Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire

Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire PDF Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815626657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of carnivalisation to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasizes the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.

Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire

Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire PDF Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815626657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of carnivalisation to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasizes the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.

Unauthorized Versions

Unauthorized Versions PDF Author: José Lanters
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 9780813209869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Certain moments in history, especially periods of cultural turmoil and political change, appear to be conducive to the writing of Menippean satire. Unauthorized Versions is the first integral study of Menippean satires written in Ireland in the three decades following the declaration of the Irish Free State in 1922. The book discusses works by Darrell Figgis, Eimar O'Duffy, Austin Clarke, Flann O'Brien, and Mervyn Wall in the context of political and social developments, particularly relating to economic policy, the role of the Church, and censorship. Mikhail Bakhtin defines Menippean satire as an unresolved dialogue between actual and/or implied voices designed to test a truth or philosophical idea. The Irish satirists of the first half of the twentieth century use medieval Ireland as a setting for addressing contemporary concerns, or borrow characters from medieval Irish texts that they place in a modern context. Each satire thus creates a series of dialogues: between the past and present; between characters who represent opposing values and ideologies; and between the older texts and their modern reworkings. Unauthorized Versions reveals the double bind at the core of every Menippean satire. Each writer discussed in the book expresses an awareness of the paradox of an author writing in the vacuum created by official censorship, seeking to engage his audience in the dethroning of the very authorities by whom he is deprived of his audience. By revealing his own ambiguous position, the satirist knowingly subverts his own authority along with that of his opponents. This study will appeal to students and scholars interested in Irish literature, genre studies, the reception of the Middle Ages, and the relationship between literature and history. Jos Lanters, associate professor of classics at the University of Oklahoma, will begin her position as associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Fall 2000. She is author of Missed Understandings: A Study of Stage Adaptations of the Works of James Joyce and coeditor of Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth-Century Anglo-Irish Prose. "Irish satire in the twentieth century has awaited a critic as intelligent and well-informed as Jose Lanters, whose Unauthorized Versions nicely complements Vivian Mercier's pioneering efforts. For several of the works she discusses, Lanters here provides the only substantial criticism they have received to date. Her approach combines sensitivity to form and expression with a constant attentiveness to historical context, while her study is anchored in a lucid and suggestive use of Bakhtin. Every library with an interest in Irish writing will want this book."--R. Brandon Kershner Alumni Professor of English, University of Florida "Lanters' well-argued volume will be a valuable resource for the study of modern Irish prose at the upper-division undergraduate level and above."--Choice Works discussed in Unauthorized Versions Darrell Figgis The Return of the Hero Eimar O'Duffy King Goshawk and the Birds The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street Asses in Clover Austin Clarke The Bright Temptation The Singing-Men at Cashel The Sun Dances at Easter Flann O'Brien At Swim-Two-Birds The Third Policeman Mervyn Wall The Unfortunate Fursey The Return of Fursey

Flann O'Brien & Modernism

Flann O'Brien & Modernism PDF Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623568501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to understand O'Brien's nationally sensitive achievement as the work of an internationalist whose preoccupations reflect global modernist trends. The distinct themes and concerns tracked in Flann O'Brien & Modernism include characterization in branching narrative forms; the ethics and paradoxes of naming; parody and homage; lies and deception; theatricality; sexuality; technology and transport; and the inevitable matter of drink and intoxication. Taken together, these specific topics construct a mosaic image of O'Brien as an exemplary modernist auteur, abreast of all the most salient philosophical and technical concerns affecting literary production in the period immediately before and after World War Two.

Reading Games

Reading Games PDF Author: Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564784735
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In Reading Games, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja guides us through an entertaining and instructive exploration of a neglected literary genre, the Play-Text. Focusing on the works of Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec, Bohman-Kalaja's book provides insightful analysis of game and play theories, as well as a new perspective on the world of experimental fiction -- discovering, step by step, the innovative strategies of those authors who play reading games.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt

The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt PDF Author: Peter Gratton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350053309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) writings, both in public magazines and in her important books, are still widely studied today. She made original contributions in political thinking that still astound readers and critics alike. The subject of several films and numerous books, colloquia, and newspaper articles, Arendt remains a touchstone in innumerable debates about the use of violence in politics, the responsibility one has under dictatorships and totalitarianism, and how to combat the repetition of the horrors of the past. The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt offers the definitive guide to her writings and ideas, her influences and commentators, as well as the reasons for her lasting significance, with 66 original essays taking up in accessible terms the myriad ways in which one can take up her work and her continuing importance. These essays, written by an international set of her best readers and commentators, provides a comprehensive coverage of her life and the contexts in which her works were written. Special sections take up chapters on each of her key writings, the reception of her work, and key ways she interpreted those who influenced her. If one has come to Arendt from one of her essays on freedom, or from yet another bombastic account of her writings on Adolph Eichmann, or as as student or professor working in the field of Arendt studies, this book provides the ideal tool for thinking with and rediscovering one of the most important intellectuals of the past century. But just as importantly, contributors advance the study of Arendt into neglected areas, such as on science and ecology, to demonstrate her importance not just to debates in which she was well known, but those touched off only after her death. Arendt's approaches as well as her concrete claims about the political have much to offer given the current ecological and refugee crises, among others. In sum, then, the Companion provides a tool for thinking with Arendt, but also for showing just where those thinking with her can take her work today.

Assembling Flann O'Brien

Assembling Flann O'Brien PDF Author: Maebh Long
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441113355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Flann O'Brien - also known as Brian O'Nolan or Myles na gCopaleen - is now widely recognised as one of the foremost of Ireland's modern authors. Assembling Flann O'Brien explores the author's innovative and experimental work by reading him in relation to some of the 20th century's most important theorists, including Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Žižek. Assembling Flann O'Brien offers a detailed study of O'Brien's five major novels – including At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – as well as his plays, short stories, journalistic output and unpublished archival material. The book presents new theoretical perspectives on his works, exploring his compelling engagements with questions of the proper name, the archive, law, and desire, and the problems of identity, language, sexuality and censorship which acutely troubled Ireland's new state. Combining a wide range of contemporary theory with a sensitivity to the cultural and political context in which the author wrote, Maebh Long opens up entirely new aspects of Flann O'Brien's writings, and explores the ingenious and the problematic within his oeuvre.

An Irish Literature Reader

An Irish Literature Reader PDF Author: Maureen O'Rourke Murphy
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815630387
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies and serves as a course-friendly alternative to the Field Day anthology, editors Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including Old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs, and drama. For each author the editors provide a biographical sketch, a brief discussion of how his or her selections relate to a larger body of work, and a selected bibliography. In addition, this new volume includes a larger sampling of women writers.

Sub-versions

Sub-versions PDF Author: Ciaran Ross
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042028289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
From Swift's repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett's dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of modern Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, or lesser known contemporary writers like Sebastian Barry or Robert McLiam Wilson, is the continual questioning of Irish identity - Irishness - going from its colonial paradigm and stereotype of the subaltern in MacGill, to its uneasy implications for gender representation in the contemporary novel and the contemporary drama. A subsidiary theme inextricably linked to the identity problematic is that of exile and its radical heritage for all Irish writing irrespective of its different genres. Sub-Versions offers a cross-cultural and trans-national response to the expanding interest in Irish and postcolonial studies by bringing together specialists from different national cultures and scholarly contexts - Ireland, Britain, France and Central Europe. The order of the essays is by genre. This study is aimed both at the general literary reader and anyone particularly interested in Irish Studies.

Irish Modernism

Irish Modernism PDF Author: Edwina Keown
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039118946
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
An examination of the emergence, reception and legacy of modernism in Ireland. Engaging with the ongoing re-evaluation of regional and national modernisms, the essays collected here reveal both the importance of modernism to Ireland, and that of Ireland to modernism. This collection introduces fresh perspectives on modern Irish culture that reflect new understandings of the contradictory and contested nature of modernism itself.--

Jesting in Earnest

Jesting in Earnest PDF Author: Derek C. Maus
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611179637
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A critical analysis of Percival Everett's oeuvre through the lens of Menippean satire Percival Everett, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the author of more than thirty books on a wide variety of subjects and genres. Among his many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Huston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and the Dos Passos Prize in Literature. Derek C. Maus proposes that the best way to analyze Everett's varied oeuvre is within the framework of Menippean satire, which focuses its ridicule on faulty modes of thinking, especially the kinds of willful ignorance and bad faith that are used to justify corruption, violence, and bigotry. In Jesting in Earnest, Maus critically examines fourteen of Everett's novels and several of his shorter works through the lens of Menippean satire, focusing on how it supports Everett's broader aim of stimulating thoughtful interpretation that is unfettered by common assumptions and preconceived notions.