Download or read book Raymond Carver s Short Fiction in the History of Black Humor written by Jingqiong Zhou and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book-length study on the black humor in Raymond Carver's work includes valuable interpretations of Carver's aesthetics as well as the psycho-social implications of his short fiction. The presence of an indeterminate «menace» in the oppressive situations of black humor in Carver - as compared to a European tradition of existentialist writing and his American predecessors including Twain, Heller, Barth and others - is mitigated through humor so it is not dominant. As a result, a subtle promise emerges in the characters' lives.
Download or read book Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties written by Max F. Schulz and published by Athens : Ohio University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dark Humor written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an examination of the use of dark humor in classic literary works.
Download or read book Smoking Typewriters written by John McMillian and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the New Left rebellion of the 1960s? In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian argues that the "underground press" contributed to the New Left's growth and cultural organization in crucial, overlooked ways.
Download or read book Film Clowns of the Depression written by Wes D. Gehring and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1930s are routinely considered sound film's greatest comedy era. Though this golden age encompassed various genres of laughter, clown comedy is the most basic type. This work examines the Depression decade's most popular type of comedy--the clown, or personality comedian. Focusing upon the Depression era, the study filters its analysis through twelve memorable pictures. Each merits an individual chapter, in which it is critiqued. The films are deemed microcosmic representatives of the comic world and discussed in this context. While some of the comedians in this text have generated a great deal of previous analysis, funnymen like Joe E. Brown and Eddie Cantor are all but forgotten. Nevertheless, they were comedy legends in their time, and their legacy, as showcased in these movies, merits rediscovery by today's connoisseur of comedy. Even this book's more familiar figures, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, are often simply relegated to being recognizable pop culture icons whose work has been neglected in recent years. This book attempts to address these oversights and to re-expose the brilliance and ingenuity with which the screen clowns contributed a comic resiliency that was desperately needed during the Depression and can still be greatly appreciated today. The films discussed are City Lights (1931, Chaplin), The Kid From Spain (1932, Cantor), She Done Him Wrong (1933, Mae West), Duck Soup (1933, Marx Brothers), Sons of the Desert (1933, Laurel and Hardy), Judge Priest (1934, Will Rogers), It's a Gift (1934, W.C. Fields), Alibi Ike (1935, Brown), A Night at the Opera (1935, Marx Brothers), Modern Times (1936, Chaplin), Way Out West (1937, Laurel and Hardy), and The Cat and the Canary (1939, Bob Hope).
Download or read book Sublime Desire written by Amy J. Elias and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-winner of the Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Has twentieth-century political violence destroyed faith in historical knowledge? What happens to historical fiction when history is seen as either a form of Western imperialism or a form of postmodern simulation? In Sublime Desire, Amy Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history, and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime—for awe, certainty, and belief. Sublime Desire is an eloquent melding of theory and practice. Mixing the canonical with the unexpected, Elias analyzes developments in the historical romance genre from Walter Scott's novels to novels written today. She correlates developments in the historical romance to similar changes in historiography and philosophy. Sublime Desire draws engagingly on more than thirty relevant texts, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, Charles Johnson's Dreamer, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But the book also examines theories of postmodern space and time and defines the difference between postmodern and postcolonial historical perspectives. The final chapter draws from trauma theory in Holocaust studies to define how fiction can pose an ethical alternative to aestheticized history while remaining open to pluralism and democratic values. In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.
Download or read book Dis Orienting Planets written by Isiah Lavender III and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Suparno Banerjee, Cait Coker, Jeshua Enriquez, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Malisa Kurtz, Stephanie Li, Bradford Lyau, Uppinder Mehan, Graham J. Murphy, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Amy J. Ransom, Robin Anne Reid, Haerin Shin, Stephen Hong Sohn, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Timothy J. Yamamura Isiah Lavender III's Dis-Orienting Planets amplifies critical issues surrounding the racial and ethnic dimensions of science fiction. This edited volume explores depictions of Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular regard to China, Japan, India, and Korea. Dis-Orienting Planets highlights so-called yellow and brown peoples from the constellation of a historically white genre. The collection launches into political representations of Asian identity in science fiction's imagination, from fear of the Yellow Peril and its racist stereotypes to techno-Orientalism and the remains of a postcolonial heritage. Thus the essays, by contributors such as Takayuki Tatsumi, Veronica Hollinger, Uppinder Mehan, and Stephen Hong Sohn, reconfigure the very study of race in science fiction. A follow-up to Lavender's Black and Brown Planets, this collection expands the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of Asia in science fiction. One of the few on this subject, the volume probes Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story, the acclaimed film Cloud Atlas, and Guillermo del Toro's monster film Pacific Rim, among others. Dis-Orienting Planets embarks on a wide-ranging assessment of Asian representations in science fiction, upon the determination that our visions of the future must include all people of color.
