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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
