Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction PDF full book. Access full book title Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction by Thom Dancer. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Thom Dancer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191914591
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book
Book Description
Explores the idea of critical modesty in twenty-first-century fiction and criticism, with a focus on works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, to show that attitudes of acceptance, compromise, limitation, and entanglement become crucial means of minor, yet significant, intervention in the world.
Author: Thom Dancer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191914591
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book
Book Description
Explores the idea of critical modesty in twenty-first-century fiction and criticism, with a focus on works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, to show that attitudes of acceptance, compromise, limitation, and entanglement become crucial means of minor, yet significant, intervention in the world.
Author: Thom Dancer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192893327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Get Book
Book Description
From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity are dizzyingly complex and increasingly planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction argues for contemporary fiction's capacity to help those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems--not, as one might think, through the ambitious search for grand solutions, but rather by inculcating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, this volume shows how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, it makes the surprising, yet compelling, case that precisely by adopting a modest stance, the novel actually has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over critical and surface readings, bringing novels into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.
Author: Matthew Stratton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000872718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 661
Get Book
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English provides an interdisciplinary overview of the vibrant connections between literature, politics, and the political. Featuring contributions from 44 scholars across a variety of disciplines, the collection is divided into five parts: Connecting Literature and Politics; Constituting the Polis; Periods and Histories; Media, Genre, and Techne; and Spaces. Organized around familiar concepts—such as humans, animals, workers, empires, nations, and states—rather than theoretical schools, it will help readers to understand the ways in which literature affects our understanding of who is capable of political action, who has been included in and excluded from politics, and how different spaces are imagined to be political. It also offers a series of engagements with key moments in literary and political history from 1066 to the present in order to assess and reassess the utility of conventional modes of periodization. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of literary studies, which will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions within broader contexts.
Author: James F. English
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197637221
Category : Conduct of life
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Get Book
Book Description
"Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or more hostile to the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the essays are attempts to reflect on how the kinds of literary research the contributors themselves are doing, the kinds of work to which they are personally committed, might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The authors' specific fields of work are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Taken together, the essays contribute more points of ambiguity and hesitation to the study of human flourishing than decisive advancements. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable. But by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, this volume provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange"--
Author: Emily Horton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350286583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book
Book Description
In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, including Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by contemporary writers to address the cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st-century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st-Century British Gothic can tests geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability and speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism.
Author: Doug Battersby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019267806X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book
Book Description
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist writers developed new techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires that revolutionized the novel form—a revolution novelists and critics are still reckoning with today. Troubling Late Modernism tracks how those techniques have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once exploit and extend modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments to protagonists compelled by violent or exploitative sexual desires. By interrogating the expressive power and ethical liabilities of modes of writing that give us intimate access to characters' inner lives, late modernism poses fundamental philosophical questions about emotion and its inseparability from knowledge and ethical deliberation. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterized late modernism's formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Charting late modernism's characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty with emotional and ethical provocation demands an approach attuned to the experience of reading these disturbingly erotic narratives. In dialogue with recent debates about critical method, Troubling Late Modernism presents a new way of closely reading prose fiction that brings together the lessons of formalism and affect theory.
Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421438917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 487
Get Book
Book Description
How does the work of influential theorist Bruno Latour offer a fresh angle on the practices and purposes of the humanities? In recent years, defenses of the humanities have tended to argue along predictable lines: the humanities foster empathy, the humanities encourage critical thinking, the humanities offer a counterweight to the cold calculations of the natural and social sciences. The essays in Latour and the Humanities take a different approach. Exploring the relevance of theorist Bruno Latour's work, they argue for attachments and entanglements between the humanities and the sciences while looking closely at the interests, institutions, and intellectual projects that shape the humanities within and beyond the university. The collection, which is written by a group of highly distinguished scholars from around the world, is divided into two sections. In the first part, authors engage in depth with Latour's work while also rethinking the ties between the humanities and the sciences. Essays argue for greater attention to the nonhuman world, the urgency of climate change, and more nuanced views of universities as institutions. The second half of the volume contains essays that reflect on Latour's influence on the practices of specific disciplines, including art, the digital humanities, film studies, and political theory. Inspiring conversation about the relevance of actor-network-theory for research and teaching in the humanities, Latour and the Humanities offers a substantial introduction to Latour's work while discussing the humanities without falling back on the genres of either the sermon or the jeremiad. This volume will be of interest to all those searching for fresh perspectives on the value and importance of humanistic disciplines and thought. Contributors: David J. Alworth, Anders Blok, Claudia Breger, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Yves Citton, Steven Connor, Gerard de Vries, Simon During, Rita Felski, Francis Halsall, Graham Harman, Antoine Hennion, Casper Bruun Jensen, Bruno Latour, Heather Love, Patrice Maniglier, Stephen Muecke, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Nigel Thrift, Michael Witmore
Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674587625
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book
Book Description
"For many serious readers," Robert Alter writes in his preface, "the novel still matters, and I have tried here to suggest some reasons why that should be so." In his wide-ranging discussion, Alter examines the imitation of reality in fiction to find out why mimesis has become problematic yet continues to engage us deeply as readers. Alter explores very different sorts of novels, from the self-conscious artifices of Sterne and Nabokov to what seem to be more realistic texts, such as those of Dickens, Flaubert, John Fowles, and the early Norman Mailer. Attention is also given to such individual critics as Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and to current critical schools. In Alter's essays, a particular book or movement or juxtaposition of writers provides the occasion for the exploration of a general intellectual issue. The scrutiny of well-chosen passages, the joining of images or themes or ideas, the associative and intuitive processes that lead to the right phrase and the right loop of syntax for the matter at hand-all these come together unexpectedly to illuminate both the text in question and the general issue. Recent discussions of mimesis in fiction generally proceed from a single thesis. By contrast, Motives for Fiction offers an empirical approach, attempting to define mimesis in its various guises by careful critical readings of a heterogeneous sampling of literary texts. Intelligent and good-humored, the book is also old-fashioned enough to wonder whether mimesis might not be a task or responsibility to which much contemporary fiction has not proved entirely adequate.
Author: Tom Burns
Publisher: Contemporary Literary Criticis
ISBN: 9780787667573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520
Get Book
Book Description
Covers authors who are currently active or who died after December 31, 1959. Profiles novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative and nonfiction writers by providing criticism taken from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals.
Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Novel: A Forum on Fiction
ISBN: 9780822367673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
This special issue argues that our cultural moment marks a point of crisis and transition in the history of the novel. Discussing mostly twenty-first-century writers, including Michael Chabon, Vikram Chandra, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Orhan Pamuk, the contributors interrogate and revise our ideas of contemporaneity and how it can be studied. Their essays consider how novelists adapt to a global economy in which traditionally local forms of community no longer define human experience. They also examine the emergence of neurology and neuropsychology as popular discourses that have displaced the novel from its centrality as the supreme analyst of the mind. Contributors attempt to address the exasperation of literary critics disenchanted with many dominant reading practices, such as approaching fiction via reader experiences of "affect" and "trauma" or relying on staid period categories like postmodernism. Offering a way forward, this special issue emphasizes a new critical awareness of the singular qualities of the novel, a form whose truths may not be (and may never have been) translatable to other cognitive, scientific, or political vocabularies. In 2012 individual and student subscriptions to Novel will be available exclusively through membership in the newly formed Society for Novel Studies. Committed to furthering the study of the novel and to examining the role of fiction in engaging, formulating, and shaping the world, the society will hold a biennial conference. Contributors: Timothy Bewes, Thom Dancer, Andrew Gaedtke, Erdag Goknar, Nathan Hensley, Naomi Mandel, Theodore Martin, Clemens Spahr, Aarthi Vadde Timothy Bewes is Professor of English at Brown University.
