Download or read book Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction written by Aliki Varvogli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Download or read book Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction written by Aliki Varvogli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Download or read book Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction written by Judie Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.

Download or read book Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture written by Tara Stubbs and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

Download or read book Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction written by Peter Ferry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives. Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization. What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.

Download or read book Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies written by Julia Straub and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transatlantic literary studies have provided important new perspectives on North American, British and Irish literature. They have led to a revision of literary history and the idea of a national literature. They have changed the perception of the Anglo-American literary market and its many processes of transatlantic production, distribution, reception and criticism. Rather than dwelling on comparisons or engaging with the notion of ‘influence,’ transatlantic literary studies seek to understand North American, British and Irish literature as linked with each other by virtue of multi-layered historical and cultural ties and pay special attention to the many refractions and mutual interferences that have characterized these traditions since colonial times. This handbook brings together articles that summarize some of the crucial transatlantic concepts, debates and topics. The contributions contained in this volume examine periods in literary and cultural history, literary movements, individual authors as well as genres from a transatlantic perspective, combining theoretical insight with textual analysis.

Download or read book Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature written by Emma Staniland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Download or read book Identity Diaspora and Return in American Literature written by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Download or read book Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture written by Denis Jonnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

Download or read book Understanding Dave Eggers written by Timothy W. Galow and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Dave Eggers is the first book-length study incorporating Egger’s novels, short-story collections, and films by surveying thematic and stylistic developments in the work of one of the most celebrated American authors of the twenty-first century. Timothy W. Galow offers a textual analysis centered on major issues in academic scholarship, but explores them in an accessible way that gives Eggers’s texts primary attention. Unlike other scholarship on Eggers, this work uniquely combines Egger’s early autobiographical works and the subject of celebrity as well as his later texts that deal with humanitarian issues. Galow devotes a chapter to each of Eggers’s major works, from his first book, the Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, though his most recent novel, A Hologram for the King, a National Book Award finalist about an aging American businessman chasing success in Saudi Arabia. Other chapters cover You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, and Zeitoun. Each chapter studies the major themes and styles of the featured work while also placing it in the context of Eggers’s oeuvre. In this way Galow examines each text in its own right, but he also offers us a larger guide to all of Egger’s work. Providing important historical background for understanding Eggers’s literary work, Galow examines how Eggers’s texts are deeply invested in both his own public persona and the changing cultural conditions in the United States over the past twenty years. Galow’s careful analysis is conveyed in clear language that engages issues important to contemporary critics without being pedantic or jargon laden. As a result Understanding Dave Eggers can serve as a useful introduction to the author’s work or a valuable resource for the devoted reader.

Download or read book Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture written by Ana M. Manzanas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

Download or read book The Postcolonial World written by Jyotsna G. Singh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine: Affective, Postcolonial Histories Postcolonial Desires Religious Imaginings Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.

Download or read book Understanding Chang rae Lee written by Amanda M. Page and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study that traces the career of an author who pushes against formal and thematic boundaries In Understanding Chang-rae Lee, Amanda M. Page provides the first critical survey of the work of one of America's most acclaimed contemporary novelists. Chang-rae Lee, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, an American Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the author of five novels, including The Surrendered, which was a named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011. In considering the novelist's oeuvre, Page examines Lee's evolving use of narrative perspective and how it attests to the power of voice by showing that storytelling can reveal hidden truths—whether intended or not. After a brief biography, an overview of Lee's critical reception, and a discussion of his nonfiction essays, Page traces the trajectory of Lee's career to illustrate the ways his work continues to push against formal and thematic boundaries with each new novel. In her exploration of Lee's first and best-known novel, Native Speaker, Page introduces many of Lee's recurring themes, including the pains of cultural assimilation, the significant role of language in identity, and emotional alienation as a result of constructs of masculinity. Page then argues that Lee's second novel, A Gesture Life, uses evasive narration and the guise of a suburban novel to conceal a meditation on war trauma and contemporary isolation. Aloft, the last of Lee's novels told in the first person, plays with expected conventions of American suburban fiction to critique the white privilege at the heart of this familiar form. Page also explores The Surrendered, Lee's ambitious historical epic that deploys third-person perspective to show the variety of ways historical trauma reverberates in the present. Page's final chapter focuses on Lee's dystopian novel On Such a Full Sea. In his most bold experiment with narrative voice to date, this novel is told from the collective perspective of an entire community, reflecting on the experiences of a lone girl as she navigates a highly stratified social hierarchy. Page argues that this work shows the culmination of Lee's interest in the relationship between the individual and the community and the power of a single voice to speak truth.

Download or read book The Twenty first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life written by E. Lâle Demirtürk and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up the space of critical awareness for white people to work against rather than reinforce discursive practices of White supremacy in everyday life. This book explores how the multiple subjectivities and transformative acts of blackness can offer ways of subverting the discursive power of the white embodied practices. What defines post-9/11 America as a nation that is consumed by the fear of racialized terrorists is its roots in the fear of (‘uncontrollable’) Blackness as excess and ominous threat in the domestic terrain through which the ideology of White supremacy has constructed for governing through Whiteness. African-American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, the vulnerable spaces of Whiteness in interracial urban encounters, as it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by Black characters, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in the everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large.

Download or read book Brooklyn Fictions written by James Peacock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vast and diverse, Brooklyn is often portrayed in literature as a place of traditional community values and face-to-face relations, distinct from anonymous, capital-driven Manhattan. Brooklyn Fictions discovers what such representations of the New York borough can teach us about diversity and the individual, the local and the global. Combining analysis of popular texts such as Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever with more canonical novels such as Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, this study draws on the work of a variety of theorists on community and globalization and uses Brooklyn as a case study for an exploration of the complex relationship between romantic ideals of community and global economic forces. With cites often depicted as sites of conflict and fear, this is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the contemporary urban community and the ethical issues involved in conceptualizing and portraying it in literature.

Download or read book Fictions of the War on Terror written by D. O'Gorman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that there are a number of contemporary novels that challenge the reductive 'us and them' binaries that have been prevalent not only in politics and the global media since 9/11, but also in many works within the emerging genre of '9/11 fiction' itself.

Download or read book Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism written by Aparajita Nanda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As new comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity open up, scholars are identifying and exploring fresh topics and questions in an effort to reconceptualize ethnic studies and draw attention to nation–based approaches that may have previously been ignored. This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation’s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.