Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction

Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction PDF Author: Kristian Shaw
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319525247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“Cosmopolitanism contains some of the most polished and enviably well-written chapters of literary criticism that have ever come my way. Shaw’s readings are critically informed and theoretically sophisticated, yet at the same time remarkably lucid and clear. This is a work of very fine, well-balanced, and – for a first book – astonishingly mature scholarship.” — Prof Berthold Schoene, Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK “The first study to fully appreciate contemporary literature's engagement with cosmopolitanism. A persuasive and articulate engagement with questions of ethics, community, transnationalism and cultural identity, it's an essential read for anyone interested in the contribution of contemporary fiction to our world today”. — Dr Sara Upstone, Principal Lecturer in English Literature, Kingston University, UK. This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows. The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. The theories and values of cosmopolitanism will be argued to provide a direct response to ways of being-in-relation to others and answer urgent fears surrounding cultural convergence. The four chapters examine works by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Dave Eggers and Hari Kunzru. The study will demonstrate how these authors imagine new cosmopolitan modes of belonging and point towards the need for an emergent and affirmative cosmopolitics attuned to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century globality. The study assumes an interdisciplinary approach and will appeal to literature academics, under-/ postgraduate students, and researchers interested in the culture and politics of contemporary life.

Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction

Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction PDF Author: Kristian Shaw
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319525247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Cosmopolitanism contains some of the most polished and enviably well-written chapters of literary criticism that have ever come my way. Shaw’s readings are critically informed and theoretically sophisticated, yet at the same time remarkably lucid and clear. This is a work of very fine, well-balanced, and – for a first book – astonishingly mature scholarship.” — Prof Berthold Schoene, Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK “The first study to fully appreciate contemporary literature's engagement with cosmopolitanism. A persuasive and articulate engagement with questions of ethics, community, transnationalism and cultural identity, it's an essential read for anyone interested in the contribution of contemporary fiction to our world today”. — Dr Sara Upstone, Principal Lecturer in English Literature, Kingston University, UK. This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows. The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. The theories and values of cosmopolitanism will be argued to provide a direct response to ways of being-in-relation to others and answer urgent fears surrounding cultural convergence. The four chapters examine works by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Dave Eggers and Hari Kunzru. The study will demonstrate how these authors imagine new cosmopolitan modes of belonging and point towards the need for an emergent and affirmative cosmopolitics attuned to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century globality. The study assumes an interdisciplinary approach and will appeal to literature academics, under-/ postgraduate students, and researchers interested in the culture and politics of contemporary life.

Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction PDF Author: Nina Engelhardt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030194906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and in times to come.

'All is Not Well in the World'

'All is Not Well in the World' PDF Author: Jason Eng Hun Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Pablo Gómez-Muñoz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000786552
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Recent films are increasingly using themes and conventions of science fiction such as dystopian societies, catastrophic environmental disasters, apocalyptic scenarios, aliens, monsters, time travel, teleportation, and supernatural abilities to address cosmopolitan concerns such as human rights, climate change, economic precarity, and mobility. This book identifies and analyses the new transnational turn towards cosmopolitanism in science fiction cinema since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book considers a wide selection of examples, including case studies of films such as Elysium, In Time, 2012, Andrew Niccol’s The Host, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, and Cloud Atlas. It also questions the seeming cosmopolitanism of these narratives and exposes how they sometimes reproduce social hierarchies and exploitative practices. Dealing with diverse, interdisciplinary concerns represented in cinema, this book in the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series will be of interest to readers and scholars working in the fields of science fiction, film and media studies, cosmopolitanism, border theory, popular culture, and cultural studies. It will also appeal to fans of science fiction cinema and literature.

Culture and Economics in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Fiction

Culture and Economics in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Fiction PDF Author: Elif Toprak Sakız
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031449959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book investigates how culture and economics define novel forms of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan fiction. Tracing cosmopolitanism’s transition from universalism to vernacularism, the book opens up new avenues for reading cosmopolitan fiction by offering a precise and convenient set of terminology. The figure of the cosmoflâneur identifies a contemporary cosmopolitan character’s urban mobility and wandering consciousness in interaction with the global and the local. Posthuman cosmopolitanism also extends the meaning of cosmopolitan which comes to embrace the nonhuman alongside the human element. Defining narrative glocality, political hyper-awareness, and narrative immediacy, the book thoroughly explores how cosmopolitan narration forges direct responses to the contemporary world in postmillennial cosmopolitan novels. All of these concepts are elaborated in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), to which world-engagement is central.

'All Is Not Well in the World'

'All Is Not Well in the World' PDF Author: Jason Eng Hun Lee
Publisher: Open Dissertation Press
ISBN: 9781361337530
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation, "'All is Not Well in the World': Critical Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-first Century Fiction" by Jason Eng Hun, Lee, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative 'worlds'; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader. The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists' attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11's images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers' capacity for imagining global connectedness. Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one's ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate 'worlds', and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5185945 Subjects: English fiction - 21st century - History and criticism American fiction - 21st century - History and criticism Cosmopolitanism in literature

Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Twenty-First-Century Fiction PDF Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244498
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

Violet America

Violet America PDF Author: Jason Arthur
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609381475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Violet America takes on the long habit among literary historians and critics of thinking about large segments of American literary production in terms of regionalism or "local color" writing, thus marginalizing important literary works. Rather than simply celebrating regional difference, Jason Arthur argues, regional cosmopolitan fiction blends the nation's cultural polarities into a connected, interdependent America. Book jacket.

The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine

The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine PDF Author: James Landers
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826272339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Today, monthly issues of Cosmopolitan magazine scream out to readers from checkout counters and newsstands. With bright covers and bold, sexy headlines, this famous periodical targets young, single women aspiring to become the quintessential “Cosmo girl.” Cosmopolitan is known for its vivacious character and frank, explicit attitude toward sex, yet because of its reputation, many people don’t realize that the magazine has undergone many incarnations before its current one, including family literary magazine and muckraking investigative journal, and all are presented in The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The book boasts one particularly impressive contributor: Helen Gurley Brown herself, who rarely grants interviews but spoke and corresponded with James Landers to aid in his research. When launched in 1886, Cosmopolitan was a family literary magazine that published quality fiction, children’s stories, and homemaking tips. In 1889 it was rescued from bankruptcy by wealthy entrepreneur John Brisben Walker, who introduced illustrations and attracted writers such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and H. G. Wells. Then, when newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst purchased Cosmopolitan in 1905, he turned it into a purveyor of exposé journalism to aid his personal political pursuits. But when Hearst abandoned those ambitions, he changed the magazine in the 1920s back to a fiction periodical featuring leading writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and William Somerset Maugham. His approach garnered success by the 1930s, but poor editing sunk Cosmo’s readership as decades went on. By the mid-1960s executives considered letting Cosmopolitan die, but Helen Gurley Brown, an ambitious and savvy businesswoman, submitted a plan for a dramatic editorial makeover. Gurley Brown took the helm and saved Cosmopolitan by publishing articles about topics other women’s magazines avoided. Twenty years later, when the magazine ended its first century, Cosmopolitan was the profit center of the Hearst Corporation and a culturally significant force in young women’s lives. The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine explores how Cosmopolitan survived three near-death experiences to become one of the most dynamic and successful magazines of the twentieth century. Landers uses a wealth of primary source materials to place this important magazine in the context of history and depict how it became the cultural touchstone it is today. This book will be of interest not only to modern Cosmo aficionadas but also to journalism students, news historians, and anyone interested in publishing.

Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City

Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City PDF Author: Magali Cornier Michael
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319897284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.