Download or read book Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature written by Nick Levey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.
Download or read book Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature written by Nick Levey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 2 Volumes written by Patrick O'Donnell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 1607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.
Download or read book The Maximalist Novel written by Stefano Ercolino and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Maximalist Novel sets out to define a new genre of contemporary fiction that developed in the United States from the early 1970s, and then gained popularity in Europe in the early twenty-first century. The maximalist novel has a very strong symbolic and morphological identity. Ercolino sets out ten particular elements which define and structure it as a complex literary form: length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten characteristics are common to all of the seven works that centre his discussion: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by the Babette Factory. Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre.
Download or read book Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction written by Stuart J. Taylor and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Download or read book Monument Maker written by David Keenan and published by White Rabbit. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR CONCRETE ISLANDS NO. 1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 'In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination' LENNY KAYE 'Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine' WENDY ERSKINE 'I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream' EDNA O'BRIEN 'A masterpiece' WILLIAM BASINSKI Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral. Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.
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 The Pale King written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. "The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon
Download or read book A Peculiar Peril written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.
Download or read book The Art of Editing written by Tim Groenland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of the editor in literary production is an ambiguous and often invisible one, requiring close attention to publishing history and (often inaccessible) archival resources to bring it into focus. In The Art of Editing, Tim Groenland shows that the critical tendency to overlook the activities of editors and to focus on the solitary author figure neglects important elements of how literary works are acquired, developed and disseminated. Focusing on selected works of fiction by Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, authors who represent stylistic touchstones for US fiction of recent decades, Groenland presents two case studies of editorial collaboration. Carver's early stories were integral to the emergence of the Minimalist movement in the 1980s, while Wallace's novels marked a generational shift towards a more expansive, maximal mode of narrative. The role of their respective editors, however, is often overlooked. Gordon Lish's part in shaping the form of Carver's early stories remains under-explored; analyses of Wallace's fiction, meanwhile, tend to minimise Michael Pietsch's role from the creation of Infinite Jest during the mid-1990s until the present day. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with editors and collaborators, Groenland illuminates the complex and often conflicting forms of agency involved in the genesis of these influential works. The energies and tensions of the editing process emerge as essential factors in the creation of fictions more commonly understood within the paradigm of solitary authorship. The mediating role of the editor is, Groenland argues, inseparable from the development, form, and reception of these works.
Download or read book Collected Interiors written by Philip Mitchell and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern maximalist designer Philip Mitchell reveals his talent for blending collections, family heirlooms, contemporary art, and accessories in visually creative environments that are brimming with personality, color, authenticity, and warmth. The elegant, clean classicism of Philip Mitchell’s style is on full display in these homes, where he masterfully incorporates a wide-ranging mix of antiques, vintage collectibles, and contemporary pieces—everything from inherited furniture collections to modern art—in rooms that are filled with memories and warmth. As a master of what he calls modern maximalism, Mitchell embraces the challenge of taking wonderful things that a homeowner already has and making more of them. Once Mitchell has established a connecting thread among a variety of disparate pieces—whether through finish, material, scale, color, texture, or line—he starts the process of building the relationships that bring a space to life. Brilliant photographs take readers on in-depth tours of nine homes, ranging from an elegant Upper East Side pied-à-terre to a classic cottage on the water in Nova Scotia. Mitchell’s personal narrative in elegant text enlightens, while his takeaways accompanying each home help readers understand how to blend new and old, mix colors and patterns, and fill a home with an eclectic mix that is truly their own.
Download or read book American Literary Minimalism written by Robert C. Clark and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many of the authors Robert Clark discusses have yet to be recognized for their individual contributions to the emergence and continuing vitality of the movement. School of Images is organized based on chronology and lines of influence. In the introduction, Clark offers a definition of the mode and then describes its early stages. He then explores six works that reflect the core characteristics of the mode: Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Raymond Carver's Cathedral, Susan Minot's Monkeys, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. In the conclusion, he discusses contemporary authors and filmmakers whose work represents the ongoing evolution of the category"-- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace written by Ralph Clare and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction written by Stacey Olster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction explores fiction written over the last thirty years in the context of the profound political, historical, and cultural changes that have distinguished the contemporary period. Focusing on both established and emerging writers - and with chapters devoted to the American historical novel, regional realism, the American political novel, the end of the Cold War and globalization, 9/11, borderlands and border identities, race, and the legacy of postmodern aesthetics - this Introduction locates contemporary American fiction at the intersection of a specific time and long-standing traditions. In the process, it investigates the entire concept of what constitutes an “American” author while exploring the vexed, yet resilient, nature of what the concept of home has come to signify in so much writing today. This wide-ranging study will be invaluable to students, instructors, and general readers alike.
Download or read book Why Did I Ever written by Mary Robison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself.
Download or read book The Novel Essay 1884 1947 written by S. Ercolino and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel-essay emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period. Here, Ercolino argues that it is crucial for a renovated understating of the history of the novel in modernity.
