Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780191863240
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (632 download)

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Book Synopsis Art, History, and Postwar Fiction by : Kevin Brazil

Download or read book Art, History, and Postwar Fiction written by Kevin Brazil and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford English Monographs
ISBN 13 : 0198824459
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Art, History, and Postwar Fiction by : Kevin Brazil

Download or read book Art, History, and Postwar Fiction written by Kevin Brazil and published by Oxford English Monographs. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (948 download)

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Book Synopsis The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 by : Kevin Brazil

Download or read book The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 written by Kevin Brazil and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Redlining Culture

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231552319
Total Pages : 155 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Redlining Culture by : Richard Jean So

Download or read book Redlining Culture written by Richard Jean So and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.

The Program Era

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674054245
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis The Program Era by : Mark McGurl

Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

New Novel, New Wave, New Politics

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Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803273092
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis New Novel, New Wave, New Politics by : Lynn A. Higgins

Download or read book New Novel, New Wave, New Politics written by Lynn A. Higgins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, writings on the celebrated movements in literature and film that emerged in France in the mid-1950s - the New Novel and New Wave - have concentrated on their formal innovations, not on their engagement with history or politics. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) "engage in a kind of historiography.... They enact the conflicts, the double binds of postwar history and representation." Higgins claims that what art historian Serge Guilbaut has said of American Abstract Expressionism is equally true of the New Novel and New Wavethat its aesthetic innovations "provided a way for avant-garde artists to preserve their sense of social 'commitment'... while eschewing the art of propaganda and illustration. It was in a sense a political apoliticism." Higgins shows how the New Novel and New Wave are related developments. "While their individual styles and themes remain distinctive, " she writes, "they share an ecriture that can be described as alternately, or interconnectedly, filmic and novelistic." New Wave filmmakers borrowed novelistic devices and made frequent literary allusions, while the "vision of the novelists is distinctly cinematic." A lively account that takes us to the crossroads where culture and politics meet, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics dramatically revises our view of a whole generation of important, influential artists.

Metafiction and the Postwar Novel

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198871406
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Metafiction and the Postwar Novel by : Andrew Dean

Download or read book Metafiction and the Postwar Novel written by Andrew Dean and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metafiction and the Postwar Novel is a full-length reassessment of one of the definitive literary forms of the postwar period, sometimes known as 'postmodern metafiction'. In the place of large-scale theorizing, this book centres on the intimacies of writing situations - metafiction as it responds to readers, literary reception, and earlier works in a career. The emergence of archival materials and posthumously published works helps to bring into view the stakes of different moments of writing. It develops new terms for discussing literary self-reflexivity, derived from a reading of Don Quixote and its reception by J.L. Borges - the 'self of writing' and the 'public author as signature'. Across three comprehensive chapters, Metafiction and Postwar Fiction shows how some of the most highly-regarded postwar writers were motivated to incorporate reflexive elements into their writing - and to what ends. The first chapter, on South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, shows with a new clarity how his fictions drew from and relativized academic literary theory and the conditions of writing in apartheid South Africa. The second chapter, on New Zealand writer Janet Frame, draws widely from her fictions, autobiographies, and posthumously published materials. It demonstrates the terms in which her writing addresses a readership seemingly convinced that her work expressed the interior experience of 'madness'. The final chapter, on American writer Philip Roth, shows how his early reception led to his later, and often explosive, reconsiderations of identity and literary value in postwar America.

Brutalism

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Publisher : The Crowood Press
ISBN 13 : 1785004247
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (85 download)

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Book Synopsis Brutalism by : Alexander Clement

Download or read book Brutalism written by Alexander Clement and published by The Crowood Press. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term 'Brutalism' is used to describe a form of architecture that appeared, mainly in Europe, from around 1945-75. Uncomprimisingly modern, this trend in architecture was both striking and arresting and, perhaps like no other style before or since, aroused extremes of emotion and debate. Some regarded Brutalist buildings as monstrous soulless structures of concrete, steel and glass, whereas others saw the genre as a logical progression, having its own grace and balance. In this revised second edition, Alexander Clement continues the debate of Brutalism in post-war Britain to the modern day, studying a number of key buildings and developments in the fields of civic, educational, commercial, leisure, private and ecclesiastical architecture. With new and improved illustrations, fresh case studies and profiles of the most influential architects, this new edition affords greater attention to iconic buildings and structures. Now that the age of Brutalism is a generation behind us, it is possible to view the movement with a degree of rational reappraisal, study how the style evolved and gauge its effect on Britain's urban landscape. This book will be of interest to architecture students, design students and anyone interested in post-war architecture. Fully illustrated with 160 colour and 4 black & white photographs.

The Metabolist Imagination

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452963126
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Metabolist Imagination by : William O. Gardner

Download or read book The Metabolist Imagination written by William O. Gardner and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era. This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more. The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.

A Painter of Our Time

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307794288
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis A Painter of Our Time by : John Berger

Download or read book A Painter of Our Time written by John Berger and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From John Berger, the Booker Prize-winning author of G., A Painter of Our Time is at once a gripping intellectual and moral detective story and a book whose aesthetic insights make it a companion piece to Berger's great works of art criticism. The year is 1956. Soviet tanks are rolling into Budapest. In London, an expatriate Hungarian painter named Janos Lavin has disappeared following a triumphant one-man show at a fashionable gallery. Where has he gone? Why has he gone? The only clues may lie in the diary, written in Hungarian, that Lavin has left behind in his studio. With uncanny understanding, John Berger has written oneo f hte most convincing portraits of a painter in modern literature, a revelation of art and exile.

