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.

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.

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:

Call It English

Call It English PDF Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

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.

Symbolism, Cognition and Communication in Architecture

Symbolism, Cognition and Communication in Architecture PDF Author: Abraham George
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040049664
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book discusses the role and significance of symbols and symbolism in graphical communication toward the establishment of meaningful architecture. It explores how these are effectively applied in architectural education for the empowerment of learners in various cultures around the world. The volume examines the developments in graphic representations while recognizing the importance of cognition and its perception in spatial terms. In a scenario where architectural education is at crossroads, facing challenges of a global nature, this book highlights the importance of understanding architectural curriculum and design subjects. The author discusses the issues of communicating the knowledge of architecture to heterogeneous groups of students and explains how design fields and learning in architecture can be modified through cognitive instructional methods. The book outlines the methodology to develop symbols and symbolic pedagogical tools for effective communication in architecture. The book will appeal to students, researchers, teachers and scholars of architecture, design, planning and visual communication. It will also be of interest to architects, artists, spatial designers, town planners, urban planners and professionals.

Books and Beyond [4 volumes]

Books and Beyond [4 volumes] PDF Author: Kenneth Womack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313071578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1333

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Book Description
There's a strong interest in reading for pleasure or self-improvement in America, as shown by the popularity of Harry Potter, and book clubs, including Oprah Winfrey's. Although recent government reports show a decline in recreational reading, the same reports show a strong correlation between interest in reading and academic acheivement. This set provides a snapshot of the current state of popular American literature, including various types and genres. The volume presents alphabetically arranged entries on more than 70 diverse literary categories, such as cyberpunk, fantasy literature, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, graphic novels, manga and anime, and zines. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Reading in America for pleasure and knowledge continues to be popular, even while other media compete for attention. While students continue to read many of the standard classics, new genres have emerged. These have captured the attention of general readers and are also playing a critical role in the language arts classroom. This book maps the state of popular literature and reading in America today, including the growth of new genres, such as cyberpunk, zines, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, and other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's critical reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students will find this book a valuable guide to what they're reading today and will appreciate its illumination of popular culture and contemporary social issues.

Twentieth-century Spanish American literature to 1960

Twentieth-century Spanish American literature to 1960 PDF Author: David William Foster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815326779
Category : Ethnicity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Meets the needs of today's teachers and students Gathered to meet the upsurge of interest in Latin America, this collection features major critical articles dealing with the authors and texts customarily taught in colleges and universities in the United States. The articles are in English and Spanish, with a predominance of the former. Surveys a dynamic and exciting area of research Four Latin American writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Guatemalan Miquel Angel Asturias, Chilean Gabriela Mistral, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chilean Pablo Neruda. Also internationally recognized are the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Chilean Isabel Allende, to name only a few. Moreover, the sociopolitical circumstances of the past four decades of Latin American history, and the growing importance of the region have resulted in the creation of Latin American studies programs in numerous American universities. All of this literary activity hasinspired innumerable dissertations, theses, books, and journal articles. Explores contemporary Latin Americanissues and concerns In the face of such an enormous proliferation of commentary, students of Latin America and its literature need a body of basic texts that will provide them an orientation in the various research areas and new schools of thought that have emerged in the field. Particularly important are the essays and articles that have appeared in periodicals and other sources that Anglo American readers often find difficult to obtain. Individual volumes available: Vol. 1 Theoretical Debates in Spanish American Literature 448 pages, 0-8153-2676-9 Vol. 2 Writers of the Spanish Colonial Period 456 pages, 0-8153-2678-5 Vol. 3 From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin American Literture 352 pages, 0-8153-2680-7 Vol. 5 Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature Since 1960 416 pages, 0-8153-2681-5

A Semiotic Theory of Texts

A Semiotic Theory of Texts PDF Author: Floyd Merrell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311085564X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "A Semiotic Theory of Texts".

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth PDF Author: Daniel Merkur
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135575274
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book surveys the history of psychoanalytic treatments of myths variously as symptoms of psychopathology, as cultural defense mechanisms, and as metaphoric expressions of ideas that may include therapeutic insights.

Resources in Education

Resources in Education PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description