"novel" again

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:20 AM -0700 9/7/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>True, Joel, but the point is that Kovic's book *isn't a novel.*
>
>   By sheer and almost unbelievable coincidence, a few minutes after
>posting that atrocity I discovered an example of "memoir" used to
>mean "a book-length fiction set in a past time about which the
>author has some personal knowledge."  Skeptical? Try this:
>
>2003 Karen Krizanovich, in Steven Jay Schneider, ed. _1001 Movies
>You Must See Before You Die_ (N.Y.: Barron's) 675: Lothar-Gunther
>Buchheim [is] the war correspondent upon whose bestselling 1973
>memoirs the script for _Das Boot_ was based.
>
>   Krizanovich reviews films for various British publications,
>including _Cosmopolitan UK_.
>
>   BTW, why you must see all these movies before you die is never
>fully explained.

Well, seeing them after you do can be tricky.  ;-)


LH

>
>   JL
>"Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
>Subject: Re: "novel" again
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 9/6/2007 08:40 PM, Jon L. wrote:
>>How can I resist?
>>
>>  2003 Mark Taylor _The Vietnam War in History, Literature and
>>  Film_ (Tuscaloosa: U. of Alabama Press) 140: Ron Kovic's
>>  autobiographical novel _Born on the Fourth of July_ [was] published in 1976.
>>
>>  Kovic's very well-known book is what used to be called a
>>  "memoir." Taylor - Lecturer in American Studies at the University
>>  of Hull - doesn't claim that any of it is invented.
>
>Although I too cringe at calling an autobiography a novel, I take
>"autobiographical" as a looser "based on a life". And the OED has,
>at least for "autobiographic", "1. Of the nature of autobiography",
>with one quote being:
>
>1870 Lowell Among my Bks. Ser. ii. (1873) 26 The writings of
>Dante..are all..autobiographic.
>
>Surely Dante was not Orpheus -- and the OED's second ellipsis omits
>an interesting qualification:
>
>"The first remark to be made upon the writings of Dante is that they
>are all (with the possible exception of the treatise De Vulgari
>Eloquio) autobiographic"
>
>This is from Google Books -- and for something entirely different,
>eagerly await a forthcoming publication ...
>
>Joel
>
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