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Author: Alice Bennett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474282636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
With the supposed shortening of our attention spans, what future is there for fiction in the age of the internet? Contemporary Fictions of Attention rejects this discourse of distraction-crisis which suggests that the future of reading is in peril, and instead finds that contemporary writers construct 'fictions of attention' that find some value in states or moments of inattention. Through discussion of work by a diverse selection of writers, including Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, this book identifies how fiction prompts readers to become peripherally aware of their own attention. Contemporary Fictions of Attention locates a common interest in attention within 21st-century fiction and connects this interest to a series of debates surrounding ethics, temporality, the everyday, boredom, work, and self-discipline in contemporary culture.
Author: Alice Bennett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474282636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
With the supposed shortening of our attention spans, what future is there for fiction in the age of the internet? Contemporary Fictions of Attention rejects this discourse of distraction-crisis which suggests that the future of reading is in peril, and instead finds that contemporary writers construct 'fictions of attention' that find some value in states or moments of inattention. Through discussion of work by a diverse selection of writers, including Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, this book identifies how fiction prompts readers to become peripherally aware of their own attention. Contemporary Fictions of Attention locates a common interest in attention within 21st-century fiction and connects this interest to a series of debates surrounding ethics, temporality, the everyday, boredom, work, and self-discipline in contemporary culture.
Author: David Letzler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201647
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elements that he labels "cruft" after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention. While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.
Author: Joshua Cohen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399590226
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description
“Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life.”—Entertainment Weekly “Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life: politics, literature, art, music, travel, the media, and psychology, and subjects as diverse as Google, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, fictional animals, Gustav Mahler, Aretha Franklin, John Zorn, landscape photography, fake Caravaggios, Wikipedia, Gertrude Stein, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Franzen, Olympic women’s fencing, Atlantic City casinos, the closing of the Ringling Bros. circus, and Azerbaijan. Throughout ATTENTION, Cohen directs his sharp gaze at home and abroad, calling upon his extraordinary erudition and unrivaled ability to draw connections between seemingly unlike things to show us how to live without fear in a world overflowing with information. In each piece, he projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his, and a voice as witty, profound, and distinct as any in American letters. At this crucial juncture in history, ATTENTION is a guide for the perplexed—a handbook for anyone hoping to bring the wisdom of the past into the culture of the future. Praise for ATTENTION “Dazzling in its scope . . . If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post “Cause for celebration and close study . . . [Cohen] will hunt after neglected shards of the past, minor histories, and charge them with an immediacy in the present. . . . He is experimenting with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major American writer today.”—The Wall Street Journal “In Attention, Joshua Cohen makes an eclectic argument for how to improve our lives. . . . [He] tackles a surprising range of subjects to underline distraction’s role in our fraught predicament and to argue that paying attention could help us get out of it. . . . When it comes to making sense of our times with verve and imagination, few authors are more rewarding.”—Financial Times
Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100083204X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an “ecology of attention” (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this, I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: psychology, but also more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fictional and non-fictional narratives, I address such issues as social invisibilities, climate change, AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention.
Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328526917
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Carter Jones is astonished early one morning when he finds a real English butler, bowler hat and all, on the doorstep—one who stays to help the Jones family, which is a little bit broken. In addition to figuring out middle school, Carter has to adjust to the unwelcome presence of this new know-it-all adult in his life and navigate the butler's notions of decorum. And ultimately, when his burden of grief and anger from the past can no longer be ignored, Carter learns that a burden becomes lighter when it is shared. Sparkling with humor, this insightful and compassionate story will resonate with readers who have confronted secrets of their own.
