Dean Bakopoulos: The Lyricism of Upheaval (January 2011)

Dean Bakopoulos challenges the workshop maxim that “less is more” and asks what happens when writers drop “the cloak of restraint” and move into the “realm of excess.” Fiction which seeks to enact emotional upheaval and intensity need not be melodramatic, he argues. Drawing on examples from fiction, poetry, and music, Bakopoulos looks at the strategies used in Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Barry Hannah’s “Love Too Long,” Aleksander Hemon’s Nowhere Man, and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, as well as Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago.”