Curved Thought and Textual Wandering

Curved Thought and Textual Wandering PDF Author: Ellen E. Berry
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472103003
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
This wide-ranging and provocative study traces Gertrude Stein's production of avant-garde texts that radically disrupted traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued, and read. The book combines feminist and postmodern perspectives to illuminate new facets of Stein's novels and to situate them within an expanded definition of the postmodern. The author argues that if we fail to consider the contexts within which postmodern innovations occur, and if we subsume all formal disruptions under a generalized postmodern mode, we obscure important differences among authors and distort the notion of the postmodern itself. The study expands our understanding of Stein as a novelist and a narrative theorist, repositions her work within a revised notion of literary history, and thus clarifies points of relation and divergence between modernism and postmodernism. It also assists in the historicizing of the postmodern literary emergence by insisting on the centrality of gender as a category of analysis. Finally, it argues for the importance of constructing definitions of postmodernism that will allow space to consider the complexity and diversity of its cultural practices. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering will be welcomed by scholars of modernism, of Gertrude Stein, and of feminist and narrative theory and postmodern culture.

The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein's Landscape Writing

The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein's Landscape Writing PDF Author: Linda Voris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319320645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein’s work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein’s radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where she travelled in the 1920s and the spatial relations of landscape painting, Stein presents a new model of meaning whereby making sense is an activity distributed in a text and across successive texts. From love poetry, to plays and portraiture, Linda Voris offers close readings of Stein’s most anthologized and less known writing in a case study of a new method of interpretation. By practicing Stein’s innovative means of making sense, Voris reveals the excitement of her discoveries and the startling implications for knowledge, identity, and intimacy.

What is American?

What is American? PDF Author: Walter Hölbling
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 9783825877347
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
"Identity is one of the central cultural narratives of the US on which both dominant and resistant discourses draw. This critical anthology honors the topic's diversity while concentrating on one central aspect, that of newness. Construction of identities, their invention, reinvention and reformulation are discussed within four thematic categories: New Concepts and Reconsiderations, Migration and Multiple Identities, Individuation and Privatized Identity Construction, and (Re-) Inventions and Virtual Identities. Written by European as well as U. S. scholars, ranging from the 19th century to the utopian future, from mainstream canonized figures to transgender performers, from a critique of individualism to a celebration of loneliness, the articles present a cross-section of current research on U.S. identities. "

Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics

Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics PDF Author: Brad Bucknell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521660280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Bucknell's study investigates how music, as a discrete artistic mode of expression and a recurring theme in the work of these four writers, reveals the intricate and varied nature of the modernist project."--Jacket.

Primary Stein

Primary Stein PDF Author: Janet Boyd
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739183206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein’s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein’s writing. Following Stein’s own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein’s primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein’s texts.

Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing

Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing PDF Author: T. Foster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing makes new connections between feminist criticism of domestic ideology in the nineteenth century, modernist women's experiments with literary form, contemporary feminist debates about the politics of location, and postmodern theories of social space. The book identifies a coherent transition of women's writing that transforms domestic ideologies of 'woman's place' by redefining the ideas about space that underlie that ideology. The result is to open the space of gender identity to new relations of class and race.

Projecting Words, Writing Images

Projecting Words, Writing Images PDF Author: John R. Leo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443833347
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
This compilation of essays by 20 scholars trained in comparative literatures, art history, critical theory, and American cultural studies further explores and expands the spirited and energetic field of visual cultural studies and its cognate or supplemental projects of “visual practices” and “visual literacy.” Their topics and perspectives engage contemporary re-theorizations of “text,” of “word” and “image,” while their alignments, ruptures, slippages and aporias fall across a range of media practices and institutions. These include photography and exhibition, film, television, entertainment, journalism, poetry and literature as visual and spectacular performances, and graphic narratives, but also their discursive intersections with “race” and ethnicity, their conjugations of gender, their tense and constitutive relations within multiple public spheres and (post)modernities.

Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature

Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature PDF Author: Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501384880
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Breaking with linearity – the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world – many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein and Azorín; through its development in the interwar years, by writers such as Raymond Queneau and Vladimir Nabokov; to its full flowering in the work of authors James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, among others; and its later employment by post-war writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino and Maurice Blanchot. Through a series of close readings, the book aims to highlight the various ways in which narrative circularity serves to break with an essentially teleological and theological thinking. Finally, Toribio Vazquez concludes by proposing a new typology of non-linear narratives, which builds on the work of recent narratologists.

Encyclopedia of the Novel

Encyclopedia of the Novel PDF Author: Paul Schellinger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135918260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 838

Book Description
The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

Mapping Postcommunist Cultures

Mapping Postcommunist Cultures PDF Author: Vitaly Chernetsky
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773576509
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
In Mapping Postcommunist Cultures Chernetsky argues that Russia and Ukraine exemplify the principal paradigms of post-Soviet cultural development. In Russia this has manifested itself in the subversive dismantling of the totalitarian linguistic regime and the foregrounding of previously marginalized subject positions. In Ukraine, work in these areas shows how the traumas of centuries of colonial oppression are being overcome through the carnivalesque decrowning of ideological dogmas and an affirmation of a new type of community, most recently demonstrated in the peaceful Orange Revolution of 2004. Mapping Postcommunist Cultures also critiques the neglect of the former communist world in current models of cultural globalization.