Postmodern/Postwar and After

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Author :
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 160938427X
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Postmodern/Postwar and After by : Jason Gladstone

Download or read book Postmodern/Postwar and After written by Jason Gladstone and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

Discrepant Solace

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192506943
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Discrepant Solace by : David James

Download or read book Discrepant Solace written by David James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.

The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192645617
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel by : Kelly M. Rich

Download or read book The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel written by Kelly M. Rich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Shifting attention from the "People's War" to the "People's Peace," this book shows that literature returns to the historic transition from warfare to welfare to narrate its transformative social potential and darker failures. The welfare state envisioned that managing individuals' private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community, a promise encapsulated in the 1942 Beveridge Report's promise of care from the "cradle to the grave." The postwar novel reveals the intimate effects that follow when infrastructures of collective living seek to organize social interaction, tracing these effects through quasi-administrated home spaces such as girls' hostels, makeshift sanatoria, and experimental schools. Mid-century writers including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Samuel Selvon used the militarized Home Front to present postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and new collective logics. As the century progressed, and as the unrealized dreams of welfare came to be dismantled, authors including Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro registered an unfulfilled nostalgia for a Britain that never was, situating British domestic policies within trajectories of historic and social violence. Contemporary fiction continues to reanimate the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, preserving its transformative potential while redefining its possible futures. With this long view of postwar fiction, this volume demonstrates the holding power of welfare's promises of repair and Britain's mid-century on the British cultural imagination.

Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000388506
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives by : Jan Alber

Download or read book Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives written by Jan Alber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Post45 Vs. The World: Literary Perspectives on the Global Contemporary

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Author :
Publisher : Vernon Press
ISBN 13 : 1648896146
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (488 download)

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Book Synopsis Post45 Vs. The World: Literary Perspectives on the Global Contemporary by : William G. Welty

Download or read book Post45 Vs. The World: Literary Perspectives on the Global Contemporary written by William G. Welty and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the work done on the Post45 literary field carries an implicitly Americanist perspective. Even the name of the field suggests a certain literary history, with certain assumptions and blind spots about national spaces, identities, and histories. But what would Post45 look like when considered from outside of the United States? How do the current contours of the field exclude certain voices, either in the United States or elsewhere in the world? And how would such new perspectives shift the beginning and possible endpoint of that literary period? What new narratives of the contemporary emerge if we begin telling the story in a different year or from a different national or global perspective? This collection attempts to re-frame the discussions in Post45 by engaging with non-American writers, texts, and perspectives. Additionally, productive conversations emerge by attempting to think of canonical American writers like Mark Twain and Ishmael Reed from other national and global perspectives. The authors consider both the ways texts themselves as well as their reception histories approach and challenge our understandings of the contemporary. Ultimately, the collection interrogates prevailing narratives of history, culture, identity, and space within the Post45 field. In so doing, it re-considers the historical periodization of the field, which currently covers approximately 75 years of literary history. The resulting essays thus work towards a new intertwined narrative about what defines the contemporary and how national and global literatures fit into that moment of world history.

American Literature and the Long Downturn

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198852703
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis American Literature and the Long Downturn by : Dan Sinykin

Download or read book American Literature and the Long Downturn written by Dan Sinykin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Planetary Clock

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198857721
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis The Planetary Clock by : Paul Giles

Download or read book The Planetary Clock written by Paul Giles and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging over various aesthetic forms (literature, film, music) in the period since 1960, this volume brings an antipodean perspective into conversation with the art and culture of the Northern Hemisphere, to reformulate postmodernism as a properly global phenomenon.

The Matter of High Words

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190682167
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis The Matter of High Words by : Robert Chodat

Download or read book The Matter of High Words written by Robert Chodat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? When the explanations of the natural sciences become powerfully precise and authoritative, what is the status of our highest words, the languages that articulate our norms and orient our lives? The Matter of High Words examines a constellation of American writers who in the decades since World War II have posed these questions in distinctive ways. Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace are all self-consciously post-WWII authors, attuned to the fragmentation and skepticism that have defined so much of the literary and critical culture of the last century and more. Yet they also attempt to reach back to older forms of thought and writing that are often thought to have dried up-the traditions of prophecy, of wisdom literature, of the sage. Working within this dual inheritance, these authors are drawn equally to both art and argument, "showing" and "telling," shifting continually between narrative and discursive genres. In their essays they act as moralists, promoting the broad, abstract concepts that might inspire action in the face of naturalistic reduction: community, family, courage, fraternity, marriage, friendship, temperance, judgment. In their narratives, they offer particular lives in particular settings, thick descriptions that give flesh to such high words. Rarely do these movements between genres generate a tidy equilibrium; where their essays speak of cooperation and redemption, their narratives display alienation, loss, and failure. But in pursuing such risky, unorthodox strategies, these postwar sages are not only able to challenge some of the dominant naturalistic theories of the last several decades: cognitive science, neo-Darwinian theory, social science, the fact-value divide in analytic philosophy. Through five chapters of detailed analysis and close reading, Chodat explores the question of whether vocabularies of ought and ought-not can still emerge today, and how these concepts might be embodied, and whether such ideas might be found in things.

