Confession and Complicity in Narrative

Confession and Complicity in Narrative PDF Author: Dennis A. Foster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521341912
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. In this 1987 text, Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex than that: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer's mastery over meaning in order to imagine themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. This dynamic model of the reading process is revealed most tellingly in 'confessional' narratives and so Professor Foster explores the complex patterns of the reader/writer symbiosis in texts by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Beckett. What emerges is a fresh theory of reading literature: the engagement between writer and reader as a struggle for power in which the reader is actively complicit and self-conscious in his or her interpretations.

Confession and Complicity in Narrative

Confession and Complicity in Narrative PDF Author: Dennis A. Foster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521341912
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. In this 1987 text, Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex than that: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer's mastery over meaning in order to imagine themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. This dynamic model of the reading process is revealed most tellingly in 'confessional' narratives and so Professor Foster explores the complex patterns of the reader/writer symbiosis in texts by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Beckett. What emerges is a fresh theory of reading literature: the engagement between writer and reader as a struggle for power in which the reader is actively complicit and self-conscious in his or her interpretations.

Modern Confessional Writing

Modern Confessional Writing PDF Author: Jo Gill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134299788
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This collection of essays provides a critique of the popular and powerful genre of confessional writing. Contributors discuss a range of poetry, prose and drama, including the work of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.

Textual Practice

Textual Practice PDF Author: Terence Hawkes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134957785
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Confession

Confession PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719028854
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description


Threshold Time

Threshold Time PDF Author: Lene Johannessen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042023325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as a new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the ?passage of crisis? with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes? George Washington Gomez, Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: The Open Totality of Thresholds I. A History of Borderland Routes II. Literary Blossoming III. Disillusion and Defiance in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don IV. The Appropriate(d) Hero: Americo Paredes? George Washington GomezV. Exercises in Liminality: Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him VI. The Dialogic Mind: The Education of Richard Rodriguez VII. Memories of Landscape1. The Meaning of Place in Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus 2: The Threshold ? Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water VIII. The Aesthetics of Time in Chicano Literature Bibliography Index

Proustian Passions

Proustian Passions PDF Author: Ingrid Wassenaar
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198160045
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A la recherche du temps perdu occupies an undisputed place in the unfolding intellectual history of the 'moi' in France. There is, however, a general tendency in writing on this novel to celebrate the wonders of the moi sensible uncritically. This effaces all that is morally dubious or franklyexperimental about Proust's account of selfhood. It denies the rigour with which Proust tries to understand exactly why it is so difficult to explain one's own actions to another. The great party scenes, for example, or the countless digressions, read like manuals on how acts of self-justificationtake place.Proust, however, is not merely interested in some kind of taxonomy of excuses, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and Schadenfreude. He wants to know why self-justification tends to be interpreted as indicative of moral or psychological weakness. He asks himself whether self-justification informsisolated moments of everyday existence or whether it endures in an overall conception of self that lasts an individual's lifetime. He investigates whether it dictates the functioning of an entire social group. Can we decide, he asks, whether justifying one's self should be written off as morallyrepugnant, or taken seriously as evidence of moral probity?

Male Confessions

Male Confessions PDF Author: Björn Krondorfer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804773432
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Male Confessions examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. This book examines writings—by St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi perpetrator, and a gay American theologian—that reflect sincere attempts at introspective and retrospective self-investigation, often triggered by some wounding or rupture and followed by a transformative experience. Krondorfer takes seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosure while offering a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse. The religious imagination, he argues, allows men to talk about their intimate, flawed, and sinful selves without having to condemn themselves or to fear self-erasure. Herein lies the greatest promise of these confessions: by baring their souls to judgment, these writers may also transcend their self-imprisonment.

Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts

Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts PDF Author: Eva Darias-Beautell
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 155458261X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s (lack of) ghosts.

I Confess!

I Confess! PDF Author: Thomas Waugh
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228000645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
In the postwar decades, sexual revolutions - first women's suffrage, flappers, Prohibition, and Mae West; later Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the pill - altered the lifestyles and desires of generations. Since the 1990s, the internet and its cataclysmic cultural and social technological shifts have unleashed a third sexual revolution, crystallized in the acts and rituals of confession that are a staple of our twenty-first-century lives. In I Confess!, a collection of thirty original essays, leading international scholars such as Ken Plummer, Susanna Paasonen, Tom Roach, and Shohini Ghosh explore the ideas of confession and sexuality in moving image arts and media, mostly in the Global North, over the last quarter century. Through self-referencing or autobiographical stories, testimonies, and performances, and through rigorously scrutinized case studies of "gay for pay," gaming, camming, YouTube uploads, and the films Tarnation and Nymph()maniac, the contributors describe a spectrum of identities, desires, and related representational practices. Together these desires and practices shape how we see, construct, and live our identities within this third sexual revolution, embodying both its ominous implications of surveillance and control and its utopian glimmers of community and liberation. Inspired by theorists from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to Gayle Rubin and José Esteban Muñoz, I Confess! reflects an extraordinary, paradigm-shifting proliferation of first-person voices and imagery produced during the third sexual revolution, from the eve of the internet to today.

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America PDF Author: Dave Tell
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271060255
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.