Download or read book Discrepant Solace written by David James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.
Download or read book Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry written by Antony Rowland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.
Download or read book Rachel Cusk written by Roberta Garrett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Cusk is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary British authors. Her diverse body of work offers a striking portrait of trends in 21st-century literature, and the history of Cusk's literary output is one of experimentation and a desire to push against established cultural models. Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives is the first critical guide to Cusk's work, spanning novels including Saving Agnes, A Country Life, and Second Place, her 'autofictional' Outline trilogy, and her nonfiction A Life's Work, The Last Supper, Aftermath and the Coventry essays. Rigorous and wide-ranging, this book provides an accessible and lucid introduction to Cusk's work, exploring themes of gender relations, class dynamics, maternal identity and creative freedom. The collection concludes with an in-depth interview with Cusk, conducted by Merve Emre, reflecting on her influences, writing and experiences. Mapping the formal and stylistic shift across her career and locating them within their specific contexts, this collection provides a crucial analysis of Cusk's influences, politics, and literary techniques that speak to many of the most pressing issues in contemporary literature.
Download or read book The Novel and the New Ethics written by Dorothy J. Hale and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.
Download or read book Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty First Century French and Spanish Women s Writing written by Hannie Lawlor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women's Writing offers new insight into what it means to write relational lives. It broadens the parameters of existing discussions in terms of geography as well as genre, drawing together two literatures whose prominence in life-writing theory to date could hardly be more different: while French women's writing has long been at the centre of international discussions of autobiography, the relative invisibility of Spanish women's writing remains striking. The dialogue that thus underpins this study, between diverse twenty-first-century case studies and broader approaches to life-writing, shines a light on what is gained from inviting different voices into the discussion. These narrative projects challenge longstanding critical assumptions in autobiography studies and trauma theory about how writers can and should represent the multiple perspectives that are at the heart of intergenerational stories. In exploring the narrative solutions that these texts propose in response to the ethical questions they navigate, this book shows that writing relational lives rests on far more than the mere recounting of a shared history. 'Relating' in these texts, it proposes, is an act embedded in the telling of the story. It is a mode of testifying together to traumatic experience, one that reveals a powerful preoccupation in contemporary women's life-writing practice with making more audible the many voices and versions that go unheard.
Download or read book Nature Prose written by Dominic Head and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.
Download or read book Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J M Coetzee written by Pawel Wojtas and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.
Download or read book The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson written by Laura E. Tanner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framing Marilynne Robinson's fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson's novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson's novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. Stiffly perched on the edge of un-cushioned furniture or propped awkwardly in the midst of someone else's conversation, Robinson's characters hover in the margins of a lived experience they are often forced to observe self-consciously and vigilantly. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson's narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson's novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson's fiction.
Download or read book Kazuo Ishiguro s Gestural Poetics written by Peter Sloane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of Ishiguro's repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of 'imaginary' space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators' emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the 'essence of world can only be indicated' as 'the essence of world can only be gestured towards,' Sloane argues that while Ishiguro's novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.
Download or read book Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature written by Monica Latham and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature exam>ines Woolf’s life and oeuvre from the perspective of recycling and pro>vides answers to essential questions such as: Why do artists and writers recycle Woolf’s texts and introduce them into new circuits of meaning? Why do they perpetuate her iconic fgure in literature, art and popular culture? What does this practice of recycling tell us about the endurance of her oeuvre on the current literary, artistic and cultural scene and what does it tell us about our current modes of production and consumption of art and literature? This volume offers theoretical defnitions of the concept of recycling applied to a multitude of specifc case studies. The reasons why Woolf’s work and authorial fgure lend themselves so well to the notion of recy>cling are manifold: frst, Woolf was a recycler herself and had a personal theory and practice of recycling; second, her work continues to be a prolifc compost that is used in various ways by contemporary writers and artists; fnally, since Woolf has left the original literary sphere to permeate popular culture, the limits of what has been recycled have ex>panded in unexpected ways. These essays explore today’s trends of fab>ricating new, original artefacts with Woolf’s work, which thus remains completely relevant to our contemporary needs and beliefs
Download or read book Discrepant Solace written by David James and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.
Download or read book Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty First Century American Life written by Alexandra Kingston-Reese and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.
Download or read book The Solace Paradigm written by Paul C. Horton and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modernism and Close Reading written by David James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed—even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read. Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.
Download or read book Dynamic Form written by Cara L. Lewis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
Download or read book How to Read a Moment written by Mathias Nilges and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our present. “Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day,” observes one of Don DeLillo’s characters. “The future is gone,” The Baffler argues. “Where’s my hoverboard!?” a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future. The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.
Download or read book Democracy and Education written by John Dewey and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1916 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
