Gordon Hutner
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832271
- eISBN:
- 9781469605210
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887752_hutner
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. This book describes the distorted, canonized history of the ...
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Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. This book describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. It argues that in presenting literary history this way, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have—and, the book suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.Less
Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. This book describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. It argues that in presenting literary history this way, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have—and, the book suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.
Mary Youssef
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474415415
- eISBN:
- 9781474449755
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415415.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign ...
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This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising.
This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.Less
This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising.
This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.
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.
Gareth J. Wood
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651337
- eISBN:
- 9780191741180
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651337.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a ...
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This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne’s prose has shaped Marías’s thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.Less
This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne’s prose has shaped Marías’s thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.
Annie McClanahan
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799058
- eISBN:
- 9781503600690
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799058.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Chapter 1 analyzes novelistic representations of the 2008 credit crisis. Focusing on Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, and Martha McPhee’s Dear Money, it reads the ...
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Chapter 1 analyzes novelistic representations of the 2008 credit crisis. Focusing on Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, and Martha McPhee’s Dear Money, it reads the post-crisis novel’s interest in individual psychology alongside and against the rise of behavioral economics. Behavioral economists understand the financial crisis as a consequence of individual choices and cultural climates: from excessive optimism and irrational exuberance to greed and overweening self-interest. At once mirroring and refuting these explanations, the post-credit-crisis novel reveals a deep ambivalence about the model of psychological complexity that undergirds both novelistic character and behavioralist economics. Exploring these problems through experiments with narrative perspective, these post-crisis novels suggest that the rich, full, autonomous homines economici of both the realist novel and microeconomic theory are bankrupt.Less
Chapter 1 analyzes novelistic representations of the 2008 credit crisis. Focusing on Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, and Martha McPhee’s Dear Money, it reads the post-crisis novel’s interest in individual psychology alongside and against the rise of behavioral economics. Behavioral economists understand the financial crisis as a consequence of individual choices and cultural climates: from excessive optimism and irrational exuberance to greed and overweening self-interest. At once mirroring and refuting these explanations, the post-credit-crisis novel reveals a deep ambivalence about the model of psychological complexity that undergirds both novelistic character and behavioralist economics. Exploring these problems through experiments with narrative perspective, these post-crisis novels suggest that the rich, full, autonomous homines economici of both the realist novel and microeconomic theory are bankrupt.
Mary Youssef
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474415415
- eISBN:
- 9781474449755
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415415.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
Following the January 2011 events, new directions in Egyptian novelistic production have emerged and, in their turn, commanded visibility and critical attention. This epilogue attends to these new ...
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Following the January 2011 events, new directions in Egyptian novelistic production have emerged and, in their turn, commanded visibility and critical attention. This epilogue attends to these new directions by posing relevant questions like: Do the novels produced in the post-2011 period align with or break from the new-consciousness novel? How do they operate in Michael McKeon’s dialectical framework of historical change and the definitional volatility of the novel? Where do minorities’ concerns exist in their purview? Delineating the tribulations and ambivalences surrounding this historical moment, the epilogue examines forms and spaces of what Mariz Tadros calls “unruly politics,” where citizens continue to subvert authority and continue their protest. It identifies how unruly politics are aesthetically rendered in three post-2011 novels, Hisham al-Khashin’s Jirafit (2014), Basma ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s The Queue (2016), and Muhammad Rabiʿ’s Otared (2016) and argues that they preoccupy with brining all citizens to their figurative negotiation table.Less
Following the January 2011 events, new directions in Egyptian novelistic production have emerged and, in their turn, commanded visibility and critical attention. This epilogue attends to these new directions by posing relevant questions like: Do the novels produced in the post-2011 period align with or break from the new-consciousness novel? How do they operate in Michael McKeon’s dialectical framework of historical change and the definitional volatility of the novel? Where do minorities’ concerns exist in their purview? Delineating the tribulations and ambivalences surrounding this historical moment, the epilogue examines forms and spaces of what Mariz Tadros calls “unruly politics,” where citizens continue to subvert authority and continue their protest. It identifies how unruly politics are aesthetically rendered in three post-2011 novels, Hisham al-Khashin’s Jirafit (2014), Basma ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s The Queue (2016), and Muhammad Rabiʿ’s Otared (2016) and argues that they preoccupy with brining all citizens to their figurative negotiation table.
Joshua Armstrong
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942012
- eISBN:
- 9781789629897
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942012.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life have meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of ...
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The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life have meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today’s French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. It uncovers previously unseen affinities amongst—and offers original perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.Less
The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life have meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today’s French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. It uncovers previously unseen affinities amongst—and offers original perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.
Kathryn Hume
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450013
- eISBN:
- 9780801462870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450013.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This introductory chapter discusses the author-reader contract in addressing reader expectations and approaches to contemporary American novels. Horace opined that poetry, and by extension all ...
