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Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction
Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which broadly understood contemporary fiction envisions, explores and engenders minds going beyond the classical models. The opening essay discusses the complex relationships between such innovative concepts of the mind and experimental techniques for presenting mentality. The chapters which follow focus on (dis)embodied and/or extended mind, virtuality of avatar minds, intermental thought of reader communities, the capability of artificial intelligence (and humans) for genuine selfless love, the interplay between technology and affect in posthuman consciousness. The books under discussion include Murmur by Will Eaves, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. A piece of conceptual fiction by Steve Tomasula, one of the most innovative American novelists of our times, exploring the human mind’s alleged power to transcend its biological limits, complements these scholarly inquiries.
Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind
Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind traces the multiple relations between the mind and the contemporary novel. The contributors here examine various types of narrative fiction, ranging from the postmodern novels of J. M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan through the experimental prose of Leslie Scalapino to the popular fiction of James Dashner and Christopher Moore. On the one hand, they investigate novelistic representations of various mind-related issues, including different states of consciousness, Alzheimer’s disease, thought experiments and formation of the self. On the other, by analysing and evaluating in these contexts such narrative devices as unreliable narration, development of conceptual n...
The Truths of Monsters
As monster theory highlights, monsters are cultural symbols, guarding the borders that society creates to protect its values and norms. Adolescence is the time when one explores and aims at crossing borders to learn the rules of the culture that one will fit into as an adult. Exploring the roles of monsters in coming-of-age narratives and the need to confront and understand the monstrous, this work explores recent developments in the presentation of monsters--such as the vampire, the zombie, and the man-made monster--in maturation narratives, then moves on to discuss monsters inhabiting the psychic landscapes of child characters. Finally, it touches on monsters in science fiction, in which facing the monstrous is a variation of the New World narrative. Discussions of novels by M. R. Carey, Suzanne Collins, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Sarah Maria Griffin, Seanan McGuire, Stephenie Meyer, Patrick Ness, and Jon Skovron are complemented by analysis of television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Westworld.
Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction
Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction is a collection of essays examining the potential of the contemporary English-language novel to represent and inquire into various aspects of the human mind. Grounded in contemporary literary theory as well as consciousness studies, the essays consider both narrative techniques by means of which writers attempt to render various states of consciousness (such as multimodality in digital fiction or experimental typography in post-traumatic narratives), and novelistic interpretations of issues currently being investigated by neurobiologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (such as the adaptive value of consciousness or the process of self-integration by means of self-narration). The volume thus offers critical reflection upon the novel’s cognitive accomplishment in this challenging area. Contributors are: Nathan D. Frank, Judit Friedrich, Justyna Galant, Marta Komsta, Péter Kristóf Makai, Ajitpaul Mangat, Grzegorz Maziarczyk, James McAdams, Daniel Panka, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Joanna Klara Teske, Lloyd Issac Vayo, Dóra Vecsernyés, Sylwia Wilczewska
Diffractive Reading
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently ...
Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel
Contemporary aesthetics is characterized by generic mixing on the level of both form and content. The barriers between different media and different genres have been broken down in all literary art forms, whether it be theatre, poetry, or the novel. While the publishing industry is increasingly keen to label novels according to genre or sub-genre (“Chick Lit”, “Lad Lit”, “Gay fiction”, “Scottish fiction”, “New Historical Fiction”, “Crime fiction”, “Post-9/11 Fiction”), the novel itself (and novelists) persist in resisting generic categorizations as well as inviting them. Is this a move towards a new artistic liberty or does it simply testify to a confusion of iden...
The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction
The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within exami...
The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media
One possible description of the contemporary medial landscape in Western culture is that it has gone ‘meta’ to an unprecedented extent, so that a remarkable ‘meta-culture’ has emerged. Indeed, ‘metareference’, i.e. self-reflexive comments on, or references to, various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact or performance, specific media and arts or the media in general is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in ‘high’ art and literature as frequently as in their popular counterparts, in the traditional media as well as in new media. From the Simpsons, pop music, children’s literature, computer games and pornography to the contemporary visual arts...
The Lives of Texts
The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and a living organism, the contributors analyze various literary texts ranging from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, as well as film adaptations and the graphic novel. Apart from the works of canonical writers, attention is also drawn to some long-forgotten authors, along with the most recent instances of popular literature and culture. The exploration of the title metaphor allows the contributors to trace life-like phenomena (e.g. textual birth, maturation, dissemination, death and resurrection) in the texts of writers so remote from each other as Layamon, Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Charles Williams, Ursula Le Guin, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks, J. K. Rowling, or Neil Gaiman.
Ian McEwan
This book offers a discussion of seven “canonical” novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), introducing radical new readings, which are offered not as ultimate and conclusive “solutions” of the textual puzzles, but as possibilities to engage with the text creatively, to enrich the critical consensus and restore interpretative freedom to the readers. This project formulates a strategy of “inclusive reading” – an approach to the text that does not seek to reduce it to a single interpretation, and yet is comprehensively informed through the analysis of the primary text, critical dis...
