Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture PDF Author: T. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230599508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Davis and Womack investigate the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience. The idea of reconciling the void - the locus of our sociocultural disillusionment and despair in an uncertain world - concerns explicit artistic attempts to represent the ways in which human beings seek out meaning, hope and community.

Succeeding Postmodernism

Succeeding Postmodernism PDF Author: Mary K. Holland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441159347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism

Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism PDF Author: Todd F. Davis
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791466766
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Explores the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonneguts work.

Reading Beyond the Code

Reading Beyond the Code PDF Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198794770
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This edited volume is the first extensive exploration of the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory which stresses the importance of context and inference in the interpretation of communicative acts.

New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut

New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut PDF Author: D. Simmons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230100813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Kurt Vonnegut's darkly comic work became a symbol for the counterculture of a generation. From his debut novel, Player Piano (1951) through seminal 1960's novels such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) up to the recent success of A Man Without A Country (2005), Vonnegut's writing has remained commercially popular, offering a satirical yet optimistic outlook on modern life. Though many fellow writers admired Vonnegut - Gore Vidal famously suggesting that "Kurt was never dull" - the academic establishment has tended to retain a degree of scepticism concerning the validity of his work. This dynamic collection aims to re-evaluate Vonnegut's position as an integral part of the American post-war cannon of literature.

What is Posthumanism?

What is Posthumanism? PDF Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816666148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

Postmodern Times

Postmodern Times PDF Author: Gene Edward Veith (Jr.)
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 0891077685
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The cultural landscape is now made up of diverse "communities"--feminists, gays, neo-conservatists, African-Americans, pro-lifers--who seem to have no common frame of reference by which to communicate with each other. Veith offers Christians instructions as to how they can respond to these varied groups.

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501335847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
"A critical overview of the writing of David Foster Wallace, taking his persistent interests in philosophy, language and plurality as points of departure"--

The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists

The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists PDF Author: Timothy Parrish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107013135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.

Challenging Modernity

Challenging Modernity PDF Author: Mark A. Pegrum
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book, for the first time, examines in depth the link between modernism and postmodernism and demonstrates the extensive similarities, as well as the few crucial differences between the ideas and art of the Dadaists on the one hand, and those of contemporary postmodern thinkers and artists on the other.