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This introductory chapter discusses the author-reader contract in addressing reader expectations and approaches to contemporary American novels. Horace opined that poetry, and by extension all fiction, is properly dulce (entertaining) and utile (useful, informative), and this notion has since come to form a reader's expectations of a novel. Yet for a surprising number of recent American novels, this long-standing author-reader contract has been broken. Consequently, modern novels may come across as “attacking” the readers, which may in turn cause the readers to stop reading. Yet the chapter argues that the challenges these authorial aggressions impose on the reader is meant to be a rewarding experience for the reader, in place of the usual feelings of pleasure and instruction derived from the Horatian definition of the author-reader relationship.Less
This introductory chapter discusses the author-reader contract in addressing reader expectations and approaches to contemporary American novels. Horace opined that poetry, and by extension all fiction, is properly dulce (entertaining) and utile (useful, informative), and this notion has since come to form a reader's expectations of a novel. Yet for a surprising number of recent American novels, this long-standing author-reader contract has been broken. Consequently, modern novels may come across as “attacking” the readers, which may in turn cause the readers to stop reading. Yet the chapter argues that the challenges these authorial aggressions impose on the reader is meant to be a rewarding experience for the reader, in place of the usual feelings of pleasure and instruction derived from the Horatian definition of the author-reader relationship.
Joshua Armstrong
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786941787
- eISBN:
- 9781789623239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941787.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
As the natural spaces of the European countryside are increasingly micro-managed and diminished, they lose their timeless pastoral feel and come to serve, rather, as amorphous liminal spaces where ...
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As the natural spaces of the European countryside are increasingly micro-managed and diminished, they lose their timeless pastoral feel and come to serve, rather, as amorphous liminal spaces where one urban site ends and another begins: ‘edgelands,’ as British poets Roberts and Farley call them. And yet, as philosopher Edward Casey points out, there can be no oikos—no ‘ecology,’ no ‘dwelling’—without edges. And therefore, although we typically pay little attention to them, such edges, in their silent, unnoticed way, crucially subtend, give shape to, and have much to reveal about the urban environments we inhabit. In Jean Rolin’s Les Événements (2015), the focus of this chapter, we follow a narrator whose attempt to escape a near-future France in the throes of civil war takes him across the back roads of just such a countryside. Avoiding the senseless war, the narrator navigates an edgeland network of fields, ditches, and rivers. There, where long-abandoned industrial sites neighbour shopping centre parking lots, and where, in Rolin’s fiction, highways serve as battle fronts, Rolin sketches the unique and melancholic topography of an unnoticed, undervalued, and fragile ecosystem just as threatened by industry and urban sprawl as by the ravages of war.Less
As the natural spaces of the European countryside are increasingly micro-managed and diminished, they lose their timeless pastoral feel and come to serve, rather, as amorphous liminal spaces where one urban site ends and another begins: ‘edgelands,’ as British poets Roberts and Farley call them. And yet, as philosopher Edward Casey points out, there can be no oikos—no ‘ecology,’ no ‘dwelling’—without edges. And therefore, although we typically pay little attention to them, such edges, in their silent, unnoticed way, crucially subtend, give shape to, and have much to reveal about the urban environments we inhabit. In Jean Rolin’s Les Événements (2015), the focus of this chapter, we follow a narrator whose attempt to escape a near-future France in the throes of civil war takes him across the back roads of just such a countryside. Avoiding the senseless war, the narrator navigates an edgeland network of fields, ditches, and rivers. There, where long-abandoned industrial sites neighbour shopping centre parking lots, and where, in Rolin’s fiction, highways serve as battle fronts, Rolin sketches the unique and melancholic topography of an unnoticed, undervalued, and fragile ecosystem just as threatened by industry and urban sprawl as by the ravages of war.
Berthold Schoene
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198749394
- eISBN:
- 9780191869754
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198749394.003.0034
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and ...
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This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and outside nationalist demarcations. At its weakest, often against its own best intentions, this new cosmopolitan writing cannot but simply reinscribe the old imperial power relations. Or, it provides an essential component of the West’s ideological superstructure for globalization’s neoliberal business of rampant upward wealth accumulation. At its best, however, this newly emergent genre promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of justice, resistance. It also promotes dissent while working hard to expose and deconstruct the extant hegemonies and engaging in a radical imaginative recasting of global relations.Less
This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and outside nationalist demarcations. At its weakest, often against its own best intentions, this new cosmopolitan writing cannot but simply reinscribe the old imperial power relations. Or, it provides an essential component of the West’s ideological superstructure for globalization’s neoliberal business of rampant upward wealth accumulation. At its best, however, this newly emergent genre promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of justice, resistance. It also promotes dissent while working hard to expose and deconstruct the extant hegemonies and engaging in a radical imaginative recasting of global relations.
Akane Kawakami
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781382745
- eISBN:
- 9781786945235
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781382745.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book is an introduction to the work of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel-Prize-winning French contemporary author. Using a theoretical approach based on the work of Genette and Ricoeur, the study ...
