Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk

By Kevin Kopelson

Book Overview

In Neatness Counts, Kevin Kopelson reflects on the poetics of the desk--rolltop or bureau-plat, cluttered or bare, the nestlike desk, the schematic desk, the dramatic desk, the dramatic lack of any such furniture. Exploring the topography of literary creation by way of the topography of work space, Kopelson, one of today's most important critics, offers a series of meditations on how orderliness, chaos, and other physical states correspond with both the exhilaration of production and the desperation of writer's block.Focusing on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the novelist Marcel Proust, the critic Roland Barthes, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Neatness Counts is at once critical and creative, examining how various writers' work habits relate to their published work. Kopelson also considers desks of his own--one that had belonged to an older brother, one he borrowed from a messy friend, one now shared with a partner. And by pursuing these two lines of inquiry to their unlikely but enlightening conclusions, Kopelson both fabricates a virtual library of literary insight and commemorates an era in which the term "desktop" didn't denote one's computer screen.Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His books include, most recently, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816644020
• ISBN13: 9780816644025
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Captivating Read

If you're interested in an account of the writing process as it relates to a variety of different writers and contexts, I couldn't recommend a better book. Kopelson is himself a great writer, with a good sense of humor and an excellent command of detail. The Bishop chapter was my favorite, along with the section on Proust. This is a learned book but also a fun read. I couldn't put it down.

Chaos Counts

The title is ironic. Part critical theory, part psychological analysis, part philosophical exploration, part personal journey, Neatness Counts is anything but "neat." On the contrary, this brilliant collection of five "impressionistic, idiosyncratic" essays is so packed with footnotes, digressions, and parenthetical remarks that the reader feels, at times, as though he were on a roller coaster ride. To his credit, moreover, Kopelson does not insist on drawing one-to-one correlations between writers and their desks. Rather, he pushes his exploration towards deeper, "messier" questions that seek to understand the writers themselves. But even these questions are pit-stops en route to the book's ultimate exploration: the relationship between order and chaos, madness and genius, life and art.