Teachers - General & Miscellaneous - Biography, Social Change, U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography

Yonder

Name: Yonder
Author: Jim W. Corder
ISBN: 9780820338033

by Jim W. Corder

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Overview

Merging cultural commentary and intense introspection, Yonder is a remarkable meditation on change, memory, nostalgia, and the modern condition. A contrapuntal mix of contemporary history and the events of the author’s personal life, Yonder portrays and ponders a world delivered from the pieties and hierarchies of the past yet incapacitated by the dizzying excess of new connotations and perspectives, choices and possibilities. Yonder is about Corder’s struggle for a footing against nostalgia’s pull. In a kind of nonlinear, semi random sorting process reflected in the book’s structure, Corder turns inward to refocus hazy memories and estimate and shoulder his responsibilities for the turns his life has taken. These events are juxtaposed against the momentous changes of his generation, drawing universal truths from the offhand and obscure, discerning pitch and tone in the white noise.

About the Author, Jim W. Corder

Jim W. Corder (1929–1998) was an English professor at Texas Christian University. He is the author of numerous books including Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne (Georgia), Chronicle of a Small Town, and Lost in West Texas. Texas Christian University created the Corder Fellowship in his honor.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``I'm disappearing . . . . Everyone disappeared, and no one notices,'' Corder writes in a fragmentary monologue that focuses relentlessly on the permanence of change. His dirt-poor West Texas upbringing, a failed marriage, mental collapse, his inability to fit into ``WASP culture'' and his emotional withdrawal from his three children form the autobiographical bedrock for a wide-ranging meditation that links Americans' ``perpetual nostalgia'' to the wrenching dislocations of the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust and the computer age. Mortality confronts the writer everywhere--on vacations from his post as a professor of English at Texas Christian University, while gardening and in sifting through novels and poems for clues to his place in the scheme of things. ``We're always provisional,'' he declares. Charged with visceral intensity, Corder's lyrical reminiscence conveys a sense of the personal narratives each of us constructs to give shape and meaning to our lives. (Aug.)

Booknews

Through narrative fragments, rhetorical exchanges, evocations of his West Texas upbringing and ancestry, and borrowings from contemporary literature, Corder (English, Texas Christian U.) sets forth his memoirs. No Index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)