Download or read book Narratives of Nothing in 20th Century Literature written by Meghan Vicks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero ? the number that is also not a number ? allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative ? that is, how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, and how we exist in language.
Download or read book Stories and Texts for Nothing written by Samuel Beckett and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, “You can’t stay here,” they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on. Includes: “The Expelled” “The Calmative” “The End” Texts for Nothing (1-10)
Download or read book Cosmos written by Witold Gombrowicz and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “creatively captivating and intellectually challenging” existential mystery from the great Polish author—“sly, funny, and . . . lovingly translated” (The New York Times). Winner of the 1967 International Prize for Literature Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz “one of the great novelists of our century.” Now his most famous novel, Cosmos, is available in a critically acclaimed translation by the award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt. Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. In need of a quiet place to study, Witold and his melancholy friend Fuks head to a boarding house in the mountains. Along the way, they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the first clue to a sinister mystery? As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family that runs the boarding house, Grombrowicz creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe. “Probably the most important 20th-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of.” —Benjamin Paloff, Words Without Borders
Download or read book Is Nothing Sacred written by Salman Rushdie and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1990 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Companion to Victor Pelevin written by Sofya Khagi and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.
Download or read book Anatomy of a Short Story written by Yuri Leving and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique anthology devoted to a single story–“Signs and Symbols” by Vladimir Nabokov–which exposes the way we read and interpret short stories.
Download or read book Little Nothing written by Marisa Silver and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Huffington Post Book Club Suggestion • An O: The Oprah Magazine Fall Pick • A LitHub Book You Should Read This September • One of The Millions' "Most Anticipated" for 2016 • 2017 Ohioana Book Award Winner in Fiction “Marisa Silver’s beguiling new novel Little Nothing is a powerful exploration of the relationship between our changeable bodies and our just as malleable identities…Silver’s storytelling skills are finely matched to her themes…meditative passages bloom with life.” —Matt Bell, The New York Times Book Review A stunning, provocative new novel from New York Times bestselling author Marisa Silver, Little Nothing is the story of a girl, scorned for her physical deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly ability to transform herself and the world around her. In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla. Little Nothing unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of human form, as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all. Woven throughout is the journey of Danilo, the young man entranced by Pavla, obsessed only with protecting her. Part allegory about the shifting nature of being, part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny guises, Little Nothing spans the beginning of a new century, the disintegration of ancient superstitions, and the adoption of industry and invention. With a cast of remarkable characters, a wholly original story, and extraordinary, page-turning prose, Marisa Silver delivers a novel of sheer electricity.
Download or read book British Children s Literature and Material Culture written by Jane Suzanne Carroll and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.
Download or read book Nothing Daunted written by Dorothy Wickenden and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.
Download or read book Great Spanish and Latin American Short Stories of the 20th Century Grandes cuentos espa oles y latinoamericanos del siglo XX A Dual Language Book written by Anna E. Hiller and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bilingual anthology offers geographic and cultural diversity with stories from Central America, South America, and Spain. Featured authors include Silvina Ocampo, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Augusto Roa Bastos, and many others.
Download or read book The Twentieth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 1082 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victorian Parables written by Susan E. Colon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and Lazarus and the rich man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. In this book Susan E. Colòn shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral ideas. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources.
Download or read book An Interpretation of Nietzsche s On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life written by Anthony K. Jensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life is shown to be a ‘timely’ work, too, insofar as it weaves together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere ‘early’ work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text’s composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche’s arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen’s Interpretation should restore Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19th Century philosophies of history.
Download or read book Nothing But the Truth written by Avi and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 1991 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ninth-grader's suspension for singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" during homeroom becomes a national news story.
Download or read book Nora Webster written by Colm Toibin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of contemporary literature’s bestselling, critically acclaimed, and beloved authors: a “luminous” novel (Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review) about a fiercely compelling young widow navigating grief, fear, and longing, and finding her own voice—“heartrendingly transcendant” (The New York Times, Janet Maslin). Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s magnificent seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable, and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be sucked back into it. Wounded, selfish, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning insight and empathy, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven—herself. Nora Webster “may actually be a perfect work of fiction” (Los Angeles Times), by a “beautiful and daring” writer (The New York Times Book Review) at the zenith of his career, able to “sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations” (USA TODAY). “Miraculous...Tóibín portrays Nora with tremendous sympathy and understanding” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post).
Download or read book Stuff Theory written by Maurizia Boscagli and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking theory of materialism which reconsiders the role of stuff, the small objects that clutter our lives, as they crowd the pages of modern literature.
Download or read book The Age of Atheists written by Peter Watson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014 From one of England’s most distinguished intellectual historians comes “an exhilarating ride…that will stand the test of time as a masterful account of” (The Boston Globe) one of the West’s most important intellectual movements: Atheism. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is dead” and ever since tens of thousands of brilliant, courageous, thoughtful individuals have devoted their creative energies to devising ways to live without God with self-reliance, invention, hope, wit, and enthusiasm. Now, for the first time, their story is revealed. A captivating story of contest, failure, and success, The Age of Atheists sweeps up William James and the pragmatists; Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Albert Camus; the poets of World War One and the novelists of World War Two; scientists, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking; and the rise of the new Atheists—Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. This is a story of courage, of the thousands of individuals who, sometimes at great risk, devoted tremendous creative energies to devising ways to fill a godless world with self-reliance, invention, hope, wit, and enthusiasm. Watson explains how atheism has evolved and reveals that the greatest works of art and literature, of science and philosophy of the last century can be traced to the rise of secularism. From Nietzsche to Daniel Dennett, Watson’s stirring intellectual history manages to take the revolutionary ideas and big questions of these great minds and movements and explain them, making the connections and concepts simple without being simplistic. The Age of Atheists is “highly readable and immensely wide-ranging…For anybody who has wondered about the meaning of life…an enthralling and mind-expanding experience” (The Washington Post).
