Download or read book Narrating Postmodern Time and Space written by Joseph Francese and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Morrison, Doctorow, and Tabucchi vary in their stylisitic responses to these changes, their narratives propose a collective recovery of the past into a future-oriented present and serve as examples of how literature can intervene in history, rather than merely reflecting and acquiescing to it.
Download or read book Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature written by Patricia Garcia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.
Download or read book Handbook of Narrative Analysis written by Luc Herman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories are everywhere, from fiction across media to politics and personal identity. Handbook of Narrative Analysis sorts out both traditional and recent narrative theories, providing the necessary skills to interpret any story. In addition to discussing classical theorists, such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, Handbook of Narrative Analysis presents precursors (such as E. M. Forster), related theorists (Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn), and a large variety of postclassical critics. Among the latter particular attention is paid to rhetorical, cognitive, and cultural approaches; intermediality; storyworlds; gender theory; and natural and unnatural narratology. Not content to consider theory as an end in itself, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck use two short stories and a graphic narrative by contemporary authors as touchstones to illustrate each approach to narrative. In doing so they illuminate the practical implications of theoretical preferences and the ideological leanings underlying them. Marginal glosses guide the reader through discussions of theoretical issues, and an extensive bibliography points readers to the most current publications in the field. Written in an accessible style, this handbook combines a comprehensive treatment of its subject with a user-friendly format appropriate for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Handbook of Narrative Analysis is the go-to book for understanding and interpreting narrative. This new edition revises and extends the first edition to describe and apply the last fifteen years of cutting-edge scholarship in the field of narrative theory.
Download or read book To the Extreme written by Robert E. Rinehart and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes like Jake Burton and Arlo Eisenberg, look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two essays: one written by a scholar active in some aspect of research for the given activity, and another by a practitioner/athlete who writes "from the inside out." The juxtaposed essays confront questions about the essence of sport such as, What is sport?; How does it originate?; and What is its use, value, and function? This book offers a fascinating look at how twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport forms emerge, proliferate, and take hold in a sport-crazy world.
Download or read book Temporalities written by Russell West-Pavlov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and through related concepts, such as psychology, gender and postmodernism. The author also explores representations of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism written by Steven Connor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.
Download or read book Time written by Joel Burges and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from “past/future” and “anticipation/unexpected” to “extinction/adaptation” and “serial/simultaneous.” Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time—not space, as the postmoderns had it—is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.
Download or read book Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition written by William Jefferson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-05-25 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Toni Morrison's writing as politically progressive as is widely assumed? In this eye-opening study, critic William Jefferson argues that it is not. Analyzing Morrison's major texts from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Jefferson argues that Morrison's writing has advanced problematic conceptions of racial essentialism, sexuality, and agency that would not be identified as in any way progressive if issued from the pen of a white writer. More than merely showing readers underappreciated aspects of African-American history, Morrison's fiction has actively intervened in the politics of her era--and in ways politically reactionary and disturbing. Stepping back from Morrison's fiction, Jefferson asks why scholars have not recognized these political aspects of Morrison's writing. What he finds is a purportedly left-wing academy focused predominantly on recognizing the indisputably black aspects of Morrison's work. This "politics of recognition," unfortunately, also naturalizes Morrison's representations in the same manner liberal humanist criticism naturalized the representations of the pre-1970 literary canon.
Download or read book Socially Symbolic Acts written by Joseph Francese and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses issues of broad cultural consequence by examining the work of three of Italy's most prominent living novelists, Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi. The introductory chapter continues a discussion of some of the topics already broached in the author's Narrating Postmodern Time and Space (1997). It uses an approach that is both historicist and psychoanalytic to critically address topics in cultural studies and Italian studies. The book deals with fictions of very recent publication, many of which have been published after the turn of the millennium, filling important gaps in the critical bibliography. Close readings relate texts to their historical and cultural contexts, critiquing their ideology while preserving their Utopian moments.
Download or read book The Author in Criticism written by Elio Attilio Baldi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the American Novel written by Leonard Cassuto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 1271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history.
Download or read book The Meanings of J Robert Oppenheimer written by Lindsey Michael Banco and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He called the first atomic bomb “technically sweet,” yet as he watched its brilliant light explode over the New Mexico desert in 1945 in advance of the black horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he also thought of the line from the Hindu epic The Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the single most recognizable face of the atomic bomb, and a man whose name has become almost synonymous with Cold War American nuclear science, was and still is a conflicted, controversial figure who has come to represent an equally ambivalent technology. The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer examines how he has been represented over the past seven decades in biographies, histories, fiction, comics, photographs, film, television, documentaries, theater, and museums. Lindsey Michael Banco gathers an unprecedented group of cultural texts and seeks to understand the multiple meanings Oppenheimer has held in American popular culture since 1945. He traces the ways these representations of Oppenheimer have influenced public understanding of the atomic bomb, technology, physics, the figure of the scientist, the role of science in war, and even what it means to pursue knowledge of the world around us. Questioning and unpacking both how and why Oppenheimer is depicted as he is across time and genre, this book is broad in scope, profound in detail, and offers unique insights into the rise of nuclear culture and how we think about the relationship between history, imagination, science, and nuclear weapons today.
Download or read book How We Think written by N. Katherine Hayles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis -- First interlude: practices and processes in digital media -- The digital humanities: engaging the issues -- How we read: close, hyper, machine -- Second interlude: the complexities of contemporary technogenesis -- Tech-toc: complex temporalities and contemporary technogenesis -- Technogenesis in action: telegraph code books and the place of the human -- Third interlude: narrative and database: digital media as forms -- Narrative and database: spatial history and the limits of symbiosis -- Transcendent data and transmedia narrative: Steven Hall's The raw shark texts -- Mapping time, charting data: the spatial aesthetic of Mark Z. Danielewski's Only revolutions.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 1141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Oral and Written Narratives and Cultural Identity written by Francisco Cota Fagundes and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume centers on the interrelations of storytelling and various manifestations of cultural identity, from written to oral and from autobiographical to regional and national. Indigenous storytelling, as well as storytelling for and by children and the elderly, are the main focus of these essays. Together, these fifteen texts make a significant contribution toward a deeper understanding of various aspects of textual and oral narrative: they broaden the lines of inquiry into multidisciplinary and multicultural interests, particularly those centering on the construction, expression, and contextualization of various types of identity; and they illustrate the deployment of storytelling not only as testimony, contestation, and subversion - but also as peacebuilding. Many countries, languages and cultures are herein represented - from the United States and Canada to Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, from English to Japanese to Greek to Italian to the languages of indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Philippines.
Download or read book Painting with Words Writing with Pictures written by Franco Ricci and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ricci's book ranges widely over Calvino's oeuvre to illustrate the accuracy of the idea articulated by Calvino himself that a visual image lies at the origin of all his narrative. The book's main theme is the difficult interface between word and image that Calvino struggled with throughout his career, the act of perception that rendered visible that which was invisible and transformed what was seen into what is read. Ricci holds that Calvino's narrative has an 'imagocentric' program and that his literary strategy is 'ekphrastic' i.e. it is characterized by literary description of visual representation, real or imaginary. The book is interdisciplinary in nature and will interest not only scholars of literature but also those who work with the visual arts and with information technology.
Download or read book Mapping Complexity written by Kerstin Pilz and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an analysis of the dialogue of literature and science that forms a central part of the work of Italo Calvino, one of Italy's best known contemporary authors. It provides an in-depth study of Calvino's interest in scientific models and methods and the ways these have informed his narratives.