Out of Time

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520275292
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Out of Time by : Robert Slifkin

Download or read book Out of Time written by Robert Slifkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to GustonÕs practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate GustonÕs paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of Òthe sixtiesÓ as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, SlifkinÕs comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.

Memory and Trauma in the Postwar Spanish Novel

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Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611485312
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis Memory and Trauma in the Postwar Spanish Novel by : Sarah Leggott

Download or read book Memory and Trauma in the Postwar Spanish Novel written by Sarah Leggott and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, arguing that novels of this period merit a fresh critical approach that enriches existing perspectives on the Spanish novel during the first two decades of the Franco dictatorship. Essays take an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how contemporary cultural theory relating to memory and trauma can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel.

Still Life

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593330765
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Still Life by : Sarah Winman

Download or read book Still Life written by Sarah Winman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Good Morning America Book Club Pick A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man. Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs sink villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian intent on salvaging paintings from the ruins. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and paint a course of events that will shape Ulysses’s life for the next four decades. Returning home to London, Ulysses reimmerses himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parot—a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics—all the while carrying with him his Italian evocations. So, when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate: he must return to the Tuscan hills. With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a deeply drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.

Revolution

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421420880
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution by : Matthew Wilkens

Download or read book Revolution written by Matthew Wilkens and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sophisticated theoretical treatment of postwar fiction as a model of literary and cultural change. Socially, politically, and artistically, the 1950s make up an odd interlude between the first half of the twentieth century—still tied to the problems and orders of the Victorian era and Gilded Age—and the pervasive transformations of the later sixties. In Revolution, Matthew Wilkens argues that postwar fiction functions as a fascinating model of revolutionary change. Uniting literary criticism, cultural analysis, political theory, and science studies, Revolution reimagines the years after World War II as at once distinct from the decades surrounding them and part of a larger-scale series of rare, revolutionary moments stretching across centuries. Focusing on the odd mix of allegory, encyclopedism, and failure that characterizes fifties fiction, Wilkens examines a range of literature written during similar times of crisis, in the process engaging theoretical perspectives from Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson to Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou alongside readings of major novels by Ralph Ellison, William Gaddis, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and others. Revolution links the forces that shaped postwar fiction to the dynamics of revolutionary events in other eras and social domains. Like physicists at the turn of the twentieth century or the French peasantry of 1789, midcentury writers confronted a world that did not fit their existing models. Pressed to adapt but lacking any obvious alternative, their work became sprawling and figurative, accumulating unrelated details and reusing older forms to ambiguous new ends. While the imperatives of the postmodern eventually gave order to this chaos, Wilkens explains that the same forces are again at work in today’s fracturing literary market.

After the Program Era

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Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609384393
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis After the Program Era by : Loren Glass

Download or read book After the Program Era written by Loren Glass and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-01-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 12. "My Ghost Life": Russell Banks and the Limits of Aesthetic Democracy - Sean McCann -- Chapter 13. Getting Real: From Mass Modernism to Peripheral Realism - Donal Harris -- Chapter 14. From Modernism to Metamodernism: Quantifying and Theorizing the Stages of the Program Era - Seth Abramson -- Afterword. And Then What? - Mark McGurl -- Contributors -- Index

Revolution and Resistance

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Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN 13 : 1421420708
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution and Resistance by : David Tucker

Download or read book Revolution and Resistance written by David Tucker and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2016-09-11 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the links between imperialism and insurgency is “a reliable introduction to a complex subject” (Dennis E. Showalter, coauthor of If the Allies Had Fallen). In this provocative history, David Tucker argues that “irregular warfare”—including terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and other insurgency tactics—is intimately linked to the rise and decline of Euro-American empire around the globe. Tracing the evolution of resistance warfare from the age of the conquistadors through the United States’ recent ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, Revolution and Resistance demonstrates that contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are simply the final stages in the unraveling of Euro-American imperialism. Tucker explores why it was so difficult for indigenous people and states to resist imperial power, which possessed superior military technology and was driven by a curious moral imperative to conquer. He also explains how native populations eventually learned to fight back by successfully combining guerrilla warfare with political warfare. By exploiting certain Euro-American weaknesses—above all, the instability created by the fading rationale for empire—insurgents were able to subvert imperialism by using its own ideologies against it. Tucker also examines how the development of free trade and world finance began to undermine the need for direct political control of foreign territory. Touching on Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763, Abd el-Kader’s jihad in nineteenth-century Algeria, the national liberation movements in twentieth-century Palestine, Vietnam, and Ireland, and contemporary terrorist activity, this book shows how changing means have been used to wage the same struggle. Emphasizing moral rather than economic or technological explanations for the rise and fall of Euro-American imperialism, this concise, comprehensive book is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the character of contemporary conflict.

Paraliterary

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022647402X
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Paraliterary by : Merve Emre

Download or read book Paraliterary written by Merve Emre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.