Author: Stephen Hock
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498598056
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Trump Fiction:Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television examines depictions of Donald Trump and his fictional avatars in literature, film, and television, including works that took up the subject of Trump before his successful presidential campaign (in terms that often uncannily prefigure his presidency) as well as those that have appeared since he took office. Covering a range of texts and approaches, the essays in this collection analyze the place Trump has assumed in literary and popular culture. By investigating how authors including Bret Easton Ellis, Amy Waldman, Thomas Pynchon, Howard Jacobson, Mark Doten, Olivia Laing, and Salman Rushdie, along with films and television programs like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sesame Street, Sex and the City, Two Weeks Notice, Our Cartoon President, and Pose have approached and shaped the discourse surrounding Trump, the contributors collectively demonstrate the ways these cultural artifacts serve as sites through which the culture both resists and abets Trump and his rise to power.
Author: Rebekah Fitzsimmons
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane Wilson While critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.
Author: Astrid Møller-Olsen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621967002
Category : Chinese fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
"This book assesses the dynamics of human senses and environment, memory and narrativity, through the prism of the ever-evolving urban scape in the Chinese and Sinophone world. The study regards the "city" as an architectural sphere, a site of sociality, a domain of affect, and most suggestively, a narrative construct. With a lineup of works drawn from contemporary Chinese and Sinophone communities, this study identifies indigenous and global contestations, introduces multiple themes, styles, and discourses, and ponders the consequences of narrative fiction as a unique manifestation through which the urban subject encounters and configures the world. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei are chosen as the specific sites in which such encounters and configurations take shape. This book is an important resource for all interested in narratology, urban studies, environmental studies, affect studies, Asian studies, and comparative literature in both Sinophone and global contexts"--
Author: Steven Conte
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 1460712579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Epic in scope, ambitious and astonishingly good, The Tolstoy Estate proclaims Steven Conte as one of Australia's finest writers. From the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award, Steven Conte, comes a powerful, densely rich and deeply affecting novel of love, war and literature 'Grave, moving, engaging ... full of the flash and fire of dramatic incident, but also full of real feeling, humour and poignancy, and equipped with plenty of panache ... It deserves the widest possible readership.' The Saturday Paper In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana - the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trubetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer's hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, becomes erratic and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel... From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate is ambitious, accomplished and astonishingly good: an engrossing, intense and compelling exploration of the horror and brutality of conflict, and the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual limits that people reach in war time. It is also a poignant, bittersweet love story - and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world. Shortlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award 2021 Longlisted for the 2021 ARA Historical Novel Prize Longlisted for the 2021 Colin Roderick Award Longlist Longlisted for the 2021 Indie Book Awards 'Breathtaking ... an intelligent cinematic blockbuster. celebrating the power of literature to dissolve barriers and forge connections.' The West Australian 'Reading a book that is such a complete world, evoked in such fine detail, is almost wickedly satisfying ... Elegant, intelligent, utterly engrossing and immersive ... He reminds us that travel is always possible in the imagination even when reality goes dark and that literature always leads us towards the light.' Caroline Baum 'Steven Conte has written a sweeping historical saga spanning the second world WAR and the frigid decades of PEACE that followed; an essential novel about essential things - love's triumphs and failures, the redoubtable human spirit, and the power of literary art itself. Tolstoy, of course, is at the novel's heart, and in its very soul.' Luke Slattery, author, journalist, Books Editor of Australian Financial Review 'A riveting story of war, love and literature - Conte's prose does not miss a beat.' Jane Gleeson-White, award-winning author of Classics and Double Entry
Author: Anna-Louise Milne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108468916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Our global literary field is fluid and exists in a state of constant evolution. Contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation; the collapse of the distinction between 'French' and 'Francophone' literature has opened up French writing to a world of new influences and interactions. In this collection, renowned scholars provide thoughtful close readings of a whole range of genres, from graphic novels to crime fiction to the influence of television and film, to analyse modern French fiction in its historical and sociological context. Allowing students of contemporary French literature and culture to situate specific works within broader trends, the volume provides an engaging, global and timely overview of contemporary fiction writing in French, and demonstrates how our modern literary world is more complex and diverse than ever before.
