Download or read book John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance written by Patricia Tobin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the sixties and seventies, the fictional "reinventions" of john Barth, along with his misread and influential essay 'The Literature of Exhaustion," established the comic novelist as a leading practitioner and theorist of what was then coming to be called postmodern literature. In more recent years, however, Barth's reputation has been called into question within the ongoing critical debate over the criterion of "originality" and the status of literary repetition, imitation, and parody. In her spirited defense of Barth, Patricia Tobin employs Harold Bloom's theory of belatedness to confront and explode this issue. For Bloom, the later the artist the greater the burden of the past against which he must rebel and the more hopeless his task. However, Tobin argues Barth revels in his belatedness and celebrates the opportunity to survey a rich literary past and to bring back to life its dead forms, genres, and styles by completing, fulfilling, and "exhausting" them. Not a retrospective and negative anxiety of influence, then, but a wholly prospective and positive anxiety of continuance has propelled Barth through a distinguished career. Throughout, Tobin elaborates the conjunctions and disjunctions between Bloom and Barth with surprising results. Most notable, perhaps, is her examination of how Bloom's model of a "map of misreading" helps to elucidate, and even predict, the ways in which Barth sets each new novel in antithetical relation to the one before. Along the way, much is said about modernism and postmodernism, repetition and difference, and what it means poetically and willfully to intend a career. John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance will be of interest to scholars of American fiction and critical theory.
Download or read book A Reader s Companion to the Short Story in English written by Erin Fallon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the short story has existed in various forms for centuries, it has particularly flourished during the last hundred years. Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English includes alphabetically-arranged entries for 50 English-language short story writers from around the world. Most of these writers have been active since 1960, and they reflect a wide range of experiences and perspectives in their works. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes biography, a review of existing criticism, a lengthier analysis of specific works, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The volume begins with a detailed introduction to the short story genre and concludes with an annotated bibliography of major works on short story theory.
Download or read book Critical Essays on Literature Language and Aesthetics written by Saroja Ganapathy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of critical essays explores various facets of the social sciences and humanities from an interdisciplinary perspective. The essays gathered here have been culled from different aspects of humanities research in order to widen the scope of research possibilities. The dialogic mode in which the essays are arranged lends a unique texture to the book. This volume will be of interest to researchers, academics and even the casual reader with an interest in the humanities. The rich array of topics covered here gives an inkling of the range of Professor Milind Malshe’s research interests and his academic associations in his career as a scholar and mentor. The different sections in this volume engage in a performance of sorts, allowing a free play of many voices—identified as the core to teaching and research in the humanities.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Arabian Nights written by Wen-chin Ouyang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this comparative study of a selection of The Arabian Nights stories in a cross-cultural context, brings together a number of disciplines and subject areas to examine the workings of narrative. It predominantly focuses on the ways in which the Arabian Nights have transformed as its stories have travelled across historical eras, cultures, genres and media. Departing from the familiar approaches of influence and textual studies, this book locates its central inquiry in the theoretical questions surrounding the workings of ideology, genre and genre ideology in shaping and transforming stories. The ten essays included in this volume respond to a general question, ‘what can the transformation of Nights stories in their travels tell us about narrative and storytelling, and their function in a particular culture?’ Following a Nights story in its travels from past to present, from Middle East to Europe and from literature to film, the book engages in close comparative analyses of ideological variations found in a variety of texts. These analyses allow new modes of reading texts and make it possible to breach new horizons for thinking about narrative. This Book was previously published as a special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures entitled Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on Arabian Nights.
Download or read book The Twentieth Century American Fiction Handbook written by Christopher MacGowan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.
Download or read book New Makers of Modern Culture written by Justin Wintle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 2569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Makers of Modern Culture is the successor to the classic reference works Makers of Modern Culture and Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, published by Routledge in the early 1980s. The set was extremely successful and continues to be used to this day, due to the high quality of the writing, the distinguished contributors, and the cultural sensitivity shown in the selection of those individuals included. New Makers of Modern Culture takes into full account the rise and fall of reputation and influence over the last twenty-five years and the epochal changes that have occurred: the demise of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of postmodernism; the eruption of Islamic fundamentalism; the triumph of the Internet. Containing over eight hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, New Makers of Modern Culture includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, next to John Ruskin is Salman Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping runs shoulders with Jacques Derrida as do Julia Kristeva and Kropotkin. Once again, Wintle has enlisted the services of many distinguished writers and leading academics, such as Sam Beer, Bernard Crick, Edward Seidensticker and Paul Preston. In a few cases, for example Michael Holroyd and Philip Larkin, contributors are themselves the subject of entries. With its global reach, New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing. There is an index of names and key terms.
