Martin Amis: Lucre, Love, and Literature

1
Martin Amis Lucre, Love, and Literature

• By Ben Jenkins
• Kati Morgan
• Crystal Smith
• Vinson Goldwire
• Cameron Smith

2
What is the purpose of this criticism?

• Purpose To analyze the characters of the stories
  written by Amis in the way that they react to
  love and lust.

3
Does the author communicate and clearly debate
the issue(s), or does the author simply wish to
impress his audience or confuse the issue?

• The author communicates and clearly debates 
• the issues he has addressed. The author wishes to
  
• show the audience that Amis is much more
• focused on style rather than content, which makes
  
• his work regarded more as art than as literary
• fiction. Amis uses his literary work to comment
  on
• culture and presents it in such a manner that it
  is
• more of an art-form.

4
On what aspect of the literature does the author
focus?

• The author mainly focuses on the ways that
  Amiss characters show their traits in his
  storys and novels and how they are a reflection
  on the way he lives his life and the problems
  that he faces.  

5
Does the author build on unfounded assumptions or
on the work of other critics?

• The author builds on the work of other critics.

6
What is the dominant method of persuasion?
 Explain.

• The dominant method of pursuasion is 
• "the proof in the pudding." 
• The author looks towards Amis's literary 
• works to corroborate his argument. 

7
What is the thesis statement of this essay?

• The thesis of the article seems to be that Amis
  is thus more interested in good and bad writing
  then in literature that attempts to delineate the
  good and the bad(35).

8
How is the argument organized?  List/Mark
sub-points of argument.

• In this article the argument is awful. It is not
  straight forward it hops around and while it is
  logical and it pulls much information from the
  books Amis has written, it does not follow a
  clear path in its argument.
• Sub plots include the authors view of how
  pornography figures into Amiss work, and how
  Amis views things such as a nuclear war, and the
  nature of characters in his novels.

9
Explain the main argument in your own words.

• Group

10
What is your reaction to his/her argument?  Is it
the intended reaction?  Does the author fail to
achieve his goal?

• Group

11
Quotes

• The subject may be crude and repulsive (CN,35).
• The contexts, the great forms of the eighteenth-
  and nineteenth- century sagas, have been
  exhausted realism and experimentation have come
  and gone without seeming to point a way ahead.
  The contemporary writer, therefore, must combine
  these veins, calling on the strengths of the
  Victorian novel together with the alienations of
  post-modernism (WAC,78-9).
• One of the chief subjects of the novel is
  masculinity, but here it is allied to a wider
  sense of the relationship between patriarchy and
  violence, within which pornography figures as the
  pervasive symbol and characteristic industry of a
  fallen world (CM, 38).
• Pornography awakened all his finer responses. It
  wasnt just sex. He really did think it was
  beautiful (LF,332).

12
Quotes Contd

• The abuse of the defenceless innocent appears to
  become the last recourse for put-upon adults who,
  through the torturing of others, seem also to
  attempt to punish something in themselves
  (CN,41).
• It is here that Amis explains why nuclear threat
  infects his novels the modern situation is one
  of suspense no one, no one at all, has any idea
  how things will turn out. (EM,17).
• Amiss work might be best seen as an attempt to
  make sense of a world that doesnt make any
  (CN,42).
• It seemed to him that all the time he used to
  spend writing he now spent dying (CN,53).