The Grotesque In Modern American Fiction

Author : Dieter Meindl
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0826210791

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American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque by Dieter Meindl Pdf

By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.

Author : James Goodwin,Professor James Goodwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814211089

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Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin,Professor James Goodwin Pdf

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O'Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century. A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin's book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

Author : William Van O'Connor
Publisher : Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : American literature
ISBN : UCAL:B4354236

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The Grotesque: an American Genre by William Van O'Connor Pdf

Author : James Goodwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2015-09-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814252354

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Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin Pdf

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O'Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media-that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is "one of finding something that is not grotesque"-is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century. A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin's book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

Author : Michael J. Meyer
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2023-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004656475

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Literature and the Grotesque by Michael J. Meyer Pdf

Author : Christopher MacGowan
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2011-02-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781405160230

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The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook by Christopher MacGowan Pdf

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.

Author : Robert Dunne
Publisher : Kent State University Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0873388275

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A New Book of the Grotesques by Robert Dunne Pdf

Sherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form. This book looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches.

Author : Yuan Yuan
Publisher : UPA
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2016-04-12
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780761866633

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The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx by Yuan Yuan Pdf

The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980’s, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage. The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, the epitome of Western logos, solved the Sphinx’s riddle with a single word, “Man.” This evocation for the phantom of a solipsistic subject discloses, in effect, Oedipus’ latent grotesque disparity. The book explores the encounter of this unlikely pair to inquire the riddling relationship between the singular subject and the grotesque other in the context of modern discourses of the subject and postmodern theories of the other.

Author : Ajit Kumar Mishra
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : American fiction
ISBN : IND:39000001012751

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Loneliness in Modern American Fiction by Ajit Kumar Mishra Pdf

Author : Michael Jon Meyer,Michael J. Meyer
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9051837933

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Literature and the Grotesque by Michael Jon Meyer,Michael J. Meyer Pdf

Author : Donald Leslie Shaw
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literature and society
ISBN : 9781855660786

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A Companion to Modern Spanish American Fiction by Donald Leslie Shaw Pdf

With such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel ngel Asturias and Gabriel Garc a M rquez (both the latter Nobel Prizewinners) Spanish American fiction is now unquestionably an integral part of the mainstream of Western literature. This book draws on the most recent research in describing the origins and development of narrative in Spanish America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the pattern from Romanticism and Realism, through Modernismo, Naturalism and Regionalism to the Boom and beyond. It shows how, while seldom moving completely away from satire, social criticism and protest, Spanish American fiction has evolved through successive phases in which both the conceptions of the writer's task and presumptions about narrative and reality have undergone radical alterations. DONALD SHAW holds the Brown Forman Chair of Spanish American literature in the University of Virginia.

Author : Leonard Cassuto
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : African Americans in literature
ISBN : 9780231103374

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The Inhuman Race by Leonard Cassuto Pdf

In revealing the source of the ideology of whiteness in the imagination, Cassuto turns to images of blackness in American literature and culture from 1622 to 1865, examining such texts as Swallow Barn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Typee, and Moby Dick.

Author : Robert Paul Lamb,G. R. Thompson
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 640 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781405178310

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A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914 by Robert Paul Lamb,G. R. Thompson Pdf

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction

Author : Susan Castillo Street,Charles L. Crow
Publisher : Springer
Page : 505 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2016-07-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137477743

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic by Susan Castillo Street,Charles L. Crow Pdf

This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.

Author : Philip Swanson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2015-08-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317620297

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Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (Routledge Revivals) by Philip Swanson Pdf

In the 1960s, there occurred amongst Latin American writers a sudden explosion of literary activity known as the ‘Boom’. It marked an increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels. But the ‘Boom’ of the 1960s should not be taken as the only flowering of Latin American fiction, for such novels dubbed ‘new novels’ were being written in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. In this edited collection, first published in 1990, Philip Swanson charts the development of Latin American fiction throughout the twentieth century. He assesses the impact of the ‘new novel’ on Latin American literature, and follows its growth. Nine key texts are analysed by contributors, including works by the ‘big four’ of the ‘Boom’ – Fuentes, Cortázar, Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa. This book will be of interest to critics and teachers of Latin American literature, and will be useful too as supplementary reading for students of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. It will also serve as a helpful introduction to those new to Latin American fiction.