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Intimacy and Identity in the Postmodern Novel

Author: Emilija Dimitrijevic

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9783039110315

This book focuses on the themes of intimacy and identity in the contemporary novel and, in particular, in the novels of A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. Not only do the specificity of the contemporary social context and a growing awareness of the relational nature of the concepts of intimacy and identity set these novels apart from earlier writing that take these issues more for granted. Their very concern with the themes of intimacy and identity also sets them apart from much postmodernist, or mannerist, writing that chooses to cold-shoulder these arguments. The study draws on work by contemporary social theorists and philosophers, and aims to examine issues which, although central to the writing of these authors, have been neglected or treated superﬁcially in literary criticism. Finally, it looks into the ways in which the new approaches to the question of intimacy and identity relate and contribute to contemporary debates on the postmodern novel.

Intimacy in postmodern times

Author: Peter Beilharz

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1526132176

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Zygmunt Bauman was one of the most important social theorists of recent decades. He did major work on the Holocaust, the postmodern and much else, up to fifty-eight books in English on almost as many topics. In this book, Australian sociologist Peter Beilharz, Bauman’s collaborator for thirty years, recounts the details of their relationship, simultaneously charting the changes that have occurred in academic life from the 1980s to today. Friendship was one of the bonds that made Bauman and Beilharz’s intellectual collaboration possible. Though the two were worlds apart in terms of biography and place, their work together was defined by a certain kind of intimacy. Separated by a generation, they collaborated for a generation together. This book follows their story in touching detail while puzzling over Bauman’s rich yet contested legacy.

Salvific Manhood

Author: Ernest L. Gibson (III)

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-10

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1496217918

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2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Salvific Manhood foregrounds the radical power of male intimacy and vulnerability in surveying each of James Baldwin's six novels. Asserting that manhood and masculinity hold the potential for both tragedy and salvation, Ernest L. Gibson III highlights the complex and difficult emotional choices Baldwin's men must make within their varied lives, relationships, and experiences. In Salvific Manhood, Gibson offers a new and compelling way to understand the hidden connections between Baldwin's novels. Thematically daring and theoretically provocative, he presents a queering of salvation, a nuanced approach that views redemption through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Exploring how fraternal crises develop out of sociopolitical forces and conditions, Salvific Manhood theorizes a spatiality of manhood, where spaces in between men are erased through expressions of intimacy and love. Positioned at the intersections of literary criticism, queer studies, and male studies, Gibson deconstructs Baldwin's wrestling with familial love, American identity, suicide, art, incarceration, and memory by magnifying the potent idea of salvific manhood. Ultimately, Salvific Manhood calls for an alternate reading of Baldwin's novels, introducing new theories for understanding the intricacies of African American manhood and American identity, all within a space where the presence of tragedy can give way to the possibility of salvation.

London Fiction at the Millennium

Author: Claire Allen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 3030488861

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This book analyses London fiction at the millennium, reading it in relation to an exploration of a theoretical positioning beyond the postmodern. It explores how a selection of novels can be considered as “second-wave” or “post-postmodern” in light of their borrowing more from mainstream and classical genres as opposed to formally experimental avant-garde techniques. It considers how writers utilise the cultural capital of London in a process of relocating marginalized, subjugated or under-represented voices. The millennium provides an apt symbolic opportunity to reflect on British fiction and to consider the direction in which contemporary authors are moving. As such, key novels by Martin Amis, Bella Bathurst, Bernardine Evaristo, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Gautam Malkani, Timothy Mo, Will Self, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Rupert Thomson, and Sarah Waters are used to explore writing beyond the postmodern. ‘In this significant and welcome contribution to the field, Allen provides us with a sophisticated, detailed, and rigorous study of the move in contemporary fiction beyond postmodernism as exemplified by London fiction.’ —Nick Hubble, Brunel University London, UK

The Intimate Critique

Author: Diane P. Freedman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780822312925

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For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts--above all, "objectivity"--seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life. Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume--including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim--respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior, Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass. Revealing the beliefs and formative life experiences that inform their essays, these writers characteristically recount the process by which their opinions took shape--a process as conducive to self-discovery as it is to critical insight. The result--which has been referred to as "personal writing," "experimental critical writing," or "intellectual autobiography"--maps a dramatic change in the direction of literary criticism. Contributors. Julia Balen, Dana Beckelman, Ellen Brown, Sandra M. Brown, Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton, Suzanne Bunkers, Peter Carlton, Brenda Daly, Victoria Ekanger, Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Shirley Nelson Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Melody Graulich, Gail Griffin, Dolan Hubbard, Kendall, Susan Koppelman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Linda Robertson, Carol Taylor, Jane Tompkins, Cheryl Torsney, Trace Yamamoto, Frances Murphy Zauhar

Identity

Author: Milan Kundera

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0063290707

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"Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. . . . But Identity has a special charm: suspense. . . . [It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end." — San Francisco Chronicle In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Milan Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of this novel. Hailed as a "a fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness" (Baltimore Sun), it is not to be missed.

Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction

Author: Brian Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 113482565X

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Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledge Exploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literature The work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), John Barth (LETTERS , Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey (Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.

Succeeding Postmodernism

Author: Mary K. Holland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1441159347

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While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Writing Diaspora in the West

Author: P. McCarthy

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-02-17

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0230233848

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In this bold intervention into the understanding of the diasporic experience within cultural studies, McCarthy challenges a critical position emergent over the last thirty years (what he calls the 'new marginalism'). He confronts the liberal orthodoxies that prevail in this area, exposing contradictions in the thinking of its major theorists.