Contemporary Novelists And The Aesthetics Of Twenty First Century American Life

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Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty First Century American Life Book PDF

Author : Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2020-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609386757

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Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life by Alexandra Kingston-Reese Pdf

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

Thom Dancer
Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction Book PDF

Author : Thom Dancer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2021-09-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192645364

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Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction by Thom Dancer Pdf

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity can feel impossible to solve. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction argues that contemporary fiction helps those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems — not, as usually assumed, through the ambitious search for grand solutions but rather by cultivating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction advances a claim for the value of temperament in general as a crucial analytic for understanding contemporary experience as well as for a particular temperament of critical modesty as crucial in negotiating the limits of critical and human agency that constitute our daily lives. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, this volume makes the surprising case that by adopting a modest stance, the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, it offers an engaging response to the debate over critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature

Katherine Ebury,Christin M. Mulligan
Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature Book PDF

Author : Katherine Ebury,Christin M. Mulligan
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2024-05-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781040024591

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Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature by Katherine Ebury,Christin M. Mulligan Pdf

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Profiles and Plotlines

Katherine D. Johnston
Profiles and Plotlines Book PDF

Author : Katherine D. Johnston
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2023-06-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609388942

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Profiles and Plotlines by Katherine D. Johnston Pdf

Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot points in tales of the political economy. In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.

Novel Competition

Evan Brier
Novel Competition Book PDF

Author : Evan Brier
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2024-04-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609389406

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Novel Competition by Evan Brier Pdf

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

Flat Aesthetics

Christian Moraru
Flat Aesthetics Book PDF

Author : Christian Moraru
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501355288

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Flat Aesthetics by Christian Moraru Pdf

Flat Aesthetics seeks to secure a more granular and ontologically demotic handle on the contemporary in American literature. While contemporaneity can be viewed as “our” period, Christian Moraru approaches the contemporary as some-thing made by things themselves. The making of the contemporary is variously restaged by the body of fictional prose under scrutiny here. Thus, this corpus itself participates in the making of contemporaneity. In dialogue with object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms, Moraru contends that the contemporary does not preexist objects or the novels featuring them; it is not their background but an outcome of things' self-presentation. As objects, beings, or existents present themselves in the present, in our “now,” they foster thing-configurations that together compose the form of, and essentially make, the contemporary - the present's cultural-material signature, as Moraru calls it. To decipher this signature, Flat Aesthetics provides a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction. Discussed are solely post-2000 works by writers who have also established themselves over the past two decades or so, from Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Ben Lerner to Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel. Their output, Moraru claims, bears witness to the onset of a “flat” aesthetics in American letters after September 11, 2001. Organized into five parts, the books canvases objectual constellations of contemporaneity shaped by material dynamics of language, museality and display, spatiality, zombification and thing-rhetoric, and post-anthropocentric kinship.

Ecospatiality

Lowell Wyse
Ecospatiality Book PDF

Author : Lowell Wyse
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2021-07-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609387747

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Ecospatiality by Lowell Wyse Pdf

"John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley. Richard Wright's Chicago. Leslie Marmon Silko's New Mexico. Readers often have strong connections with literary places like these. And some works of literature can even change our understanding of the world we live in. But can place also change our view of literature? Site-Reading advances a place-based approach to literature, reading classic texts through the twin lenses of geographical awareness and environmental thought. This book highlights recent developments in ecocriticism and geocriticism to argue for a theory of "ecospatiality" with nature, space, and story as the three elements of place. Site-Reading reconsiders well-known works of twentieth-century American prose and shows how social and environmental issues always overlap. Travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, whose work embodies the ecospatial perspective, portrays his experiences with place on the local, regional, and continental scales. Classic novels by Silko, Willa Cather, and Ana Castillo-usually discussed in isolation-converge in a way that maps diverse cultural perspectives and environmental threats onto the shared geography of Central New Mexico. A reading of Steinbeck's Salinas Valley Watershed texts investigates the impacts of literary tourism in "Steinbeck Country" before drilling down into Steinbeck's portrayals of spatial development and environmental history. And an innovative analysis of Native Son shows how Richard Wright uses cartographic details to decry the spatial/racial politics of South Side Chicago in the 1930s. In this book, Lowell Wyse shows how place provides the grounds for both human experience and critical practice. By bringing together concepts like literary cartography, deep mapping, and bioregionalism in an "ecospatial" approach, Site-Reading not only maps new terrain between ecocriticism and geocriticism, but also shows why place matters-in the world and in the text"--