Download or read book The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture written by Justin Wintle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-28 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Who's Who of Western culture, from Woody Allen to Emile Zola... Containing four hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, with John Ruskin is Salman Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping rubs shoulders with Jacques Derrida as do Julia Kristeva and Kropotkin. With its global reach, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing as well as an index of names and key terms.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Download or read book Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature and Arts written by Jaroslav Kušnír and published by ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes contributions by African, East and West European, Asian and North American scholars which deal with and compare ideological and non-ideological approaches to the analysis of literary, artistic as well as popular works (popular music) mostly by American authors. Most of the essays deal with a way various aspects of American identity are depicted, represented, treated, ideologized and aestheticized in different literary genres, forms of art and media. The contributions offer multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative perspectives and represent a diversity of scholarly voices ranging from the general discussion on the relationship between ideology and art (Anton Pokrivčák), ideology and multiculturalism (Cristina Garrigós). They also give the analysis of poetry (Pokrivčák, Obododima Oha), postmodern fiction (Pi-Hua Ni, Cristina Garrigós), drama (Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Csaba Csapó) as well as the comparative analysis of the depiction of the identity of North American Indians in such different media as literature and film (Michal Peprník). In addition to this, the book includes the analysis of Black rap music (Wojciech Kallas).
Download or read book On Second Thought written by Debra Taylor Bourdeau and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every ending marks a potential beginning; every act of reading is, in a very real sense an act of re-writing; and to revise is, literally, to re-see. These bits of conventional wisdom underlie the topic explored in this volume's collection of essays by literary critics who want to know more about the instinct to continue and the impulse to revise an existing text.
Download or read book Around Quitting Time written by Robert Seguin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-20 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at once hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America. Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible. Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.
Download or read book Beyond Suspicion written by Marc Chenetier and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996-01-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996
Download or read book Cycles of Influence written by Stephen Benson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes how the folktale has influenced the development of narrative theory and how postmodern fiction has drawn on the folktale to experiment with diverse narrative concepts. In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative—to storytelling centered on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernism—and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson begins by examining the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. He traces the interactions between the folktale and Italo Calvino’s Fiabe Italiane, between selected fictions of John Barth and the Arabian Nights, between the work of Robert Coover and the subgenre of the fairy tale, and between the "Bluebeard" stories and recent feminist retellings by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.
Download or read book Beyond the Red Notebook written by Dennis Barone and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis available of Auster's themes of solitude, chance, and paternity found in works such as The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan. This volume includes contributions from Pascal Bruckner, Marc Chenetier, Norman Finkelstein, Derek Rubin, Madeleine Sorapure, Stephen Bernstein, Tim Woods, Steven Weisenburger, Arthur Saltzman, Eric Wirth, and Motoyuki Shibata. The extensive bibliography, prepared by William Drenttel, will greatly benefit both scholars and general readers.
Download or read book Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction written by J. Duvall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White southern writers are frequently associated with the racism of blackface minstrelsy in their representations of African American characters, however, this book makes visible the ways in which southern novelists repeatedly imagine their white characters as in some sense fundamentally black.
Download or read book Keeping Literary Company written by Jerome Klinkowitz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-06-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. Chief among them were Kurt Vonnegut, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Although their work proved puzzling to reviewers and did not fit the conventions familiar to academic critics, these writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Hired to teach Hawthorne and other nineteenth-century figures, Klinkowitz found his deepest sympathies (and most lifelike affinities) to be with Vonnegut and company instead. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. By 1975 he was ready to write Literary Disruptions, a literary history of what he called this "post-contemporary" period. Since then he has written more than thirty books on contemporary fiction and its allied developments in cultural history, art, music, politics, and philosophy. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers—not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating, first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction.
Download or read book Frameworks written by William Nelles and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The structural device of the “story within a story,” variously labeled “frame,” “Chinese box,” “Russian doll,” or “embedded” narrative, is so widely found in the literature of all cultures and periods as to approach universality. Despite its durable attraction for writers and audiences throughout history, however, embedded narrative remains a form largely unmapped by literary theory. This study surveys and synthesizes the work done to date on this significant artistic technique and breaks new ground by providing a comprehensive model for the description and analysis of the many types and functions of embedded narrative.
