Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology & Myth [Anglais] [Relié]

Leslie Fiedler, author of Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity and the acclaimed Love and Death in the American Novel, is back with Tyranny of the Normal, a set of nine essays written during the previous quarter century that explore his iconoclastic views on the whole notion of normality--and by extrapolation political correctness--that plagues our modern discourse. This is not your typical view of the world. "Deep within the under-mind of all of us there persists a desire to murder the disabled," he avers in one essay; in another he argues that the inevitable ambivalence we all feel over the birth of a child (love and hate) but are afraid to own up to, could be mitigated if we "reinstitute some form of permitted ritualized 'abuse' of the young." Still, his goal is less to shock and titillate than it is to point out that by pretending we no longer fear those things that are different, a tendency that is part and parcel of the human condition, we are only making matters worse.

Combative, opinionated, sometimes belabored, these thought-provoking original essays confirm Fiedler's reputation as an intellectual maverick, an erudite critic, an irrepressible explorer of humanity's darkest impulses. Two pieces deal with images of "dirty old men" in Chaucer, Dickens, Nabokov, Mann, Shakespeare, Goethe, in plays, movies and dirty jokes?images that, in Fiedler's reckoning, crystallize an ancient, mythologically reinforced taboo against sexuality in the elderly. In another essay, he argues that almost all of us are subconsciously driven to search for "a myth system which will permit the ritualized slaughter of some human beings," whether via abortion, infanticide, child abuse or capital punishment. Elsewhere, he lambastes the 1960s and '70s counterculture as a revolt against reason and establishment medicine. Fiedler often goes out on a limb, as when, citing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, he contends that our unconscious resentment of the medical profession, and fear of pain and death, cause most people to refuse to become organ-transplant donors, or when he likens teratacide, the killing of "monstrously malformed" neonates such as the Thalidomide babies of the 1960s, to the Nazis' extermination of dwarfs and other "useless people."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Writing as a Christian for Christians, Meilaender (religion, Oberlin Coll.) ponders the ramifications of contemporary biotechnology. He offers "reasons of concern" rather than a full-blown attack, based on the Christian conception of the human being and the traditional respect for the body. He seeks to examine the implications of different technologies and capabilities of the medical profession that raise, for him, grave questions. While directed to Christians, the points he raises have a wider validity, and his style is pleasing and generally accessible. In reflections tinged with a traditional Judeo-Chistian viewpoint, Fiedler (English, SUNY-Buffalo) writes more as a humanist. The author of over 20 books of essays in the humanities, he rebels against the demystification and desacralization that has governed medical sciences. In his idiosyncratic style, which will not appeal to all, Fiedler berates the prejudice against the disabled and those not seen as normal and abhors euphemisms such as "nonviable terata," said of infants so malformed they are unlikely to survive. In essays addressed mostly to specialists, Fiedler ponders such points as why organ transplant programs do not succeed, the image of the doctor and the nurse in literature and popular culture, the obsession with "normal" children, and the abnormal fear of abnormality. Both authors ponder the mystery of human life; both have a healthy respect for science but also a healthy disdain for technology as an end in itself. Theirs are clarion calls for a more circumspect examination of current medical procedures that allow us to prolong life, end the life of the unwanted, and cure the problems of those who are not "normal." For pertinent collections.?Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, N.J.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

No writer is a more courageous defender of "difference" in an age that has yet to realize that you do not have to be the same to be equal and that justice is not served by treating different cases alike.

As literary critic Leslie Fiedler's fascination with the idea of otherness extended from books to the real world, from Huckleberry Finn to Freaks, it was perhaps inevitable that he would be called upon to present the literary (or, more accurately, mythic) point of view on such bioethical subjects as child abuse and the "care of imperiled newborns." This collection of essays, most originally published in academic journals or monographs, brings together these interdisciplinary attempts to explore the mythic underpinnings of society's often confused responses to images of normality. Finding ambivalence lurking beneath a plethora of societal norms, Fiedler uses literature to expose our conflicted responses to such issues as Eros and old age, doctors in society, and, in the title essay, freaks as symbols of the absolute other and the essential self. Throughout, he gives the lie to all who would normalize the world, from plastic surgeons to policy makers. Fiedler's great gift has always been to engage literature in life; that gift is displayed passionately here. Bill Ott

Entertaining and invigorating essays by one of our most challenging critics of literature and culture. Academic critics normally swim in ``schools of thought,'' a pleasant phrase that often masks abject groupthink. Fiedler--a poet, novelist, essayist, and professor of literature at SUNY Buffalo--swims alone. Indeed, he identifies with people who are abnormal. In this book, his 25th, he continues to explore ideas spun off of Freaks (1978), his study of sideshow performers. Such people embody for us, he argues, not only the primordial fear of that which is abnormal and alien, but also (and more deeply) our secret recognition of what is monstrous and freakish in ourselves. Hence the immense popularity of The Elephant Man. In this spirit Fiedler examines the ethics of organ transplants, the culturally defined images of doctors and nurses, the relationship between literature and child abuse, and the cultural meanings of New Age spirituality, impotence, and deformity. Fiedler has a special knack for demystifying the imagery of popular culture. Commenting on Coming Home, Jane Fonda's hit movie about a disabled Vietnam veteran, he brushes aside its veneer of sanctimonious politics to suggest less attractive reasons for its popularity: What moved audiences, especially women, ``were certain genuinely mythic elements, long familiar in women's literature, and quite unrelated to leftist politics. First is the fantasy of making it with a cripple: a variant of the Beauty and the Beast archetype . . . The second is a variant of the Cinderella archetype (classically formulated in Jane Eyre . . . ) in which the heroine gets the prince only after he is maimed.'' Fiedler is famous for his curmudgeonly viewpoints, and this collection will not disappoint his readers. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a collection of provocative essays, a distinguished social and literary critic shares his observations on abortion, the removal of life support, bioethics, aging, the disabled, the role of doctors in our society, and other controversial topics. IP.