Reviews for Invention as a Social Act (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric)

The average rating for Invention as a Social Act (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-30 00:00:00 Patrick Corcoran This is a solidly academic, carefully built refutation of the old, romantic (small r) notion that writing is a solitary act, performed in seclusion, often with the writer in mystic communion with his or her inner self. LeFevre builds her case that invention is better understood as a social act," in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something." This is largely the point that Diana Pavlac Glyer makes in her The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community which, for purposes of the writer who wishes to better understand what it is she's doing by seeing how others have done it before, does much better. I do not fault LeFevre for being careful, substantiating to extreme detail her premis. But it was slow going to plough through it, as compared to Glyer's book, which was detailed, profound, yet eminently readable.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Michael Foley The reason I gave this book only three stars is because I think it's a bit out-dated. In my experience (limited though it is) the kind of paradigm shift LaFevre pushed for in 1987 has occurred. She writes near the end of the book, "Changes compatible with a social view of invention have in fact already begun" (121), and I think that 25 years later those changes have become pretty standard. Perhaps my MA training was done at a decidedly theoretical instituion (University of Vermont), where most of the upper level faculty have strong theoretical backgrounds--postmodernism, Lacanian, Marxism, queer theory--which promote the questioning of individualism and the relation of atomistic individuals to their social contexts and the ideologies permeating those contexts. I simply don't feel that I learned almost anything new from this book, though it was well written and a very good introductory work to this way of thinking.