Download or read book Likeness and Unlikeness in Postmodern Fiction written by Mei-Yee Sung and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Likeness and Unlikeness in Postmodern Fiction" by Mei-yee, Sung, 沈美怡, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract This paper examines the relationships between 'likeness' and 'unlikeness' in three texts, a novella and two films: Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Andy and Larry Wachowski's The Matrix. The resulting analysis, focusing on sin and punishment, as well as empathy and humanity, looks at reinventions of Biblical narrative in light of a selection of postmodernist theories, including Patricia Waugh's writing on metafiction and Jean Baudrillard's ideas of simulacra and simulations. DOI: 10.5353/th_b2679197 Subjects: Postmodernism (Literature)
Download or read book Likeness and Unlikeness in Postmodern Fiction written by Mei-yee Sung and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Postmodernism and Notions of National Difference written by Geoffrey William Lord and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodernism and Notions of National Differenceexamines the critical construction of postmodern fiction raising the question of whether the construction of postmodernism has sufficiently accounted for national difference. Geoffrey Lord argues that current meta-national conceptions of postmodernism need serious reconsideration to take national cultural contexts into account. Through a comparative investigation of the theoretical debate, literary traditions and close textual reading of a number of postmodern texts, Lord makes a persuasive case for his broad claim that national cultural differences are more persistent and powerful than usually allowed by established theories of postmodernity which claim a general collapse of traditional cultural orders and the meta-narratives that justify them.
Download or read book Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction written by Eberhard Alsen and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.
Download or read book Rethinking Postmodernism s written by Katrin Amian and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Postmodernism(s) revisits three historical sites of American literary postmodernism: the early postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon's V. (1961), the emancipatory postmodernism of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and the late or post-postmodernism of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). For the first time, it confronts these texts with the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, staging a conceptual dialogue between pragmatism and postmodernism that historicizes and recontextualizes customary readings of postmodern fiction. The book is a must-read for all interested in current reassessments of literary postmodernism, in new critical dialogues between seminal postmodern texts, and in recent attempts to theorize the 'post-postmodern' moment.
Download or read book DEFINING LITERARY POSTMODERNISM FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY written by MATTHIAS. STEPHAN and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Modernism to Postmodernism written by Gerhard Hoffmann (Dr. phil.) and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodern Studies; American Literature; 20th Century; Cultural Theory; and Aesthetics.
Download or read book Succeeding Postmodernism written by Mary Holland and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contra dictions in art written by Joanna Klara Teske and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contingent Meanings written by Jerry A. Varsava and published by Tallahassee, Fla. : Florida State University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In making a case for a mimetic function in postmodern fiction, Jerry Varsava evaluates the American reception of postmodern fiction, challenging both the critics who condemn postmodernism as morally pointless and those who celebrate postmodern fiction for its aesthetic alone. He then advances a view of mimesis: the reader of fiction, not the writer, establishes the text's reference to the world.
Download or read book Postmodern Belief written by Amy Hungerford and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Download or read book Nabokov Rushdie and the Transnational Imagination written by R. Trousdale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.
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 with total page 206 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 The Voiding of Being written by William Desmond and published by Studies in Philosophy & the Hi. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author amplifies important themes in the unfolding of modern metaphysics, exploring diverse aspects of current skepticism and offering a defense in terms of his metaxological metaphysics. Along the way he engages both the long tradition and more modern writers, such as Heidegger and Marion"--
Download or read book Dialogue and Deviance written by R. Sturges and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the historical relationship between male-male erotic desire and the genre of literary or philosophical dialogue. It describes three literary-philosophical traditions, each of which originates in a different Platonic dialogue whose subsequent influence can be traced, first, through the Roman and medieval periods; second, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods; and, finally, through the modern and postmodern periods. Sturges demonstrates that various forms of erotic deviance have been differently valued in these different periods and cultures, and that dialogue has consistently proven to be the genre of choice for expressing these changing values. This study provides a valuable historical perspective on current debates over the place of homosexuality in modern Western culture.
Download or read book The Familiar Enemy written by Ardis Butterfield and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-12-10 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Familiar Enemy re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two profoundly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. This special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. Ardis Butterfield reassesses the concept of 'nation' in this period through a wide-ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce, or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this conflict created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. She considers authors writing in French, 'Anglo-Norman', English, and the comic tradition of Anglo-French 'jargon', including Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous works. Traditionally Chaucer has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus suggests that a modern understanding of what 'English' might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from 'French', and that this has far-reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.
Download or read book Jesus as Mother written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.
