The Challenge of Bewilderment

The Challenge of Bewilderment PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.

The Challenge of Bewilderment

The Challenge of Bewilderment PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.

Culture and Criticism in Henry James

Culture and Criticism in Henry James PDF Author: Dietmar Schloss
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
ISBN: 9783823350224
Category : Civilization in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description


Bewilderment: A Novel

Bewilderment: A Novel PDF Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

Re-forming the Narrative

Re-forming the Narrative PDF Author: David Hayman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801420054
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Suicide Century

Suicide Century PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110841804X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Suicide Century investigates suicide as an increasingly 'normalised' but still deeply traumatic and profoundly baffling act in twentieth-century writing.

Self Impression

Self Impression PDF Author: Max Saunders
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199579768
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life Volume II: The After-War World Max Saunders --

Literary Impressionism

Literary Impressionism PDF Author: Rebecca Bowler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474269079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
With its new innovations in the visual arts, cinema and photography as well as the sciences of memory and perception, the early twentieth century saw a crisis in the relationship between what was seen and what was known. Literary Impressionism charts that modernist crisis of vision and the way that literary impressionists such as Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair used new concepts of memory in order to bridge the gap between perception and representation. Exploring the fiction of these four major writers as well as their journalism, manifesto writings, letters and diaries from the archives, Rebecca Bowler charts the progression of modernism's literary aesthetics and the changing role of memory within it.

Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad

Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad PDF Author: Agata Szczeszak-Brewer
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611175305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad is a collection of essays directed to both new and experienced readers of Conrad. The book takes into account recent developments in literary theory, including the prominence of ecocriticism, ecopostcolonial approaches, and gender studies. Editor Agata Szczeszak-Brewer offers a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to Conrad's most popular texts, also addressing the most recent academic debates as well as the conversations about narrative and genre in Conrad's canon. Students and scholars of Conrad, twentieth-century literature, and modernism will appreciate the clear, accessible prose by nineteen internationally recognized contributors who approach Conrad in different ways, from postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, through explorations of gender, to psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and political analysis. Beginning with a biographical introduction by Szczeszak-Brewer, the collection offers an essay outlining the cultural and historical contexts that influenced Conrad's fiction and an essay on reception of Conrad's work. Following that, contributors provide critical approaches to Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer, and Under Western Eyes. In these sections scholars offer insights about complex issues in Conrad's fiction, ranging from the study of specific literary tools and narrative development in his books to the political theories in Conrad's portrayal of the threat of terrorism and violent revolutions.

Henry James and the Language of Experience

Henry James and the Language of Experience PDF Author: Collin Meissner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139425714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In Henry James and the Language of Experience, Collin Meissner examines the political dimension to the representation of experience as it unfolds throughout James's work. Meissner argues that, for James, experience was a private and public event, a dialectical process that registered and expressed his consciousness of the external world. Adapting recent work in hermeneutics and phenomenology, Meissner shows how James's understanding of the process of consciousness is not simply an aspect of literary form; it is in fact inherently political, as it requires an active engagement with the full complexity of social reality. For James, the civic value of art resided in this interactive process, one in which the reader becomes aware of the aesthetic experience as immediate and engaged. This wide-ranging study combines literary theory and close readings of James's work to argue for a redefinition of the aesthetic as it operates in James's work.

Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns

Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns PDF Author: R. Hawkes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Ford Madox Ford is a major modernist writer, yet many of his works do not conform to our assumptions about modernism. Examining ways in which he, alongside other 'misfit moderns', undermines 'stabilities' we expect from novels and memoirs, this book poses questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity.