Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts

Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts PDF Author: Kim Vahnenbruck
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN: 3954890321
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 57

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Book Description
'New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts' tries to capture the picture and meaning of an ever-changing city which has casted and still casts a spell over people all around the world. An uncountable number of authors have dedicated their works to New York City because of their fascination of its diversity and constant change that promises its dwellers a life in wealth and freedom. Surprisingly, all novels that have been analyzed reveal New York as the complete opposite of the American Dream that everyone expects when arriving on Ellis Island. The protagonists have to realize that their dreams will never become fulfilled and, consequently, become disillusioned and corrupted by their unhealthy environment. John Dos Passos describes a City that becomes a modern Babylon; it is fragmented and on its way to greed, capitalism and corruption. The New York of Stephen Crane's Maggie Johnson and Edith Wharton's Lily Bart is like a gigantic deterministic cage that denies every attempt of escape. Moreover, the metaphysical novel 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster does not show any sign of the promised life in wealth and freedom, but rather a city that is split into pieces, ruled by chance and misunderstandings. The city literally dehumanizes its inhabitants as they are dazzled by its addictive quality.

Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts

Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts PDF Author: Kim Vahnenbruck
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN: 3954890321
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 57

Get Book Here

Book Description
'New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts' tries to capture the picture and meaning of an ever-changing city which has casted and still casts a spell over people all around the world. An uncountable number of authors have dedicated their works to New York City because of their fascination of its diversity and constant change that promises its dwellers a life in wealth and freedom. Surprisingly, all novels that have been analyzed reveal New York as the complete opposite of the American Dream that everyone expects when arriving on Ellis Island. The protagonists have to realize that their dreams will never become fulfilled and, consequently, become disillusioned and corrupted by their unhealthy environment. John Dos Passos describes a City that becomes a modern Babylon; it is fragmented and on its way to greed, capitalism and corruption. The New York of Stephen Crane's Maggie Johnson and Edith Wharton's Lily Bart is like a gigantic deterministic cage that denies every attempt of escape. Moreover, the metaphysical novel 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster does not show any sign of the promised life in wealth and freedom, but rather a city that is split into pieces, ruled by chance and misunderstandings. The city literally dehumanizes its inhabitants as they are dazzled by its addictive quality.

Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts

Fictions of New York: The City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts PDF Author: Kim Vahnenbruck
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN: 3954895323
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
‘New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts’ tries to capture the picture and meaning of an ever-changing city which has casted and still casts a spell over people all around the world. An uncountable number of authors have dedicated their works to New York City because of their fascination of its diversity and constant change that promises its dwellers a life in wealth and freedom. Surprisingly, all novels that have been analyzed reveal New York as the complete opposite of the American Dream that everyone expects when arriving on Ellis Island. The protagonists have to realize that their dreams will never become fulfilled and, consequently, become disillusioned and corrupted by their unhealthy environment. John Dos Passos describes a City that becomes a modern Babylon; it is fragmented and on its way to greed, capitalism and corruption. The New York of Stephen Crane’s Maggie Johnson and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart is like a gigantic deterministic cage that denies every attempt of escape. Moreover, the metaphysical novel ‘City of Glass’ by Paul Auster does not show any sign of the promised life in wealth and freedom, but rather a city that is split into pieces, ruled by chance and misunderstandings. The city literally dehumanizes its inhabitants as they are dazzled by its addictive quality.

Down in the Dumps

Down in the Dumps PDF Author: Jani Scandura
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place. An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.

New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts

New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts PDF Author: Kim Vahnenbruck
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783656212348
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: "New York, Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can't do, Now you're in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, lets hear it for New York, New York, New York" These lines from the song Empire State of Mind (2009) by the famous American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur Jay-Z, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, reveal the challenge of capturing the City of New York in words or text. New York City is on the one hand celebrated as the place "where dreams are made of," whose "streets will make you feel brand new" and whose "lights will inspire you," but on the other hand also as a "[c]oncrete jungle." The contrasting, yet at the same time very tempting ideas of the 'City that Never Sleeps' make it not only the most popular city in the United States, but also the most "dynamic, varied and perplexing in the world" (Gates ix). Robert A. Gates further describes the challenge for the writer, singer or song- writer: "There are no standards [one] can grasp; no guidelines [one] can follow," because [t]he City presents no standard language, philosophy, or neighborhood that can be labelled as typically New York" (ix). In order to understand the city and its influences at least to some extent, it might be useful to talk about the name 'New York' and the events in history that helped to make it the most important and most famous city in the world. When people talk about New York, the City of New York is referred to and more precisely the most densely populated borough of Manhattan. In 1898, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island were consolidated to the City of New York, which is part of the state of New York. Therefore, New York and New York City are almost always used synonymously and refer to the same part of the city:

At Home in the City

At Home in the City PDF Author: Elizabeth Klimasmith
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A lucidly written analysis of urban literature and evolving residential architecture.

Humanities

Humanities PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Humanities
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description


Poetry and Story Therapy

Poetry and Story Therapy PDF Author: Geri Giebel Chavis
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1849058326
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This accessible book explores the therapeutic possibilities of poetry and stories, providing techniques for facilitating personally relevant and growth-enhancing sessions. The author provides ideas for writing activities that emerge from this discussion, and explains how participants can create their own poetic and narrative pieces.

Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre

Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre PDF Author: Mike Cadden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135873615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book critically examines Le Guin's fiction for all ages, and it will be of great interest to her many admirers and to all students and scholars of children's literature.

The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature

The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature PDF Author: Kevin Corstorphine
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319974068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
This handbook examines the use of horror in storytelling, from oral traditions through folklore and fairy tales to contemporary horror fiction. Divided into sections that explore the origins and evolution of horror fiction, the recurrent themes that can be seen in horror, and ways of understanding horror through literary and cultural theory, the text analyses why horror is so compelling, and how we should interpret its presence in literature. Chapters explore historical horror aspects including ancient mythology, medieval writing, drama, chapbooks, the Gothic novel, and literary Modernism and trace themes such as vampires, children and animals in horror, deep dark forests, labyrinths, disability, and imperialism. Considering horror via postmodern theory, evolutionary psychology, postcolonial theory, and New Materialism, this handbook investigates issues of gender and sexuality, race, censorship and morality, environmental studies, and literary versus popular fiction.

Teaching Jewish American Literature

Teaching Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Roberta Rosenberg
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603294465
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.