Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel PDF

Author: Bran Nicol

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13:

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Collects together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last 40 years, guiding readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates.

Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature

Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature PDF

Author: Patricia Garcia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1317581334

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Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

Succeeding Postmodernism

Succeeding Postmodernism PDF

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.

Postmodernist Fiction

Postmodernist Fiction PDF

Author: Brian McHale

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1134949162

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In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking.

Late Postmodernism

Late Postmodernism PDF

Author: J. Green

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-05-12

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1403980403

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Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade, including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in culture.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism PDF

Author: Steven Connor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521648400

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The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.

History and Refusal

History and Refusal PDF

Author: Stephen N. doCarmo

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780980149616

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This book examines the ways in which John Gardner's 'October Light', Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho', Thomas Pynchon's 'Vineland', Mark Leyner's 'Et Tu Babe', Bobbie Ann Mason's 'In Country' and Don DeLillo's 'White Noise' formulate critiques of a late-capitalist consumer culture proclaimed in recent years to be all but unassailable.

Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism

Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism PDF

Author: I. Gregson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1996-11-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0230379141

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Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism explores the fraught relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of 'estrangement' is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

Nostalgic Postmodernism

Nostalgic Postmodernism PDF

Author: Christian Gutleben

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9004488359

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Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction PDF

Author: Bran Nicol

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-10-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1139483110

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Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature.