Author : Caroline D. Hamilton
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 34,98 MB
Release : 2010-10-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1441166963
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Author : Timothy W. Galow
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 47,38 MB
Release : 2014-11-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1611174287
Understanding Dave Eggers surveys the work of one of the most celebrated American authors of the twenty-first century and is the first book-length study incorporating Eggers's novels, short-story collections, and film scripts. With a style aimed at students and general readers alike, Timothy W. Galow offers a textual analysis that uniquely combines Eggers's early autobiographical works and the subject of celebrity as well as his later texts that deal with humanitarian issues. Galow devotes a chapter to each of Eggers's major works, from his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, though his recent novel, A Hologram for the King, a National Book Award finalist about an aging American businessman chasing success in Saudi Arabia. Other chapters cover You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, and Zeitoun. Each chapter studies the major themes and styles of the featured work while also placing it in the context of Eggers's oeuvre. In this way Galow examines each text in its own right, but he also offers us a larger guide to all of Egger's work. Providing important historical background for understanding Eggers's literary work, Galow examines how Eggers's texts are deeply invested in both his own public persona and the changing cultural conditions in the United States over the past twenty years. Galow's careful analysis is conveyed in clear language that engages issues important to contemporary critics without being pedantic or jargon laden. As a result Understanding Dave Eggers can serve as a useful introduction to the author's work or a valuable resource for the devoted reader.
Author : Gillian B. Pierce
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,96 MB
Release : 2013-01-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1443845159
The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror.
Author : Carmen Laguarta-Bueno
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 26,99 MB
Release : 2022-10-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000655288
This work studies three twenty-first century novels by Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and Don DeLillo as representative of a new trend of US fiction concerned with the topic of the technological augmentation of the human condition. The different chapters provide, from the double perspective of the optimistic transhumanist philosophy and the more balanced approach of critical posthumanism, an overview of the narrative strategies used by the writers to explore the possibilities that biotechnology, digital technologies and cryonics open up to transcend our human limitations, while also warning their readers of their most nefarious consequences. Ultimately, the book puts forward the claim that even if the writers approach the subject from a variety of perspectives and using different narrative styles and techniques, they all share a critical posthumanist fear that an unrestrained and unquestioned use of technology for enhancement purposes may bring about disembodiment and dehumanization.
Author : Patrick O'Donnell
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 1607 pages
File Size : 29,72 MB
Release : 2022-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1119431719
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 34,14 MB
Release : 2011
Category :
ISBN : 0989082628
Author : Linda De Roche
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 2067 pages
File Size : 47,6 MB
Release : 2021-06-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.
Author : Rieke Jordan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 46,72 MB
Release : 2019-05-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 150134773X
Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First Century American Fiction interrogates contemporary texts that showcase forms of reading practices that feel anachronistic and laborious in times of instantaneity and short buffering times. Objects of analysis include the graphic narrative Building Stories by Chris Ware, the music album Song Reader by the indie rock artist Beck Hansen, and the computer game Kentucky Route Zero by the programming team Cardboard Computer. These texts stage their fragmentary nature and alleged “unfinishedness” as a quintessential part of both their narrative and material modus operandi. These works in and of progress feel both contemporary and retro in the 21st century. They draw upon and work against our expectations of interactive art in the digital age, incorporating and likewise rejecting digital forms and practices. This underlines the material and narrative flexibilities of the objects, for no outcome or reading experience is the same or can be replicated. It becomes apparent that the texts presuppose a reader who invests her spare time in figuring these texts out, diagnosing a contorted work-leisure dichotomy: “working these stories out” is a significant part of the reading experience for the reader–curatorial labor. This conjures up a reader, who, as the author argues, is turned into a curator and creative entity of and in these texts, for she implements and reassembles the options made available.
Author : Christopher K. Coffman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 18,50 MB
Release : 2020-12-18
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1000289117
Several of American literature’s most prominent authors, and many of their most perceptive critics and reviewers, argue that fiction of the last quarter century has turned away from the tendencies of postmodernist writing. Yet, the nature of that turn, and the defining qualities of American fiction after postmodernism, remain less than clear. This volume identifies four prominent trends of the contemporary scene: the recovery of the real, a rethinking of historical engagement, a preoccupation with materiality, and a turn to the planetary. Readings of works by various leading figures, including Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, A.M. Homes, Lance Olsen, Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace, support a variety of arguments about this recent revitalization of American literature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.
Author : Heike Steinhoff
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 33,54 MB
Release : 2021-07-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1501370391
Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. Stereotypically associated with nerd glasses, beards and buns, boho clothing, and ironic T-shirts, hipsters represent a (post-)postmodern (post-)subculture whose style, aesthetics, and practices have increasingly become mainstream. Hipster Culture is the first comprehensive collection of original studies that address the hipster and hipster culture from a range of cultural studies perspectives. Analyzing the cultural, economic, aesthetic, and political meanings and implications of a wide range of phenomena prominently associated with hipster culture, the contributors bring their expertise and own research perspectives to bear, thus shaping the volume's transnational and intersectional approach. Chapters address global and local manifestations of hipster culture, processes of urban gentrification and cultural appropriation, alternative foodways and eclectic fashion styles, the significance of nostalgia, retro technologies and social media, and the aesthetics and cultural politics of literature, film, art, and music marked by self-reflexivity, irony, and a simultaneous longing for an earnest authenticity. Hipster Culture explores the diversification of hipster culture, sheds light on popular constructions of the hipster as cultural Other, and critically investigates hipster culture's entanglements with and challenges to dominant cultural discourses of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, age, religion, and nationality.
