Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America

Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America PDF Author: Kirby Olson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
"This is one of those times, a time choked in the weeds of academic and civilian formalism. To put it mildly, most of what we see in print in North America is unbearably trivial and singularly devoid of courage."--Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside. Known to the general public as a radio commentator on National Public Radio, Romanian-born essayist and poet Andrei Codrescu has developed a variety of voices throughout his career: Transylvanian humorist on NPR, surrealist poet in his many volumes of poetry, academic essayist in his philosophical writings and historical novelist. Taking seemingly everyday events in seemingly mundane places, Codrescu is able to link the random details into a larger whole, leading his readers and listeners to conclusions very different from those they first imagined. This work explores Codrescu's writings and how they are a part of the surrealist tradition. It examines the ways in which his poetry, essays and novels are influenced by his upbringing in Communist Romania and the liberal attitudes he encountered upon moving to the United States, and draws comparisons between Codrescu and other surrealists. An interview with the author is also included.

Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America

Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America PDF Author: Kirby Olson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
"This is one of those times, a time choked in the weeds of academic and civilian formalism. To put it mildly, most of what we see in print in North America is unbearably trivial and singularly devoid of courage."--Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside. Known to the general public as a radio commentator on National Public Radio, Romanian-born essayist and poet Andrei Codrescu has developed a variety of voices throughout his career: Transylvanian humorist on NPR, surrealist poet in his many volumes of poetry, academic essayist in his philosophical writings and historical novelist. Taking seemingly everyday events in seemingly mundane places, Codrescu is able to link the random details into a larger whole, leading his readers and listeners to conclusions very different from those they first imagined. This work explores Codrescu's writings and how they are a part of the surrealist tradition. It examines the ways in which his poetry, essays and novels are influenced by his upbringing in Communist Romania and the liberal attitudes he encountered upon moving to the United States, and draws comparisons between Codrescu and other surrealists. An interview with the author is also included.

Romanian Literature as World Literature

Romanian Literature as World Literature PDF Author: Mircea Martin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501327917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This "intersectional" revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's "national poet," Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or "Romanian literature in the plural." Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and �migr� literature, and translation.

An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes (and what Happened Afterwards)

An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes (and what Happened Afterwards) PDF Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: David R Godine Pub
ISBN: 9781574231618
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Multimedia culture critic, novelist, poet, editor of the radical literary journal Exquisite Corpse, Andrei Codrescu proves also a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life. The self-invented Codrescu was born Andrei Perlmutter in the medieval town of Sibiu, Romania in 1946. A dissident student-intellectual and draft-dodger, he experienced a chequered adolescence under a draconian Communist regime. Beguiled by ideal photographs of places out of reach, at the age of 19 the young rebel fled his Transylvanian homeland -- this drab military country where young men turned old before they had a chance to look -- for the Land of Opportunity. It was my great luck, Codrescu remarks with characteristic sly irony in his introduction, coming into America in the late Sixties, to encounter several wayward myths ready-made for me, Transylvania being but one of them. Transylvania at the time of my arrival was a growing myth, full of potential, and anybody who bought stock in Dracula then must feel like an investor in early McDonald. In the past two decades I have seen Halloween overtake Christmas as the nation's greatest holiday, and Dracula become bigger than Jesus Christ, and even John Lennon. Queasy at first about this Hollywood fantasy, I later considered it as a gift. The dark stranger who bites blond Anglosaxony in her semisleep is the outsider, par excellence, the exile who brings history to a halt with his story. His bite ends being in time, it jumpstarts eternity, overthrows daytime and the bourgeoisie, reinstates aristocracy and difference. And it was a great way to meet girls. I never abandoned the profoundly gloomy existentialist disposition ofmy rebellious Romanian generation within which I had been raised as a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. No, I just put on a cape to complete the picture. Ionesco, my previous totem, was only a literary Dracula. To be bit by the absurd is every bit as liberating as being bit by an immortal, but why not be bit by both?

Casanova in Bohemia

Casanova in Bohemia PDF Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504015274
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
An erotic, comedic, and compulsively readable historical novel depicting the beguiling Giacomo Casanova as he looks back on a life of love and ribald adventure In Count Waldstein’s far-flung Bohemian castle, an aging Casanova spends his days as a librarian cataloging the count’s extensive collection of books. Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Ever the storyteller, Casanova instead dedicates himself to his own writing, for which the young servant Laura Brock serves as an endlessly fascinated audience. He recounts to her his greatest escapades—from romances in a Venetian convent to the seduction of an entire harem to the triumphant amassing (and subsequent loss) of a fortune in Paris. Enlivened by the French Revolution and the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment, Casanova’s latest exploits prove he still possesses an intellectual vigor and insatiable curiosity. Even old age can’t keep this legendary libertine—who corresponded with Voltaire, discussed flight with Benjamin Franklin, and whose life and writings inspired artists as diverse as Mozart, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Hesse—from causing trouble. Rich with eighteenth-century European social, political, and religious history, Casanova in Bohemia is an energetic and erotic portrait of Western literature’s most beloved lothario, whose hedonism was matched by his creativity and wit.

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans PDF Author: Rei Magosaki
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823271323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non–Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. The newly imagined cosmopolitan subject that emerges from their works dramatically reconfigured Asian American female subjectivity in metropolitan space with a kind of fluidity and ease never before seen. But as Rei Magosaki shows, these narratives also invariably expose the problematic side of this figure, which also serves to perpetuate exploitative structures of Western imperialism and its legacies in late capitalism. Arguing that the actual establishment of such a critical standpoint on imperialism and globalization required the expansive and internationalist vision of editors who supported, cultivated, and promoted these works, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans reveals the negotiations between these authors and their publishers and between the shared investment in both politics and aesthetics that influenced the narrative structure of key works in the Asian American literary canon.

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Brian W. Shaffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405192445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1581

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Book Description
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

The Myths That Made America

The Myths That Made America PDF Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839414857
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Types and stereotypes

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Types and stereotypes PDF Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027234582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 729

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Book Description
"Types and stereotypes" is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989, the "History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe" approaches the region s literatures from five complementary angles, focusing on literature s participation in and reaction to key political events, literary periods and genres, the literatures of cities and sub-regions, literary institutions, and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories, to contextualize them in a regional perspective, and to recover individual works, writers, and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored. "Types and stereotypes" brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets, figurations of the Family, Women, Outlaws, and Others, as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes, the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history, focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region s literary historians, to students and teachers of comparative literature, to cultural historians, and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region."

The Book Review Digest

The Book Review Digest PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bibliography
Languages : en
Pages : 1940

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Book Description


Baseball and the American Dream

Baseball and the American Dream PDF Author: Robert Elias
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A fascinating look at how America's favorite sport has both reflected and shaped social, economic, and