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.

Truth and Metafiction

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

Get Book Here

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.

Historiographic Metafiction

Historiographic Metafiction PDF Author: Barry Pomeroy
Publisher: Bear's Carvery
ISBN: 9781987922066
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
I ground this reading of historiographic metafiction in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon's construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography, I investigate the specific textual strategies that historiographic genres-such as the postmodern novel, the Canadian long poem, the short story and to some extent, the film genre-use to present their self-reflexive interaction between history and fiction.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Patricia Waugh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136493891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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

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.

Telling the "truth" Through Metafiction in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut

Telling the Author: Berit Preston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description


Fiction about Fiction

Fiction about Fiction PDF Author: Sophie Milne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
"In this thesis I explore a style of fiction called metafiction and what it contributes to philosophical debates surrounding the question of truth in fiction. Metafiction is a piece of literature, play, or film which reflects on the nature of fiction from within the fictional form. Metafiction gained popularity in the 1960s with the rise of postmodernism and has had a substantial amount of literature dedicated to it from literary critics. It generally remains outside of philosophical discourse, aside from a recent conference which was held in April 2011 at the University of Cambridge. This conference shows that metafiction and philosophy do have important links which I hope to explore. I argue that metafiction is not as disconnected from truth and reality as many theorists claim. Metafiction not only reveals truths about the nature of fiction and postmodern reality but it also contributes to debates in the philosophy of art. Metafiction provides insights into the paradox of fiction and the nature of propositional truth in fiction, revealing that it is possible to be emotionally engaged in fiction whilst being aware of its fictionality, and that a theory of truth in fiction needs to account for paradoxical truths. I conclude with a discussion of how fiction can be philosophical and the way in which metafiction embodies philosophical ideas in the philosophy of literature through its self-reflexive form".

Cosmodernism

Cosmodernism PDF Author: Christian Moraru
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472071297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
A study of the emerging cultural model of "cosmodernism"

Fabulation and Metafiction

Fabulation and Metafiction PDF Author: Robert Scholes
Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description


Factual Fictions

Factual Fictions PDF Author: Leonora Flis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443824771
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Factual Fictions: Narrative Truth and the Contemporary American Documentary Novel focuses on contemporary American documentary narratives, specifically the documentary novel, as it re-emerged in the 1960s and later developed into various other forms. The book explores the connections between the documentary novel and the concurrent rise of New Journalism (a.k.a. “literary journalism”) in the United States, situating the two genres in the cultural context of the tumultuous 1960s and an emerging postmodern ethos. Flis makes a comprehensive analysis of texts by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, John Berendt, and Don DeLillo, while tackling discussions on various theoretical complexities with assurance and rigor. Interested in the precarious divide between fact and fiction, the author productively complicates traditional notions of the two poles. Furthermore, the book examines parallels between contemporary Slovene documentary narratives and their American counterparts. Flis’s work, with its systematic and innovative approach to the subject matter, adds an important historical dimension to the developing field of literary journalism studies as well as to the more established area of 20th Century American literature.

Historiographic Metafiction Or Lying with the Truth

Historiographic Metafiction Or Lying with the Truth PDF Author: Barry Samuel Pomeroy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description