Author : Michael Sayeau
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191503312
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)
Book Synopsis Against the Event by : Michael Sayeau
Download or read book Against the Event written by Michael Sayeau and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration - from Benjamin's 'shock' and 'distraction' to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson - generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the 'new' but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the 'event.'