Moral Metafiction

Moral Metafiction PDF Author: Donna Pennee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Examines Findley's novels, from The Last of the Crazy People through The Telling of Lies, for the ways in which their use of metafictive devices pose specifically ethical challenges for readers. Findley's novels dramatize the process of interpretation and interrogation of dominant discourses from the point of view of those subjects either already marginalized by history or who choose to repudiate dominant texts and thus become marginalized. As revisionist texts, these novels tell history from the losers' point of view, and in the process of explicating how dominant discourse is constructed, they create the possibility of other constructions and seek to express counterdiscourses. But they also make clear that such expressions are themselves constructions: their ethical challenge lies in problematizing readers' knowledge of dominant history and in asking readers to choose their constructions carefully.

Moral Metafiction

Moral Metafiction PDF Author: Donna Pennee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Examines Findley's novels, from The Last of the Crazy People through The Telling of Lies, for the ways in which their use of metafictive devices pose specifically ethical challenges for readers. Findley's novels dramatize the process of interpretation and interrogation of dominant discourses from the point of view of those subjects either already marginalized by history or who choose to repudiate dominant texts and thus become marginalized. As revisionist texts, these novels tell history from the losers' point of view, and in the process of explicating how dominant discourse is constructed, they create the possibility of other constructions and seek to express counterdiscourses. But they also make clear that such expressions are themselves constructions: their ethical challenge lies in problematizing readers' knowledge of dominant history and in asking readers to choose their constructions carefully.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Patricia Waugh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136493964
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Timothy Findley's Novels Between Ethics and Postmodernism

Timothy Findley's Novels Between Ethics and Postmodernism PDF Author: Dagmar Krause
Publisher: Königshausen & Neumann
ISBN: 9783826030055
Category : Ethics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Timothy Findley (1930-2002) is one of the most important contemporary Canadian writers. His novels have been classified as postmodern, exhibiting characteristic features such as parody, historiographic metafiction, and hybrid genres. This classification of Findley as a postmodern writer, however, largely neglects the fact that Findley is deeply committed to the exploration of certain ethical and political themes. Recurring topics in his work are, for instance, fascism, environmental concerns, and the problem of responsibility. Sparked off by the fascinating question of how postmodernism and ethics can be reconciled at all, and inspired by the so-called ethical turn in the literary theory of the 1990s, this study supplies a closer look at Findley's ethics with regard to its postmodern potential. A detailed analysis of five of his novels (The Wars, Famous Last Words, Not Wanted on the Voyage, The Telling of Lies and Headhunter) explores the ethical dimension of Findleys work and its consequences for his categorization as a postmodern writer.

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism PDF Author: Mary K. Holland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501362631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new “realisms” in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature “realistic”? And if it is, then what does “realism” mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Truth and Metafiction

Truth and Metafiction PDF Author: Josh Toth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501351745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism-with a certain sense of irresponsibility, political apathy, or outright nihilism. Yet, if (as is now widely assumed) postmodernism has finally run its course, how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media? Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed, or has the function of metafiction somehow changed? To answer these questions, Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional texts-bywriters such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape: from the rise of various new materialisms (in philosophy) and the turn to affect (in literary criticism) to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernism's ostensible successor. Ultimately, Toth argues that much contemporary metafiction moves beyond postmodern skepticism to reassert the possibility of making true claims about real things. Capable of combating a “post-truth” crisis, such forms assert or assume a kind of Hegelian plasticity; they actively and persistently confront the trauma of what is infinitely mutable, or perpetually other. What is outside or before a given representation is confirmed and endured as that which exceeds the instance of its capture. The truth is thereby renewed; neither denied nor simply assumed, it is approached as ethically as possible. Its plasticity is grasped because the grasp, the form of its narrative apprehension, lets slip.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried PDF Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547420293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature

Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature PDF Author: Bernd Engler
Publisher: Paderborn [Germany] : F. Schöningh
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description


Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy

Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy PDF Author: Robert K. Bolger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441192069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Asked in 2006 about the philosophical nature of his fiction, the late American writer David Foster Wallace replied, "If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be." Gesturing Toward Reality looks into this quality of Wallace's work-when the writer dons the philosopher's cap-and sees something else. With essays offering a careful perusal of Wallace's extensive and heavily annotated self-help library, re-considerations of Wittgenstein's influence on his fiction, and serious explorations into the moral and spiritual landscape where Wallace lived and wrote, this collection offers a perspective on Wallace that even he was not always ready to see. Since so much has been said in specifically literary circles about Wallace's philosophical acumen, it seems natural to have those with an interest in both philosophy and Wallace's writing address how these two areas come together.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Mark Currie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317893875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing; and secondly effect: an emphasis on the playing with styles and forms, resulting from an enhanced self-consciousness and awareness of the elusiveness of meaning and the limitations of the realist form. Dr Currie's volume examines first the two components of metafiction, with practical illustrations from the work of such writers as Derrida and Foucault. A final section then provides the view of metafiction as seen by metafictional writers themselves.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Yaël Schlick
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100068525X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yaël Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period. This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives' usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory. Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.