Five Fictions In Search Of Truth

Author : Myra Jehlen
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2016-07-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691171234

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Five Fictions in Search of Truth by Myra Jehlen Pdf

Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science.

Author : Luke Strongman
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 165 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2014-11-24
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9781443871686

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Bush Telegraph by Luke Strongman Pdf

A bush telegraph is an antipodean slang noun phrase for a grapevine or an informal network of communication. The title of this book on English language use comes from the fact that the book is written from the southern hemisphere (where the idea of a bush telegraph is more widely-known) and because the concept of a bush telegraph describes what the book providesa discussion of salient points in English language use and tertiary teaching across branches of interrelated interests. Each chapter of Bush Telegraph describes aspects of English writing culture. Separately and together, these 20 chapters teach, elucidate, analyse, and discuss crucial aspects of English writing culture, in order to communicate central ideas in, and improve knowledge of, English language writing culture.

Author : Sungju Park-Kang
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2014-06-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781317970521

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Fictional International Relations by Sungju Park-Kang Pdf

This book proposes the idea of fictional International Relations (IR) and engages with feminist IR by contextualising the case of a woman spy in Korea in the Cold War. Fictional imagination and feminist IR encourage one to go beyond conventional or standard ways of thinking; it reshapes taken-for-granted interpretations and assumptions. This takes the view that a dominant narrative of events might be reconstructed as a different kind of story, once events are placed within a wider temporal approach. The case of the woman Korean secret agent- who reportedly bombed a South Korean plane (Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 858) under the instruction from the North Korean leadership to disrupt the Seoul Olympic Games- is chosen to serve as an effective example of fictional IR and feminist IR scholarship, which can be investigated through the research puzzles concerning gender, pain and truth. Fictional International Relations has three main objectives. First, it investigates the way in which fiction-writing can become a method for dealing with data problems and contingency in IR. Second, the book examines how gender, pain and truth operate or interact in the case of the Korean spy and how this observation can strengthen feminist IR in terms of intersectionality. Finally, the author goes on to explore why this case has been so difficult to study openly and thoroughly. The aim of the book is not to refute the official findings; the point is to unpack complex dynamics surrounding truth—more specifically how the official account has been executed as ‘the’ truth—based on a feminist-informed investigation. This book will be of interest to students of IR theory, critical security studies, Cold War studies, gender studies and Asian studies.

Author : Gregory Jusdanis
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2010-02-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804773768

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Fiction Agonistes by Gregory Jusdanis Pdf

In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.

Author : Brian Hamnett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2011-11-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199695041

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The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Brian Hamnett Pdf

Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

Author : Dora Zhang
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226722665

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Strange Likeness by Dora Zhang Pdf

The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.” As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. Strange Likeness will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.

Author : Timothy Aubry
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674988965

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Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures by Timothy Aubry Pdf

For scholars invested in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, the beauty of literature seemed frivolous, even complicit with social iniquities. Suspicion of aesthetics became a way to establish the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s politics. Yet aesthetic pleasure never disappeared, Timothy Aubrey writes. It went underground.

Author : Michael Anesko
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192513984

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Generous Mistakes by Michael Anesko Pdf

By combining the techniques of textual criticism and the insights of close reading, Generous Mistakes offers new perspectives not only on two of Henry James's major novels (The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors) but also on the process by which they became the books we know—or think we know. Through a better understanding of the conditions of production that affected James's author function, we achieve a deeper appreciation of the historical contingencies of his artistry. Closely examining new forms of evidence (even fingerprints), Generous Mistakes contends that authorship is a hybrid construction, a sometimes unpredictable sequence of different forms of practice, each of which contributes meaningfully to the texts we read and analyze. Offering a sustained examination of the 'textual condition' of James's work—going beyond the relatively familiar ground of authorial revision—this study brings into sharper focus the complex and sometimes arbitrary factors that contributed to the making of two masterpieces of modern fiction and to the legend of the master who wrote them.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Dept of English Studies ELTE
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9789632841540

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A tűnődések valósága - The Reality of Ruminations by Anonim Pdf

Author : Leonard Cassuto
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1271 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2011-03-24
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780521899079

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The Cambridge History of the American Novel by Leonard Cassuto Pdf

An authoritative and lively account of the development of the genre, by leading experts in the field.

Author : George Levine
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2011-06-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780191620621

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Darwin the Writer by George Levine Pdf

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.

Author : Julian Murphet
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2024-03-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192863126

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Modern Character by Julian Murphet Pdf

In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.

Author : David M. Halperin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2012-08-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674070868

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How To Be Gay by David M. Halperin Pdf

No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth. David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style. Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.

Author : Benjamin H. Ogden,Thomas H. Ogden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2013-03-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134065660

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The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye by Benjamin H. Ogden,Thomas H. Ogden Pdf

The Analyst‘s Ear and the Critic‘s Eye is the first volume of literary criticism to be co-authored by a practicing psychoanalyst and a literary critic. The result of this unique collaboration is a lively conversation that not only demonstrates what is most fundamental to each discipline, but creates a joint perspective on reading literature that ne

Author : William C. Dowling
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2011-10-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780268077976

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Ricoeur on Time and Narrative by William C. Dowling Pdf

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s Temps et récit, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of Temps et récit, Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et récit: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed Time and Narrative, looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another.