The End Of American Literature

Author : Dan Sinykin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192594266

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American Literature and the Long Downturn by Dan Sinykin Pdf

Apocalypse shapes the experience of millions of Americans. Not because they face imminent cataclysm, however true this is, but because apocalypse is a story they tell themselves. It offers a way out of an otherwise irredeemably unjust world. Adherence to it obscures that it is a story, rather than a description of reality. And it is old. Since its origins among Jewish writers in the first centuries BCE, apocalypse has recurred as a tempting and available form through which to express a sense of hopelessness. Why has it appeared with such force in the US now? What does it mean? This book argues that to find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, this volume calls this period the long downturn. Though it might seem abstract, the economics of the long downturn worked its way into the most intimate experiences of everyday life, including the fear that there would be no tomorrow, and this fear takes the form of 'neoliberal apocalypse'. The varieties of neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation's commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century. For many of us, for different reasons, it feels like the end is coming soon and this book explores how we came to this, and what it has meant for literature.

Author : Gregory S. Jay
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Education
ISBN : 0801484227

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American Literature & the Culture Wars by Gregory S. Jay Pdf

Introduction: making ends meet -- The struggle for representation -- Not born on the fourth of July -- Taking multiculturalism personally -- The discipline of the syllabus -- The end of "American" literature.

Author : Gregory S. Jay
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2018-09-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501731273

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American Literature and the Culture Wars by Gregory S. Jay Pdf

Gregory S. Jay boldly challenges the future of American literary studies. Why pursue the study and teaching of a distinctly American literature? What is the appropriate purpose and scope of such pursuits? Is the notion of a traditional canon of great books out of date? Where does American literature leave off and Mexican or Caribbean or Canadian or postcolonial literature begin? Are today's campus conflicts fueled more by economics or ideology? Jay addresses these questions and others relating to American literary studies to explain why this once arcane academic discipline found itself so often in the news during the culture wars of the 1990s. While asking some skeptical questions about new directions and practices, Jay argues forcefully in favor of opening the borders of American literary and cultural analysis. He relates the struggle for representation in literary theory to a larger cultural clash over the meaning and justice of representation, then shows how this struggle might expand both the contents and the teaching of American literature. In an account of the vexed legacy of the Declaration of Independence, he provides a historical context for the current quarrels over literature and politics. Prominent among these debates are those over multiculturalism, which Jay takes up in an essay on the impasses of identity politics. In closing, he considers how the field of comparative American cultural studies might be constructed.

Author : John Barth
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1322291870

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The End of the Road by John Barth Pdf

Author : John Hay
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 590 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781316997420

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Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture by John Hay Pdf

The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

Author : Samuel Cohen
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2009-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781587298905

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After the End of History by Samuel Cohen Pdf

In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

Author : Brett Levinson
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0804743460

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The Ends of Literature by Brett Levinson Pdf

The Ends of Literature analyzes the part played by literature within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all the politics of neoliberalism. The "why?" of contemporary Latin American literature is the book's overarching concern. Its wide range includes close readings of the prose of Cortázar, Carpentier, Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the "Boom" movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the process of neoliberalism: as the "too-strong" state (dictatorship) yields to the "too-weak" state (the market), and as the various practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private or privatized endeavors. However, neither the "end of literature" nor the "end of the state" can be assumed. The end of literature in Latin America is in fact the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the "ends" in question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and conclusion. Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much recent Latin American political discussion la transición refers to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind between these two displacements—hence of Latin America's voyage into "post-transition"—forms a fundamental portion of the text.

Author : Stephen J. Burn,Mark W. Van Wienen,Ichiro Takayoshi,Christopher Vials,Steven Belletto,David Wyatt,Kirk Curnutt,D. Quentin Miller,Rachel Greenwald Smith
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : American literature
ISBN : 131650171X

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American Literature in Transition, 1990-2000 by Stephen J. Burn,Mark W. Van Wienen,Ichiro Takayoshi,Christopher Vials,Steven Belletto,David Wyatt,Kirk Curnutt,D. Quentin Miller,Rachel Greenwald Smith Pdf

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, and from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade's literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period's well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

Author : Richard Gray
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2011-05-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780470657928

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After the Fall by Richard Gray Pdf