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This book is an introduction to the work of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel-Prize-winning French contemporary author. Using a theoretical approach based on the work of Genette and Ricoeur, the study teases out the complexities of Modiano’s apparently simple narratives, showing how they skilfully weave together the fictional and historical to involve and draw the reader into the worlds of his novels, whether it be the murky labyrinth of the années noires or the amoral yet attractive landscape of the sixties. The book also discusses new aspects of Modiano’s post-2000 novels, such as the greater role played in them by women, the unexpected appearance of ideas from Nietzsche, and a meditation on the nature of time that owes much to – but is profoundly different from – that of his illustrious precursor, Proust.Less
This book is an introduction to the work of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel-Prize-winning French contemporary author. Using a theoretical approach based on the work of Genette and Ricoeur, the study teases out the complexities of Modiano’s apparently simple narratives, showing how they skilfully weave together the fictional and historical to involve and draw the reader into the worlds of his novels, whether it be the murky labyrinth of the années noires or the amoral yet attractive landscape of the sixties. The book also discusses new aspects of Modiano’s post-2000 novels, such as the greater role played in them by women, the unexpected appearance of ideas from Nietzsche, and a meditation on the nature of time that owes much to – but is profoundly different from – that of his illustrious precursor, Proust.
Joshua Armstrong
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942012
- eISBN:
- 9781789629897
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942012.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Introduction sets out the terrain of the book by signifying a key historical turning point in postwar France (and the West more generally): the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. The ...
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The Introduction sets out the terrain of the book by signifying a key historical turning point in postwar France (and the West more generally): the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. The effects of this crisis are felt as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. The chapter proposes an initial synthesis of key notions from important thinkers of postmodernity and globalization—including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, and Bruno Latour —in order to develop the parameters of this crisis, which notably entails the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging. It makes the claim that such preoccupations constitute a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel, illustrating this with a brief reading of Jean Rolin’s Les événements [The Events] (2015). Finally, it presents overviews of each chapter, introducing the corpus of eight novels that will be the subject of the book: novels by Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq.Less
The Introduction sets out the terrain of the book by signifying a key historical turning point in postwar France (and the West more generally): the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. The effects of this crisis are felt as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. The chapter proposes an initial synthesis of key notions from important thinkers of postmodernity and globalization—including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, and Bruno Latour —in order to develop the parameters of this crisis, which notably entails the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging. It makes the claim that such preoccupations constitute a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel, illustrating this with a brief reading of Jean Rolin’s Les événements [The Events] (2015). Finally, it presents overviews of each chapter, introducing the corpus of eight novels that will be the subject of the book: novels by Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq.
Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089596
- eISBN:
- 9781781707289
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089596.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The coda of this study summarizes findings about the literary orphan figure in contemporary American novels. Through brief analyses of Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing (2009), Chang-Rae Lee’s The ...
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The coda of this study summarizes findings about the literary orphan figure in contemporary American novels. Through brief analyses of Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing (2009), Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered (2010), Sapphire’s The Kid (2011), Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012), and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), it demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure for literary imaginings of home.Less
The coda of this study summarizes findings about the literary orphan figure in contemporary American novels. Through brief analyses of Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing (2009), Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered (2010), Sapphire’s The Kid (2011), Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012), and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), it demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure for literary imaginings of home.
Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a ...
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Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.Less
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.
Joshua Armstrong
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942012
- eISBN:
- 9781789629897
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942012.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Conclusion summarizes the most prominent aspects of the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism, as these have been encountered in the corpus. It draws parallels between these and current ...
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The Conclusion summarizes the most prominent aspects of the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism, as these have been encountered in the corpus. It draws parallels between these and current events—including U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate, and his creation of a Space Force. It draws the conclusion that French novels written in the second decade of the new millennium—post-2008-recession, perhaps—become increasingly dystopian, as they move away from the personal existential crises of protagonists finding themselves awkwardly lost in translation toward portraits of societies at large facing more palpably existential threats (financial collapse, war). Indeed, a host of more recent novels depict the near-future demise of the Fifth Republic, if not of France (as a nation) itself. However, these near-future dystopian versions of France also become the occasion for social awakenings and revolution. This is demonstrated by a brief reading of Marie Darriuessecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts (2017).Less
The Conclusion summarizes the most prominent aspects of the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism, as these have been encountered in the corpus. It draws parallels between these and current events—including U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate, and his creation of a Space Force. It draws the conclusion that French novels written in the second decade of the new millennium—post-2008-recession, perhaps—become increasingly dystopian, as they move away from the personal existential crises of protagonists finding themselves awkwardly lost in translation toward portraits of societies at large facing more palpably existential threats (financial collapse, war). Indeed, a host of more recent novels depict the near-future demise of the Fifth Republic, if not of France (as a nation) itself. However, these near-future dystopian versions of France also become the occasion for social awakenings and revolution. This is demonstrated by a brief reading of Marie Darriuessecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts (2017).
Nikhil Govind
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199498727
- eISBN:
- 9780199098354
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of ...
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The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.Less
The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.