Download or read book A Hand to Turn the Time written by Theodore D. Kharpertian and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the major fiction of Thomas Pynchon in three contexts: Menippean satire, post-modernism, and American writing. The critical genealogy of the term satire is discussed and Pynchon's V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are analyzed.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Humour Research written by Elisabeth Vanderheiden and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dionysus in Literature written by Branimir M. Rieger and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anthology, outstanding authorities present their assessments of literary madness in a variety of topics and approaches. The entire collection of essays presents intriguing aspects of the Dionysian element in literature.
Download or read book Well that about wraps it up for God written by Katharina Günther and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2008-02-18 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: The story of The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy is the story of Life, the Universe and Everything. Initially broadcasted as a radio series on BBC Radio 4 in 1978 it was such a success that its author, Douglas Adams, eventually ended up not only publishing the story with a slightly modified plot in book form but also creating four sequels until 1992. The story was taken up by other media which resulted in the creation of a TV series in 1981, stage shows, a movie in 2005, a computer game, comics, towels and a lot more. Today the H2G2 has reached a cult status that few other Science Fiction works boast. The plot of the HG is mostly confusing and full of curious ideas wherefore a complete summary is not possible at this point. However, the following paragraph will give the unacquainted readers an idea of the story. There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are: Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? The Trilogy in Five Parts is the story of Arthur Dent and his quest for the answers to these problems. After the destruction of Earth the only surviving Englishman Dent hitchhikes through the width of time and space, finds out the answer to the ultimate question, dines at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, saves the world, falls in love with a woman whose feet cannot touch the ground, is worshipped by birds and sandwich-lovers, is enlightened by God s final message to His Creation and finally meets his fate on STAVROMULABETA. The ape-descendent Dent is accompanied by Ford Prefect, owner of a copy of the most remarkable book ever to come out of the Great Publishing Houses of Ursa Minor Beta: The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy an encyclopaedia that sells so well mainly because it has the words DON T PANIC written in large friendly letters on the cover. Other companions are Marvin, the paranoid android, Trillian, the sole surviving woman from Earth and Zaphod Beeblebrox, the former Galactic President. The author of this humorous work of Science Fiction was born as Douglas Noel Adams on March 11th 1952 in Cambridge, UK, and died on May 11th 2001 in Santa Barbara, California. Whilst studying English in Cambridge he joined the Footlights Society, a comedy group which is also closely connected to Monty Python. Adams initial career aspiration was to become a comedian yet he seemingly never [...]
Download or read book Joseph Heller s Catch 22 written by Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of essays analyzing Heller's Catch-22, including a chronology of his works and life.
Download or read book The Style of Connectedness written by Thomas Moore and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, arguably one of the greatest works of fiction in this century, has often been considered despairing, absurdist, or niilistic. Now, in a monumental effort to make Pynchon's work more accessible, Thomas Moore surveys all the major, and often confusing, backgrounds in Gravity's Rainbow--from archaic myths to quantum-physical theory; from romantic thought to rocket technology; from seventeenth-century Puritanism, through the ideas of Weber, Jung, and Marhsall McLuhan, to the worlds of Weimar and Hollywood movies--to help Pynchon's reader understand the weird, frightening, funny, lyrical, surreal, and ultimately hopeful cosmos of Pynchon's fictions. By exploring the novel's internal strategies and its brilliant integrations of background information, Moore illustrates how Gravity's Rainbow remains movingly humane, as its author, the agonized mediator of a bewildering field of cultural information, remains excruciatingly sensitive to every human image and gesture, searching for the chances for love and connection that still hide in the vast designs of things. The reader of Moore's work should emerge with a thorough appreciation of Pynchon's unique style of genius, of his optimism, of his intense moralism, and of the justness of the widespread claim that Pynchon is the most brilliant "encyclopedic" writer of fiction since Joyce.
Download or read book Deadly Musings written by Michael Kowalewski and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous," writes Michael Kowalewski. "They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful." In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging from scalpings and torture in The Deerslayer to fish feeding off human viscera in To Have and Have Not, to show how highly charged descriptive passages bear on major issues concerning a writer's craft. Instead of focusing on violence as a socio-cultural phenomenon, he explores how writers including Cooper, Poe, Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Pynchon draw on violence in the realistic imagining of their works and how their respective styles sustain or counteract this imagining. Kowalewski begins by offering a new definition of realism, or realistic imagining, and the rhetorical imagination that seems to oppose it. Then for each author he investigates how scenes of violence exemplify the stylistic imperatives more generally at work in that writer's fiction. Using violence as the critical occasion for exploring the distinctive qualities of authorial voice, Deadly Musings addresses the question of what literary criticism is and ought to be, and how it might apply more usefully to the dynamics of verbal performance.
Download or read book Gates of Eden American Culture in the Sixties written by Morris Dickstein and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely admired as the definitive cultural history of the 1960s, this groundbreaking work finally reappears in a new edition. The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzying display of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fully grasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as a momentous cultural epoch in its own right, as much as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political ferment of the decade but also its disillusionment. What results is an inestimable contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century American culture.
Download or read book A Literary History of the American West written by Western Literature Association (U.S.) and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 1408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the American Short Story written by Abby H. P. Werlock and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 3225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two-volume set that presents an introduction to American short fiction from the 19th century to the present.
