The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction

The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction PDF Author: Morton Levitt
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584655008
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
A wide-ranging response to The Rhetoric of Fiction.

The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction

The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction PDF Author: Morton Levitt
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584655008
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
A wide-ranging response to The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent PDF Author: Wayne C. Booth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226065723
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that "you cannot reason about values" and that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted," and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a "befouled rhetorical climate" in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes—defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of "values" becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find "identity" or a "self." In casting doubt on systematic doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of "systematic assent," Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of "good reasons"—many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These "good reasons" are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, "When should I change my mind?"

Out of Context

Out of Context PDF Author: Michaela Bronstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190655410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history. Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives. Reading the modernists through these authors' eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

The Rhetoric of Fiction

The Rhetoric of Fiction PDF Author: Wayne C. Booth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226065588
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
A standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts. Its concepts and terms have become standard critical lexicon.

Feminist Narrative Ethics

Feminist Narrative Ethics PDF Author: Katherine Saunders Nash
Publisher: Theory Interpretation Narrativ
ISBN: 9780814212424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Establishes a new theory of narrative ethics by analyzing how rhetorical techniques can prompt readers of novels to reconsider their ethical convictions about women's rights.

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness PDF Author: Megan Quigley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110708959X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Modernist Fiction and Vagueness examines the development of the modernist novel in relation to changing approaches to philosophy. It argues that the puzzle of vagueness challenged the great thinkers of the early twentieth century and led to dramatic changes in both fiction and philosophy. Building on recent interest in the connections among analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, this book posits that literary vagueness should be read as a defining quality of modernist fiction.

The Subject of Modernism

The Subject of Modernism PDF Author: Tony E. Jackson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472105526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Like other poststructuralist theories, Lacanian theory has long been accused of being ahistorical. In The Subject of Modernism, Tony E. Jackson combines a uniquely graspable explanation of the Lacanian theory of the self with a series of detailed psychoanalytic interpretations of actual texts to offer a new kind of literary history." "After exposing the seldom-discussed history of the self found in the work of Lacan, Jackson shows that the basic plot structure of realistic novels reveals an unconscious desire to preserve a certain kind of historically institutionalized self, but that the desire of realism to write the most real representation of reality steadily makes the self-preservation more difficult to sustain. Thus in following through on its own desire to prove the certainty of its being, realism eventually discovers its own impossibility. Jackson charts the resistances to and misrecognitions of this discovery as they are revealed in the changes of narrative form from Eliot's last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda, through Conrad's most modernist novels, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. He ends with an appended consideration of the "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" chapters from Joyces's Ulysses." "While other critics have argued that realism structures a certain self and modernism undoes that self, they have not attempted a historical explanation of why this change should have occurred. Jackson reads the emergence of modernism as a kind of generic self-analysis of realism, analogous to the self-analysis performed by Freud: when realism discovers the significance of its own desire to write the most real representation of reality, it has, in that moment, become modernism. It has grasped its own nature and so fully becomes itself, for the first time, as modernism." "The Subject of Modernism will appeal most obviously to readers of Victorian and modernist fiction, but it will also draw those interested in the history of the novel and in the idea of literary history in general. Finally, because of the way Jackson brings together fiction, psychoanalysis, and history, anyone interested in the history of aesthetics will find here new ways to examine particular art forms."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

False Starts

False Starts PDF Author: David M. Ball
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810131137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States.

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


Paradoxy of Modernism

Paradoxy of Modernism PDF Author: Robert Scholes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
In this lively, personal book, Robert Scholes intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and literature in terms of binary oppositions—high/low, old/new, hard/soft, poetry/rhetoric—Scholes contends that these distinctions are in fact confused and misleading. Such oppositions are instances of “paradoxy”—an apparent clarity that covers real confusion. Closely examining specific literary texts, drawings, critical writings, and memoirs, Scholes seeks to complicate the neat polar oppositions attributed to modernism. He argues for the rehabilitation of works in the middle ground that have been trivialized in previous evaluations, and he fights orthodoxy with such paradoxes as “durable fluff,” “formulaic creativity,” and “iridescent mediocrity.” The book reconsiders major figures like James Joyce while underscoring the value of minor figures and addressing new attention to others rarely studied. It includes twenty-two illustrations of the artworks discussed. Filled with the observations of a personable and witty guide, this is a book that opens up for a reader’s delight the rich cultural terrain of modernism.