-PDF Download- Contemporary American Fiction In The Embrace Of The Digital Age EBOOK

Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age

Author: Beatrice Pire

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-12-31

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 178284712X

This collection aims to examine the relationship between American fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine our world, interact with each other and understand the human being in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are these recent advances changing language and literature? How is fiction transformed by technological progress and what representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In a context where software can generate literary works, can the force of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars here investigate the American fiction of Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.

Hyperobject Reading, Scale Variance, and American Fiction in the Anthropocene

Author: Chingshun J. Sheu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-25

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 3031256395

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This book proposes a model of reading called hyperobject reading that bridges the Anthropocene scale variance between humans and humanity by focusing on the large-scale problems and phenomena themselves. Hyperobject reading draws on narratology and reader-response theory, as well as newer developments such as the postcritical turn and object-oriented ontology. The theoretical introduction sets out the building blocks of hyperobject reading. Chapter 2 intervenes in critical disability studies and debates about the ecosomatic paradigm; Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about technological evolution, analogue vs. digital subjectivity, and affect theory; and Chapter 4 intervenes in debates about autofiction, contemporary metafiction, and the position and role of the narrator in first-person narratives where the narrator and protagonist can be distinguished. The analytical conclusion sketches the conceptual anatomy of the hyperobject and three possible responses. No part of the Earth today is free from human influence, but literary success suggests effective real-world strategies.

The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics

Author: Delphine Louis-Dimitrov

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-29

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 3031409345

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This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works of art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, spanning cultures and schools of thought. Drawing on philosophical, religious and psychological theories of the soul, it emphasizes the far-reaching and enduring epistemological function of the concept in literature, art and politics. The authors argue that the concept of the soul has shaped the understanding of human life and persistently irrigated cultural productions. They show how the concept of soul was explored and redefined by writers and artists, remaining relevant even as it became removed from its ancient or Christian origins.

The Digital Literary Sphere

Author: Simone Murray

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1421426099

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Drawing on approaches from literary studies, media and cultural studies, book history, cultural policy, and the digital humanities, this book asks: What is the significance of authors communicating directly to readers via social media? How does digital media reframe the “live” author-reader encounter? And does the growing army of reader-reviewers signal an overdue democratizing of literary culture or the atomizing of cultural authority? In exploring these questions, The Digital Literary Sphere takes stock of epochal changes in the book industry while probing books’ and digital media’s complex contemporary coexistence.

Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Fiction

Author: Alexandra Cheira

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1527591336

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This volume provides more sustained critical attention on the use of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, both stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, the book examines contemporary retellings of myths and fairy tales in a productive dialogue with tradition as an extended appreciation of this productive creative and theoretical dialogue. The individual chapters evince a robust variety of conceptions and approaches, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story and genre, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches. Hence, the volume demonstrates the undeniable importance of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, suggesting questions for future consideration, and hopefully pointing towards new texts and new critical inquiries.

Flat-World Fiction

Author: Liliana M. Naydan

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0820360570

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Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

Radical Change

Author: Eliza T. Dresang

Publisher: H. W. Wilson

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13:

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Proposing a conceptual framework for evaluating "hand-held" books, Dresang (information studies, Florida State U.) explains how books are changing along with developments in digital information and how librarians, teachers, and parents can recognize and use books to create connections for and among young people using digital concepts and designs that emphasize multilayered, nonlinear stories and information. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011

Author: Martin Moling

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1793647240

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Can rock music help us understand literature? Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011 argues that a close analysis of the rock music incorporated into a literary text–an investigation of the lyrics, a musicological exploration of the sounds and rhythms, a cultural-historical inquiry into the production and reception of a song–may yield exciting new insight into and expand our understanding of American literary production from the mid-20th century onwards. Reading major works by Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sherman Alexie and Jennifer Egan from such a rock-musicological vantage point, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing adds a new dimension to recent work in American literary criticism by seeking to establish rock music as an analytical tool for literary investigation. The book concentrates on the way these literary artists have struggled to come to terms with the dichotomies inherent in rock music–its liberating and revolutionary impulses as well as its adherence to the bleakest laws of consumer capitalism–in their work. By combining a musicological with a literary analysis, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing highlights the crucial and complex role rock music has played in shaping the artistic outlook and cultural sensibilities of literary artists since the 1960s in America and beyond.