Download or read book Humor and Masculinity in U S Fiction written by Joseph L. Coulombe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.
Download or read book Upstairs at the Strand Writers in Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore written by Jessica Strand and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revelatory conversations between renowned writers at New York City’s legendary bookstore. For nearly ninety years, the Strand Book Store has been a New York institution, a legendary mecca for readers throughout the five boroughs, across the country, and around the world. Featuring freewheeling and behind-the-scenes conversations between renowned novelists, playwrights, and poets on how they work, think, and live, Upstairs at the Strand captures the happy collision of books and ideas in the Strand's famed reading series in its Rare Book Room. Upstairs at the Strand is indispensable for aspiring writers, readers of contemporary literature, and devoted fans of the 18 Miles of Books at the Strand Book Store. Contributors include: Renata Adler • Edward Albee • Hilton Als • Paul Auster • Blake Bailey • Alison Bechdel • Tina Chang • Junot Díaz • Deborah Eisenberg • Rivka Galchen • A. M. Holmes • Hari Kunzru • Rachel Kushner • Wendy Lesser • D. T. Max • Leigh Newman • Téa Obreht • Robert Pinsky • Katie Roiphe • George Saunders • David Shields • Charles Simic • Tracy K. Smith • Mark Strand • and Charles Wright.
Download or read book Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction 1950 75 written by Maggie McKinley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An examination of the relationship between violence and masculinity in works by Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth, highlighting the inherent paradox whereby masculinity in this fiction is both asserted and undermined by acts of aggression"--
Download or read book A Lucky Man written by Jamel Brinkley and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
Download or read book Man Made written by Joel Stein and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The smudge looked suspiciously penis- like. The doctor confirmed: "That's the baby's penis!" which caused not celebration, but panic. Joel pictured having to go camping and fix a car and use a hammer and throw a football and watch professionals throw footballs and figure out whether to be sad or happy about the results of said football throwing. So begins his quest to confront his effete nature whether he likes it or not (he doesn't), by doing a twenty-four-hour shift with L.A. firefighters, going hunting, rebuilding a house, driving a Lamborghini, enduring three days of boot camp with the U.S. Army, day-trading with $100,000, and going into the ring with UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture. Seeking help from a panel of experts, including his manly father-in-law, Boy Scouts, former NFL star Warren Sapp, former MLB All-Star Shawn Green, Adam Carolla, and a pit bull named Hercules, he expects to learn that masculinity is defined not by the size of his muscles, but by the size of his heart (also, technically, a muscle). This is not at all what he learns.
Download or read book How Are You Going to Save Yourself written by JM Holmes and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four young men struggle to liberate themselves from the burden of being black and male in America in an assured debut "as up-to the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale" (Kirkus, starred review). Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires. Gio proves himself an unforgettable narrator, beautifully flawed and unstintingly honest, as he recounts both the friends' conflicts and their triumphs. Whether it's a fraught family cookout, a charged altercation on the block, a raucous night in high-society Manhattan gone wrong, or the troubled efforts of a drug hustler to go clean, JM Holmes brings the thump and the heat of his scenes to life with the kind of ease that makes us not just eavesdroppers but participants. How Are You Going to Save Yourself illuminates in breathtaking detail an entire world-one that has been underrepresented in American fiction. At times funny, often uncomfortable, occasionally disturbing, these stories fearlessly engage with issues of race, sex, drugs, class, and family. Holmes's blistering and timely new voice, richly infused with the unmistakable rhythms of hip-hop that form the sound track to his characters' lives, delivers an indelible fiction that has never been more vital and necessary.
Download or read book All That Man Is written by David Szalay and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving--in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel--to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man. Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts--a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.
Download or read book Give My Love to the Savages written by Chris Stuck and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A harrowing portrait of race relations in America, as beautiful as it is urgent.”—Entertainment Weekly “Black satire with bite, like Zora Neale Hurston used to do, with a smile and a sharp elbow. A touch of Paul Beatty, a dose of Dolemite, and a serving of Dorothy Parker, too. Give My Love to the Savages announces Chris Stuck as a fearless talent, a debut that'll make your sides and your heart hurt.”—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling “Give My Love To The Savages is a wildly inventive collection of provocative stories about navigating the minefield of black masculinity in America. Stuck’s fresh and fearless perspective overturns assumptions about race and identity to reveal complex layers of absurdity. At times merciless, always darkly funny, these are stories of unexpected communion, connection, and compassion.”—Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone Dead A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown. A Black man’s life, told in scenes—through every time he’s been called nigger. A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the ’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by an older white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting proposal. The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance. Setting these stories across America, from Los Angeles, Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest, to New York and Washington, DC, to the suburbs and small Midwestern towns, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub against and bump into one another. Ultimately, Give My Love to the Savages is the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of their desires.