After the Fall A common refrain heard since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is that “everything has changed.” After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. Author Richard Gray – widely regarded as the leading European scholar in American literature – reveals the widespread belief among novelists, dramatists, and poets – as well as the American public at large – that in the post-9/11 world they are all somehow living “after the fall.” He carefully considers how many writers, faced with what they see as the end of their world, have retreated into the seductive pieties of home, hearth, and family; and how their works are informed by the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism. As a counterbalance, Gray also discusses in depth the many writings that “get it right” – transnational and genuinely crossbred works that resist the oppositional and simplistic “us and them” / “Christian and Muslim” language that has dominated mainstream commentary. These imaginative works, Gray believes, choose instead to respond to the heterogeneous character of the United States, as well as its necessary positioning in a transnational context. After the Fall offers illuminating insights into the relationships of such issues as nationalism, trauma, culture, and literature during a time of profound crisis.

Author : Jonathan Senchyne
Publisher : Studies in Print Culture and t
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 1625344732

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The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne Pdf

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

Author : Brander Matthews
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1896
Category : American literature
ISBN : HARVARD:32044014688261

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An Introduction to the Study of American Literature by Brander Matthews Pdf

"This book is intended as an introduction to the study of American literature. Although the chapters on the separate authors are wholly distinct, they have been so planned that each of them prepares the way for its successor, and that all of them together outline the changing circumstances under which American literature has developed. An attempt has been made to show how each of the chief American authors influenced his time, and how he in turn was influenced by it; and also to indicate how each of them was related to the others, both personally and artistically. Bearing in mind the fact that the student needs to have his attention centered on vital points, all dates and all proper names, and all the titles of books not absolutely essential, have been rigorously omitted. Interest has thus been concentrated on the literary career of each of the greater writers and on their practice of the literary art, in the hope and expectation that the student will be encouraged and stimulated to read their works for his own pleasure. After the consideration of these more important authors, one by one, the writers of less consequence have been discussed briefly in a single chapter; and in like manner a single chapter only has been devoted to a summary consideration of the condition of our literature at the end of the nineteenth century. To arouse the student's interest in the authors as actual men, the illustrations chosen have been confined to portraits and views, and to facsimiles of manuscripts. To enable him to see for himself the successive stages of the growth of American literature, and to let him discover how the authors sometimes came one after another and sometimes worked side by side, there has been appended also a chronological table of the chief dates in our literary history. As mere text-book instruction can never be an adequate substitute for the student's own acquaintance with the actual works of the authors discussed, there have been annexed to every chapter bibliographical notes calling attention to the editions most suitable for the student's reading, and also to the best biographies and to a few of the most suggestive criticisms."--From the Prefatory Note.

Author : Sarah Wasserman
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781452964157

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The Death of Things by Sarah Wasserman Pdf

A comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.

Author : Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-02-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781680031799

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The End of American Literature by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Pdf

The End of American Literature explores the dynamics and stakes of the late age of print. A time when one day it seems like printed books and bookstores are on the decline, whereas on another it is ebooks and the digital utopia showing signs of slippage. The feeling that something is ending—not that something is beginning—is seen both in our prognostications on the fate of capitalism, democracy, and America as well as in declarations of the end of the book, literature, and theory. The essays here take up these timely topics not with a nostalgic nod to the past or utopian utterances to the future, but rather firmly situated in the expansiveness of the present.

Author : Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2012-09-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674066298

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What Was African American Literature? by Kenneth W. Warren Pdf

African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literatureÑand to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In WarrenÕs view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, WarrenÕs work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

Author : Derrick R. Spires,Christina Roberts,Joseph Rezek,Justine S. Murison,Laura L. Mielke,Christopher Looby,Rodrigo Lazo,Alisha Knight,Hsuan L. Hsu,Rachel Greenwald Smith,Michael Everton,Christine Bold
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 1046 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2022-04-18
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781770488250

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The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 by Derrick R. Spires,Christina Roberts,Joseph Rezek,Justine S. Murison,Laura L. Mielke,Christopher Looby,Rodrigo Lazo,Alisha Knight,Hsuan L. Hsu,Rachel Greenwald Smith,Michael Everton,Christine Bold Pdf

Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 • Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette • In-depth Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Rebellions and Revolutions,” and “Print Culture and Popular Literature” • Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology devoted not only to frequently anthologized figures but also to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Briton Hammon