Natasha Alden
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719088933
- eISBN:
- 9781781706367
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719088933.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Introduced the idea of extending postmemory to a British context, and explores the usefulness of the concept in relation to the ‘baby boomers’ born after World War Two. Explores Swift's obsession ...
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Introduced the idea of extending postmemory to a British context, and explores the usefulness of the concept in relation to the ‘baby boomers’ born after World War Two. Explores Swift's obsession with the World war two and its aftermath; explores his decision not to research the period and looks at his concept of “emotional truth” in historical fiction and the novelist's responsibility to the past. Contains original interview.Less
Introduced the idea of extending postmemory to a British context, and explores the usefulness of the concept in relation to the ‘baby boomers’ born after World War Two. Explores Swift's obsession with the World war two and its aftermath; explores his decision not to research the period and looks at his concept of “emotional truth” in historical fiction and the novelist's responsibility to the past. Contains original interview.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and ...
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This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.Less
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.
Tim Parks
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300215366
- eISBN:
- 9780300216738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300215366.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter offers a reading of Graham Swift's novel Wish You Were Here, set in a melodramatic frame. Perhaps the finest piece of storytelling in Wish You Were Here has to do with the death of a dog ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Graham Swift's novel Wish You Were Here, set in a melodramatic frame. Perhaps the finest piece of storytelling in Wish You Were Here has to do with the death of a dog named Luke. A constant theme in Swift's work is childlessness, a state that compounds the inadequacy of sterility with exclusion from the ongoing process of history. Swift has spent his whole writing career digging around the same distressed psychology, seeking simultaneously to understand, express, dramatize a certain cluster of negative emotions, a particular behavior pattern. Freedom is always an issue. To act would be to be free. Wish You Were Here offers three examples of people making a break for freedom.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Graham Swift's novel Wish You Were Here, set in a melodramatic frame. Perhaps the finest piece of storytelling in Wish You Were Here has to do with the death of a dog named Luke. A constant theme in Swift's work is childlessness, a state that compounds the inadequacy of sterility with exclusion from the ongoing process of history. Swift has spent his whole writing career digging around the same distressed psychology, seeking simultaneously to understand, express, dramatize a certain cluster of negative emotions, a particular behavior pattern. Freedom is always an issue. To act would be to be free. Wish You Were Here offers three examples of people making a break for freedom.
Robert Weninger
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813034027
- eISBN:
- 9780813038162
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813034027.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
James Joyce reduced the narrative time span of his novel, Ulysses, to just one day and thus achieved something that had never been attempted in this way before in the epical genre. In other words, ...
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James Joyce reduced the narrative time span of his novel, Ulysses, to just one day and thus achieved something that had never been attempted in this way before in the epical genre. In other words, Joyce was no less innovative in this regard than he was in deploying myth and interior monologue. But where did the idea originally stem from? What inspired Joyce to write a 700-page novel that spanned only one day in the lives of its protagonists? This chapterand explores the one-day novel directs attention to another aspect of Joycean intertextuality: his influence on subsequent authors. It argues that Ulysses has become, in Michel Foucault's term, a foundational literary text of the twentieth century. However, authors who imitated some of the crucial innovations of Ulysses, such as Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, Graham Swift in The Sweet-Shop Owner, Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis, and Arno Schmidt in Zettels Traum, felt compelled also to fight against his legacy or to deny and suppress its effects.Less
James Joyce reduced the narrative time span of his novel, Ulysses, to just one day and thus achieved something that had never been attempted in this way before in the epical genre. In other words, Joyce was no less innovative in this regard than he was in deploying myth and interior monologue. But where did the idea originally stem from? What inspired Joyce to write a 700-page novel that spanned only one day in the lives of its protagonists? This chapterand explores the one-day novel directs attention to another aspect of Joycean intertextuality: his influence on subsequent authors. It argues that Ulysses has become, in Michel Foucault's term, a foundational literary text of the twentieth century. However, authors who imitated some of the crucial innovations of Ulysses, such as Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, Graham Swift in The Sweet-Shop Owner, Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis, and Arno Schmidt in Zettels Traum, felt compelled also to fight against his legacy or to deny and suppress its effects.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling ...
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This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. A discussion which aims to explain what it is that the contemporary novel has expressed, if anything, about time, is provided. In Amis's Time's Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. The effect that time reversal seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. Time's Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says.Less
This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. A discussion which aims to explain what it is that the contemporary novel has expressed, if anything, about time, is provided. In Amis's Time's Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. The effect that time reversal seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. Time's Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says.
