You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Rethinking Postmodernism(s) revisits three historical sites of American literary postmodernism: the early postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon's V. (1961), the emancipatory postmodernism of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and the late or post-postmodernism of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). For the first time, it confronts these texts with the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, staging a conceptual dialogue between pragmatism and postmodernism that historicizes and recontextualizes customary readings of postmodern fiction. The book is a must-read for all interested in current reassessments of literary postmodernism, in new critical dialogues between seminal postmodern texts, and in recent attempts to theorize the 'post-postmodern' moment.
Amerikafahrt by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation, analysis, and writing, based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer, Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka’s Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if Koeppen sought to answer de Tocqueville’s questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. Journey through America is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.
Richly nuanced and firmly grounded in literature, biography, and history, The Language of Trauma analyses three major central European writers, revealing how they incorporated and responded to psychological and historical trauma.
This study explores the literary representations of Adolf Hitler in American fiction and makes the case that his figure has slowly developed from a means of left-wing critique into a device of right-wing affirmation.
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as...
The novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are increasingly regarded as representing a new trend, an 'aesthetic sea change' in contemporary American literature. 'Post-postmodernism' and 'New Sincerity' are just two of the labels that have been attached to this trend. But what do these labels mean? What characterizes and connects these novels? Den Dulk shows that the connection between these works lies in their shared philosophical dimension. On the one hand, they portray excessive self-reflection and endless irony as the two main problems of contemporary Western life. On the other hand, the novels embody an attempt to overcome these problems: sincerity, reality-commitment and community are portrayed as the virtues needed to achieve a meaningful life. This shared philosophical dimension is analyzed by viewing the novels in light of the existentialist philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Camus.
How can English and American Studies be instrumental to conceptualizing the deep instability we are presently facing? How can they address the coordinates of this instability, such as war, terrorism, the current economic and financial crisis, and the consequent myriad forms of deprivation and fear? How can they tackle the strategies of de-humanization, invisibility, and the naturalization of inequality and injustice entailed in contemporary discourses? This anthology grew out of an awareness of the need to debate the role of English and American Studies both in the present context and in relation to the so-called demise of the Humanities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s rethinking of materialit...
British-born experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose puzzled numerous critics, theoreticians, and writers as she overturned opinions continuously struggling to outline her fractal identity. The present book boldly outlines and settles the ambiguities of Christine Brooke-Rose’s split identity, originating in the psychoanalytical, aesthetic, and authorial confusion of a writer who took delight in challenging readers with highly experimental novels. This study highlights the chameleonic features of the Brooke-Rosean narrative in an audaciously exhaustive and original attempt to chart the author’s lipogrammic narrative discourse, its unifying intertextual yet anamorphic web, and its fictional characters.
While Plato recommended expelling poets from the ideal society, W. H. Auden famously declared that poetry makes nothing happen. The 19 contributions to the present book avoid such polarized views and, responding in different ways to the “ethical turn” in narrative theory, explore the varied ways in which narratives encourage readers to ponder matters of right and wrong. All work from the premise that the analysis of narrative ethics needs to be linked to a sensitivity to esthetic (narrative) form. The ethical issues are accordingly located on different levels. Some are clearly presented as thematic concerns within the text(s) considered, while others emerge through (or are generated by) ...
In an age of globalization, computerization, and commodification, why read poetry? It seems ill suited to meet today's challenges. Or is it? This volume, which collects papers and poems read at a conference on British and North American experimental poetry, demonstrates the opposite.