New Letters on the Air: Contemporary Writers on Radio

Item

University of Missouri-Kansas City. 1990. “New Letters on the Air: Contemporary Writers on Radio”. Presented at the, William H. Gass: The Soul Inside the Sentence, accessed February 11, 2026, https://digitalexhibits.library.wustl.edu/s/gass/item/57503

Title: New Letters on the Air: Contemporary Writers on Radio
Description: In this interview broadcast by University of Missouri-Kansas City in May 1990, Gass talks about his literary strengths and weaknesses, the challenge of depicting a reprehensible character in a sympathetic and cultured light, the origin and development of On Being Blue, and more.; Selection 1: Gass says he uses poetic language in prose because he failed at poetry and found his strength in rhetorical rather than poetic or narrative form. He loves Beckett and minimalism but Gass has a "baroque imagination": convoluted, expansive, loves excess. Gass's mode is to get the language rolling and let it go rather than in fragments. He then discusses the exploratory challenges in The Tunnel of writing from the perspective of a reprehensible character who has sympathetic, sensitive, cultured qualities--the "facism of the heart."; Selection 2: Gass discusses his background in and approach to philosophy and development of ideas as influence in fictional worlds. He discusses the failure of literature as providing a redemptive morality, the impossibility of living illusion-free even if you are aware of it--"the less you believe the better off you are"; "the world is suffering from belief." Most of the things he teaches and admire may be beautiful but are not true. When writing he is looking for development of ideas, not for truth. One of the things philosophy must do is to alert us to the dangers of accepted truths and ask who is profiting from those beliefs.
Date: 1990: May
Type: Sound Recording
Format: Audio Cassette; mp3 files
Creator: University of Missouri-Kansas City
Extent: Selection 1: 08min 03sec; Selection 2: 08min 57sec; Tape: 30min 18sec
Language: English
Publisher: University of Missouri-Kansas City
Source: Accession: MS2024-001; Acquired from: Mary Gass
Identifier: ms051-cass1330-acc-20240626_selection_01; ms051-cass1330-acc-20240626_selection_02
Rights: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/