Download or read book Humor and Latina o Camp in Ugly Betty written by Tanya González and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-07-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor and Latina/o Camp in Ugly Betty: Funny Looking expands the vista of critical approaches to comedy and representational politics on mainstream television from an interdisciplinary Latina/o studies approach. González and Rodriguez y Gibson examine how Ugly Betty uses humor and Latina/o camp to reframe socially charged issues on the show: representations of masculinity and familia, immigration, drag and queer subjectivities, Latina sexuality, and finally, a Latina feminist critique of the American Dream. Ugly Betty moves beyond the binaries of traditional representational politics and opens a vista of critical possibility applicable to all mainstream texts that portray people of color through comedy. This work will be of interest to scholars in media studies, Latina/o studies, and communication studies.
Download or read book Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn written by Sarah Miller and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the thoughts and feelings of New England prep school student Gideon Rayburn through the narration of one of Gideon's female classmates, who is inside his mind and sees events through his perspective.
Download or read book Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature written by Julie Cross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in oppositional binaries of ‘simple’ versus ‘complex’ humor. The varied combinations of so-called high and low forms of humor within junior texts for young readers, who are at such a crucial stage of their reading and social development, provide a valuable commentary upon the culture and values of contemporary western society, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both children’s literature and childhood studies. Cross explores the ways in which the changing content, forms and functions of the many varied combinations of humor in junior texts, including the Lemony Snickett series, reveal societal attitudes towards young children and childhood. The new compounds of seemingly paradoxical high and low forms of humor, in texts for developing readers from the 1960s onwards, reflect and contribute to contemporary society’s hesitant and uneven acceptance of the emergent paradigm of children’s rights, abilities, participation and empowerment. Cross identifies four types of potentially subversive/transgressive humor which have emerged since the 1960s which, coupled with the three main theories of humor – relief, superiority and incongruity theories – enables a long-overdue charting of developments in humor within junior texts. Cross also argues that the gradual increase in the compounding of the simple and the complex provide opportunities for young readers to play with ambiguous, complicated ideas, helping them embrace the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.
Download or read book Bronxwood written by Coe Booth and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of TYRELL and KENDRA returns to PUSH to continue Tyrell's astonishing story.Tyrell's father is just out of jail, and Tyrell doesn't know how to deal with that. It's bad enough that his brother Troy is in foster care and that his mother is no help whatsoever. Now there's another thing up in his face, just when he's trying to settle down. Tyrell's father has plans of his own, and doesn't seem to care whether or not Tyrell wants to go along with them. Tyrell can see the crash that's coming -- with his dad, with the rest of his family, with the girls he's seeing -- but he's not sure he can stop it. Or if he even wants to.
Download or read book A Companion to American Fiction 1865 1914 written by Robert Paul Lamb and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction
Download or read book Who Stole My Spear written by Tim Samuels and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 200,000 years homo sapiens has been wandering this planet, this has to be the most absurd and challenging time to be a man... How can you hunt and gather in an open-plan office? Is monogamy fighting a losing battle against testes size? Why do men make up 95% of FTSE CEOs yet 95% of the prison population? Trapped in bodies barely changed since caveman days, males are now contending with corporate culture, lifelong commitment, rampant depression and crazy expectations to be a success at work and home. Enter award-winning BBC broadcaster and journalist Tim Samuels with Who Stole My Spear? - which stops at nothing to explore how men should actually be living these days. From relationships, religion, and the rise of ISIS, to porn, fatherhood and the oppression of office life. Nothing is taboo: Is it less serious when a man has an affair? Why don’t new parents want boys? Who Stole My Spear? is an inspiring rallying call for men and ‘good masculinity’ which cannot be ignored – that will leave you rethinking much about life’s big questions. And for women who wonder what’s on a man’s mind, this is the book that offers the entertainingly explosive answer.
Download or read book Southern Manhood written by Craig Thompson Friend and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn’t own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.
Download or read book Performing Gender and Comedy written by Shannon Hengen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1998. This lively volume explores comedy as a place where gender and sexuality, through performance, challenge sexist and heteronormative forces in Western culture. The contributors investigate the effects of gender, sexuality, sexual identity, race, class and nationality on humor and comedic performance. Each chapter, distinct in its voice and content, addresses how particular historical periods seem to affect who laughs at what, why, and with what consequences. This book not only spans a broad range of historical and literary periods, it also engages in a critical conversation with past and present thinkers to articulate the political, cultural and social effects of comedy.
Download or read book Men Without Women written by Eliot Borenstein and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the construction of masculinity in early Soviet culture that finds in the novels of Babel and others an utopian society composed exclusively of men.
