It Occurs to Me That I Am America

It Occurs to Me That I Am America PDF Author: Richard Russo
Publisher: Washington Square Press
ISBN: 1501179616
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories on what it means to be an American from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen: “This chorus of brilliant voices articulating the shape and texture of contemporary America makes for necessary reading” (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies). When Donald Trump claimed victory in the November 2016 election, the US literary and art world erupted in indignation. Many of America’s preeminent writers and artists are stridently opposed to the administration’s agenda and executive orders—and they’re not about to go gentle into that good night. In this “masterful literary achievement” (Kurt Eichenwald, author of Conspiracy of Fools), more than thirty of the most acclaimed writers at work today consider the fundamental ideals of a free, just, and compassionate democracy through fiction in an anthology that “promises to be both a powerful tool in the fight to uphold our values and a tribute to the remarkable voices behind it” (Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU). With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and edited by bestselling author Jonathan Santlofer, this powerful anthology includes original, striking art from fourteen of the country’s most celebrated artists, cartoonists, and graphic novelists, including Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Marilyn Minter, and Eric Fischl. Transcendent, urgent, and ultimately hopeful, It Occurs to Me That I Am America takes back the narrative of what it means to be an American in the 21st century.

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry PDF Author: Matt Theado
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

Wicked Messenger

Wicked Messenger PDF Author: Mike Marqusee
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous. Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."

Lyric Encounters

Lyric Encounters PDF Author: Daniel Morris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441159940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

Genealogical Pragmatism

Genealogical Pragmatism PDF Author: John J. Stuhr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421540
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Drawing on the work of popular American writers, American philosophers, and Continental thinkers, this book provides a new interpretation of pragmatism and American philosophy.

The Popular & the Canonical

The Popular & the Canonical PDF Author: David Johnson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415351690
Category : Canon
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
This volume ranges from the Second World War to the postmodern, considering issues of the 'popular' and the competing criteria by which literature has been judged in the later twentieth century. As well as tracing the transition from modernism to postmodernism, the authors guide students through debates around the pleasures of the popular and the question of inter-relations between 'mass' and 'high' cultures. Drawing further upon issues of value and function raised in Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900-1960, they examine contemporary literary prizes and the activity of judgement involved in English Studies. This text can be used alongside the other books in the series for a complete course on twentieth-century literature, or on its own as essential reading for students of mid to late twentieth-century writing. Texts examined in detail include: du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise, Barker's The Ghost Road.

The Chomsky Effect

The Chomsky Effect PDF Author: Robert F Barsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Noam Chomsky as political gadfly, groundbreaking scholar, and intellectual guru: key issues in Chomsky's career and the sometimes contentious reception to his ideas. “People are dangerous. If they're able to involve themselves in issues that matter, they may change the distribution of power, to the detriment of those who are rich and privileged.”—Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky has been praised by the likes of Bono and Hugo Chávez and attacked by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Alan Dershowitz. Groundbreaking linguist and outspoken political dissenter—voted “most important public intellectual in the world today” in a 2005 magazine poll—Chomsky inspires fanatical devotion and fierce vituperation. In The Chomsky Effect, Chomsky biographer Robert Barsky examines Chomsky's positions on a number of highly charged issues—Chomsky's signature issues, including Vietnam, Israel, East Timor, and his work in linguistics—-that illustrate not only “the Chomsky effect” but also “the Chomsky approach.” Chomsky, writes Barsky, is an inspiration and a catalyst. Not just an analyst or advocate, he encourages people to become engaged—to be “dangerous” and challenge power and privilege. The actions and reactions of Chomsky supporters and detractors and the attending contentiousness can be thought of as “the Chomsky effect.” Barsky discusses Chomsky's work in such areas as language studies, media, education, law, and politics, and identifies Chomsky's intellectual and political precursors. He charts anti-Chomsky sentiments as expressed from various standpoints, including contemporary Zionism, mainstream politics, and scholarly communities. He discusses Chomsky's popular appeal—his unlikely status as a punk and rock hero (Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is one of many rock and roll Chomskyites)—and offers in-depth analyses of the controversies surrounding Chomsky's roles in the “Faurisson Affair” and the “Pol Pot Affair.” Finally, Barsky considers the role of the public intellectual in order to assess why Noam Chomsky has come to mean so much to so many—and what he may mean to generations to come.

The Bop Apocalypse

The Bop Apocalypse PDF Author: John Lardas
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252025990
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Lardas examines the new visions of the three artists and their Beat religiosity, wherein they lived their "religion" of real-life experience rather than faith. By rejecting the cultural tenets of postwar America, each man took on the discourse of the public theology, created physical enactments of a religious representation of the world, and through literature changed the interpretation of modern religion.

The Sound of Listening

The Sound of Listening PDF Author: Philip Metres
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472124218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.

Thematics Reconsidered

Thematics Reconsidered PDF Author: Trommler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004651268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Responding to a new interest in thematic studies, the volume features essays by some of the leading scholars from the United States and Europe. In honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, the co-author with Ingrid Daemmrich of the handbook Themes and Motifs in Western Literature, the contributors reassess, both in theory and in case studies, the viability of thematics as part of contemporary literary criticism. They demonstrate the broad scope of methodologies between strict systematization of themes and motifs and reader-response conceptions of 'theming.' Special topics include a thematology of the Jewish people; motifs in folklore; a cluster on madness, hysteria, and mastery; the story of Judith; Cinderella; thematics in Dürrenmatt and Isaac Babel; chaos as a theme. A concluding chapter illuminates aspects of nineteenth-century literary history.