Contemporary Literature and the Body

Alice Hall
Contemporary Literature and the Body Book PDF

Author : Alice Hall
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2023-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781350180178

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Contemporary Literature and the Body by Alice Hall Pdf

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different genres. It argues that scholarship on literature and the body is of fundamental importance to discussions about gender, race, sexuality, class, age, narrative form, and processes of reading and writing. Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction understands 'literature' in a broad sense: as fundamentally connected to changes in technology, culture and the environment. Offering a lively and accessible synthesis, it explores how literary writing of present and recent decades is concerned with the challenges of conveying physical experiences, experimenting with sensory perception, and thinking through the relationship between embodiment, identity and knowledge.

Art Essays

Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Art Essays Book PDF

Author : Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781609388119

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Art Essays by Alexandra Kingston-Reese Pdf

Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.

William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture

Mitch R. Murray,Mathias Nilges
William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture Book PDF

Author : Mitch R. Murray,Mathias Nilges
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609387488

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William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture by Mitch R. Murray,Mathias Nilges Pdf

William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It is high time for a book that explores the significance and wide-ranging impact of Gibson’s fiction. In the 1970s and 80s, Gibson, the “Godfather of Cyberpunk,” rejuvenated science fiction. In groundbreaking works such as Neuromancer, which changed science fiction as we knew it, Gibson provided us with a language and imaginary through which it became possible to make sense of the newly emerging world of globalization and the digital and media age. Ever since, Gibson’s reformulation of science fiction has provided us not just with radically innovative visions of the future but indeed with trenchant analyses of our historical present and of the emergence and exhaustion of possible futures. Contributors: Maria Alberto, Andrew M. Butler, Amy J. Elias, Christian Haines, Kylie Korsnack, Mathias Nilges, Malka Older, Aron Pease, Lisa Swanstrom, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sherryl Vint, Phillip E. Wegner, Roger Whitson, Charles Yu

Novel Subjects

Leah A. Milne
Novel Subjects Book PDF

Author : Leah A. Milne
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609387624

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Novel Subjects by Leah A. Milne Pdf

In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care--a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and "an act of political warfare."

Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Peter Boxall
Twenty First Century Fiction Book PDF

Author : Peter Boxall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2013-06-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107244498

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Twenty-First-Century Fiction by Peter Boxall Pdf

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century

Martin Halliwell
American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century Book PDF

Author : Martin Halliwell
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2008-10-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780748631322

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American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century by Martin Halliwell Pdf

Will the twenty-first century be the next American Century? Will American power and ideas dominate the globe in the coming years? Or is the prestige of the United States likely to crumble beneath the pressure of new international challenges? This ground-breaking book explores the changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, when the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or more controversial. It brings together some of the most eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States during the early years of our new century.From the subterranean political shifts beneath the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this book explores the political, social and cultural contours of contemporary American life - but it also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, i

Wrong

Diarmuid Hester
Wrong Book PDF

Author : Diarmuid Hester
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2020-06-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781609386917

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Wrong by Diarmuid Hester Pdf

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade. In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post–War avant-garde.

Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction

Alexandra Lawrie
Writing the Past in Twenty First Century American Fiction Book PDF

Author : Alexandra Lawrie
Publisher : EUP
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2022-09-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1474463444

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Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction by Alexandra Lawrie Pdf

Argues for a reawakened commitment to historicity in contemporary American fiction Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction examines contemporary novels profoundly shaped by a sense of historical consciousness. Authors including Ben Lerner, Colson Whitehead, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru and Garth Greenwell each use flashbacks, historical parallels and non-sequential narrative arrangements to emphasise the re-emergence, in a twenty-first-century context, of historical structures and circumstances. This study explores how these frequent moments of temporal slippage amount to a 'falling out of time', as characters are forced to confront the past crises which continue to exert pressure on their own contemporary moment. Alexandra Lawrie is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.