The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107085209
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature by : Yogita Goyal

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.

The Fictions of American Capitalism

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030365646
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fictions of American Capitalism by : Jacques-Henri Coste

Download or read book The Fictions of American Capitalism written by Jacques-Henri Coste and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics. Focusing on three narratives—fictitious capital, working fictions, and the economic novel—the volume questions whether these three types of fiction can be linked under the sign of capitalism. This collection seeks to illustrate the American economy’s dependence on fictitiousness, America’s ideological fictions, and the nation’s creative literary fiction. In relation to what the credit and banking crisis of 2007–2008 exposed about the “unreal” base of the economy, the volume concludes with a call to recognize the economic humanities, arguing that American fiction and American literary studies can provide a useful mirror for economists.

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

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Author :
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609386752
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life by : Alexandra Kingston-Reese

Download or read book Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life written by Alexandra Kingston-Reese and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Writing Backwards

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231558821
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Backwards by : Alexander Manshel

Download or read book Writing Backwards written by Alexander Manshel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction. Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres—contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history—alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines novels by writers including Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Manshel studies how historical fiction has evolved over the last half century, documenting the formation of the newly inclusive literary canon as well as who and what it still excludes. Offering new insight into how institutions shape literature and the limits of historical memory, Writing Backwards also considers recent challenges to the historical turn in American fiction.

Conversations with Colson Whitehead

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Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496821483
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversations with Colson Whitehead by : Derek C. Maus

Download or read book Conversations with Colson Whitehead written by Derek C. Maus and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) has been considered an important new voice in American literature. His seven subsequent books have done little to contradict that initial assessment, especially after 2016’s The Underground Railroad spent many weeks at the top of bestseller lists and won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews collected in Conversations with Colson Whitehead reveal the workings of one of America’s most idiosyncratic and most successful literary minds. Through these interviews, it is clear that none of this well-earned praise has gone to his head. If anything, he still seems inclined to present himself as an awkward misfit who writes about such offbeat subject matter as rival groups of elevator inspectors, the insufficiency of off-brand “flesh-colored” bandages, or a literalized alternate version of the Underground Railroad. Whitehead speaks at length about matters related to his craft, including his varied literary and nonliterary influences, the particular methods of researching and writing that have proved valuable to telling his stories, and the ways in which he has managed the rollercoaster life of a professional writer. He also opens up about popular culture, particularly the unconventional blend of music, genre fiction, B movies, and comic books that he gleefully identifies as a passion that has persisted for him since his childhood.

Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108423396
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde by : Jason M. Baskin

Download or read book Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde written by Jason M. Baskin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses the idea of embodiment to reconceptualize postwar literary history and recognize the political significance of literary modernism after 1945.

Handbook of the American Short Story

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110585324
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Handbook of the American Short Story by : Erik Redling

Download or read book Handbook of the American Short Story written by Erik Redling and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

Queer Experimental Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137595434
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Queer Experimental Literature by : Tyler Bradway

Download or read book Queer Experimental Literature written by Tyler Bradway and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues that postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form. Tyler Bradway conceptualizes “bad reading” as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging in the event of reading. These incipiently social relations press back against legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness into a mode of individuality. Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed—from the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, through the AIDS crisis, to the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity and the gentrification of the queer avant-garde. Bradway contests the common narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to engender a mode of social imagination. Instead, he illuminates how queer experimental literature uses form to redraw the affective and social relations that structure the heteronormative public sphere. Through close readings informed by affect theory, Queer Experimental Literature offers new perspectives on writers such as William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Chuck Palahniuk. Queer Experimental Literature ultimately reveals that the recent turn to affective reading in literary studies is underwritten by a para-academic history of bad reading that offers new idioms for understanding the affective agencies of queer aesthetics.

Narratives at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443855545
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Narratives at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium by : Jessica Homberg-Schramm

Download or read book Narratives at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium written by Jessica Homberg-Schramm and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a cross-disciplinary approach to narratives in the 21st century, in response to the growing scholarly concern with the decreasing explanatory capacity of theoretical concepts and narrative configurations originating in postmodernism. The essays collected here meet this conceptual gap by offering cutting-edge research from a variety of disciplines, such as literary studies and design and media studies, as well as social sciences, all of which employ narrative models to explore the distinctive patterns which shape contemporary conceptions of the 3rd millennium.