This Thing We Call Literature

This Thing We Call Literature PDF Author: Arthur Krystal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190272376
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This Thing We Call Literature collects ten essays from the combative, cantankerous cultural critic Arthur Krystal. The essays in this compact volume, mostly coming from The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Chronicle of Higher Education--all share Krystal's conviction that literature and the humanities more broadly are going down the tubes"

This Thing We Call Literature

This Thing We Call Literature PDF Author: Arthur Krystal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190272376
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This Thing We Call Literature collects ten essays from the combative, cantankerous cultural critic Arthur Krystal. The essays in this compact volume, mostly coming from The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Chronicle of Higher Education--all share Krystal's conviction that literature and the humanities more broadly are going down the tubes"

This Thing Called Literature

This Thing Called Literature PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317698282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
What is this thing called literature? Why should we study it? And how? Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, this beautifully written book establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Bennett and Royle delicately weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and what sort of questions and ideas they provoke. The book’s three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful, familiar examples throughout, offering rich reflections on the question ‘What is literature?’ and on what they term ‘creative reading’. Bennett and Royle’s lucid and friendly style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This book is not only an essential guide to the study of literature, but an eloquent defence of the discipline.

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674265815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1129

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Book Description
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

This Thing Called the World

This Thing Called the World PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In This Thing Called the World Debjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it. Ganguly contends that global literature coalesced into its current form in 1989, an event marked by the convergence of three major trends: the consolidation of the information age, the arrival of a perpetual state of global war, and the expanding focus on humanitarianism. Ganguly analyzes a trove of novels from authors including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Art Spiegelman, who address wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka, the Palestinian and Kashmiri crises, the Rwandan genocide, and post9/11 terrorism. These novels exist in a context in which suffering's presence in everyday life is mediated through digital images and where authors integrate visual forms into their storytelling. In showing how the evolution of the contemporary global novel is analogous to the European novel’s emergence in the eighteenth century, when society and the development of capitalism faced similar monumental ruptures, Ganguly provides both a theory of the contemporary moment and a reminder of the novel's power.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Is Nothing Sacred? PDF Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description


The Event of Literature

The Event of Literature PDF Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Offers a thorough examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.

A Sense of Things

A Sense of Things PDF Author: Bill Brown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226076318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In May 1906, the Atlantic Monthly commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, A Sense of Things will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.

Hall of Small Mammals

Hall of Small Mammals PDF Author: Thomas Pierce
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698144929
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller. The author of the forthcoming novel, The Afterlives. The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world. In “Shirley Temple Three,” a mother must shoulder her son’s burden—a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In “The Real Alan Gass,” a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the “daisy” spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass. Like the daisy particle itself—“forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two”—the stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected. From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce’s voice emerges—a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.

Why I Write

Why I Write PDF Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724263
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description
George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell's Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the 'four great motives for writing' – 'sheer egoism', 'aesthetic enthusiasm', 'historical impulse' and 'political purpose' – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell's mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer's oeuvre.

Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts

Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : British periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 874

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Book Description