Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Ozick, Cynthia (Vol. 155) - Sarah Blacher Cohen (essay date summer 1990)

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Sarah Blacher Cohen (essay date summer 1990)

SOURCE: Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “The Fiction Writer as Essayist: Ozick's Metaphor & Memory.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal 39, no. 3 (summer 1990): 276–81.

[In the following essay, Cohen observes that with the publication of Metaphor & Memory, Ozick “can no longer claim she is a literary nobody.”]

Try to “possess one great literature, at least, besides (your) own: and the more unlike (your) own, the better.” So cautioned the critic Matthew Arnold. Years later, author Cynthia Ozick heeded his advice. Over the course of time she has populated her house of fiction with three mind-stretching novels and four collections of riveting short stories. To keep her fiction company, she has brought in a rich assortment of provocative essays to share the premises. In the preface to her 1983 collection of essays, Art & Ardor, she informs us how she happened to write...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Sarah Blacher Cohen (essay date summer 1990)
   2. Mark Krupnick (essay date fall–winter 1991)
   3. Cynthia Ozick and Mario Materassi (interview date spring–summer 1992)
   4. Cynthia Ozick and Elaine M. Kauvar (interview date fall 1993)
   5. Andrew Lakritz (essay date winter 1994)
   6. Sarah Blacher Cohen (essay date 1994)
   7. Sarah Blacher Cohen (essay date 1994)
   8. Victor Strandberg (essay date 1994)
   9. Peter Kerry Powers (essay date fall 1995)
   10. Joseph Alkana (essay date winter 1997)
   11. Susanne Klingenstein (essay date 1997)
   12. Millicent Bell (review date winter 1998)
   13. Janet L. Cooper (essay date spring 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Cynthia Ozick