal: common heroes—fathers and husbands, farmers and professors, for example—who intuitively understand that whatever the odds against them, they must act as if they can protect those whom they love. Instead of pure and powerful knights dedicated to a holy quest, Gardner’s heroes are confused, sometimes ridiculous figures who learn to overcome their feelings of betrayal and find their strength in love, memory, and forgiveness. Choosing to act responsibly, they achieve a certain measure of human dignity. In effect, the choice these characters face is a simple one: either to affirm “the buzzing blooming confusion” of life, as Gardner, quotingWilliam James, calls it, or to deny it. Whereas the existentialist finds in that confusion meaningless abundance and historical discontinuity, Gardner posits meaningful variety and an interconnectedness that assumes value and makes the individual a part of, not apart from, the human and natural worlds in which he or she lives.He was alternately a realist and a fabulist, a novelist of ideas and a writer who maintained that characters and human situations are always more important than philosophy. He was, as well, an academically inclined New Novelist whose work is formally innovative, stylistically extravagant, openly parodic, and highly allusive; yet, at the same time, he was an accessible, popular storyteller, one whom some critics, in the wake of On Moral Fiction, have labeled a reactionary traditionalist. It is perhaps best to think of Gardner not as a writer who belongs to any one school but instead as a writer who, in terms of style, subject, and moral vision, mediates between the various extremes of innovation and tradition, freedom and order, individual and society. He employed the metafictionist’s narrative tricks, for example, not to show that fiction—and, by extension, life—is mere artifice, meaningless play, but to put those tricks to some higher purpose. His fiction raises a familiar but still urgent question: How is humankind to act in a seemingly inhospitable world where chance and uncertainty appear to have rendered all traditional values worthless?