Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change [Hardcover]

Jim W. Corder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1992

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.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers 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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Tobacco chaw and human weighings by a professor of English (Texas Christian Univ.) who wonders whether he exists, and who finds the greater public crises of past decades writ small in his own life. Corder is a kind of down-home Kafka whose fingers skim the air in hopes of netting some pollen from a phantasmal 20th-century life. His clear, uncluttered style never tires the reader, though one keeps waiting for a more passionate quickening. Vague confessions arise: ``Perhaps I am the twentieth century, mostly shallow, mostly superficial, incapable of great art or much of anything, genuinely, thoroughly mediocre, watching at a distance as the trivial becomes monstrous, the monstrous trivial.'' One palpates such writing for feeling beyond word play, and it's not always there. Even so, Corder unearths enough of his heart to keep us hungry for some big dish that may lie ahead. What we get are linked epiphanies, daisy chains of homecomings for a Ulysses who never left. Every great change, Corder finds, brings nostalgia in its wake, and he charts his own sighs as wave-patterns in the culture. One sigh springs from his own deconstruction: ``Language is orphaned from its speaker'' and lodges ``in the perceiving minds of readers....Authors...now fade away into nothing.'' We win such small leavings, he warns. ``Can I get a witness? Can you? Can she, or he? In texts that are absent?'' Through haze, Corder finds himself in childhood comic books, road maps, snapshots, the Depression, the Lux Radio Theater, the Holocaust--and in forlorn thoughts of a daughter now far off, whose skin temperature he traces daily in weather reports. Subliminal grieving for a life lived in ribs of dust. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr (August 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820314196
• ISBN-13: 978-0820314198
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,282,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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