Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels

Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels PDF Author: Sławomir Studniarz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This volume examines a range of novels and novellas published over the course of nearly forty years, from 1968 to 2014, including E.L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain, John Gardner’s “The King’s Indian,” Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Peter Straub’s Mr. X, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People. These texts display one crucial unifying thread: they are doubly-mediated fictions, fictions in parentheses, so to speak. The application of narrative framing and embedding has been commonly acknowledged and abundantly researched in various works belonging to the Western literary heritage. However, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first century fiction has not been adequately explored, perhaps with the exception of the literary creations of such giants as Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. Despite this critical oversight, narrative frames prove to be a major resource for modern-day novelists, who adapt this literary device and very effectively put it to their own uses. The essays collected in this volume will serve to spark the revival of interest in this time-honored narrative tool, demonstrating its validity for research into more recently created novels.

Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels

Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels PDF Author: Sławomir Studniarz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines a range of novels and novellas published over the course of nearly forty years, from 1968 to 2014, including E.L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain, John Gardner’s “The King’s Indian,” Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Peter Straub’s Mr. X, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People. These texts display one crucial unifying thread: they are doubly-mediated fictions, fictions in parentheses, so to speak. The application of narrative framing and embedding has been commonly acknowledged and abundantly researched in various works belonging to the Western literary heritage. However, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first century fiction has not been adequately explored, perhaps with the exception of the literary creations of such giants as Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. Despite this critical oversight, narrative frames prove to be a major resource for modern-day novelists, who adapt this literary device and very effectively put it to their own uses. The essays collected in this volume will serve to spark the revival of interest in this time-honored narrative tool, demonstrating its validity for research into more recently created novels.

Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media

Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media PDF Author: Werner Wolf
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042017899
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
This book is both a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of literature and other media and a pioneering application of cognitive and frame-theoretical approaches to these fields. In the temporal media a privileged place for the coding of cognitive frames are the beginnings while in spatial media physical borders take over many framing functions. This volume investigates forms and functions of such framing spaces from a transmedial perspective by juxtaposing and comparing the framing potential of individual media and works. After an introductory theoretical essay, which aims to clarify basic concepts, the volume presents eighteen contributions by scholars from various disciplines who deal with individual media. The first section is dedicated to framing in or through the visual arts and includes discussions of the illustrations of medieval manuscripts, the practice of framing pictures from the Middle Ages to Magritte and contemporary American art as well as framings in printmaking and architecture. The second part deals with literary texts and ranges from studies centred on framings in frame stories to essays focussing on the use of paratextual, textual and non-verbal media in the framings of classical, medieval and modern German and American narrative literature; moreover, it includes studies on defamiliarized framings, e.g. by Julio Cortázar and Jasper Fforde, as well as an essay on end-framing practices. Sections on framings in film (including the trailers of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) and in music (operatic overtures and Schumann's piano pieces) provide perspectives on further media. The volume is of relevance to students and scholars from various fields: intermedia studies, cognitive approaches to the media, literary and film studies, history of art, and musicology.

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel PDF Author: James Richard Giles
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570033285
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Framing his study with two cases of violence involving children in Chicago, he notes the degree to which violence in the novels is perpetrated by adults against children or, even more shockingly, by children against children.".

Mind, Mirror, and Myth

Mind, Mirror, and Myth PDF Author: Alan Wheeler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description


The Dialectic of Self and Story

The Dialectic of Self and Story PDF Author: Robert Durante
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135713375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness.

Belonging and Narrative

Belonging and Narrative PDF Author: Laura Bieger
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839446007
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continuously produced by narrative. Against the current emphasis on metaphors of movement and destabilization, she explores the salience and significance of home. Challenging views of narrative as a mechanism of ideology, she approaches narrative as a practical component of dwelling in the world - and the novel a primary place-making agent.

Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom

Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030941663
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 2067

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

Narrative Exploits

Narrative Exploits PDF Author: Dale Pattison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This dissertation analyzes contemporary American literature, which includes novels, graphic novels, film, and television of the last forty years, to deconstruct the critical relationship between lived space, institutional power, and trauma. It examines literary representations of traumatic moments in recent American history--the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, the emergence of the Homeland Security state, and the introduction of the "new metropolis"--To demonstrate that collective trauma at the turn of the century is very much a product of the individual's complex relationship to the state and its institutional auxiliaries. As many philosophers and social critics have argued, institutional forces in contemporary America often deprive individuals of active political engagement through processes of narrative production, and this study discusses how literature both represents and simulates the traumatic consequences of this encounter. Looking to theories on urban, domestic, and textual space, this dissertation explores and problematizes the political and psychological dimensions of space, demonstrating how trauma is enacted through space and how individuals may utilize space and exploit narrative to achieve critical distance from institutional power. Literature as a narrative medium presents vital opportunities both for exposing the machinery of institutional power and for generating positions against the narratives produced by the state.

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers PDF Author: Laurie Champion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307643X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources