Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature PDF Download

Author: Matthias Eck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000054535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature: Strategic Evasion shows the important contribution that literature can make to the understanding of masculinities, by offering insights into the mental structures of hegemonic masculinity. It argues that while there is evidence of frustrating hegemonic masculinities, contemporary Austrian literature offers few positive images of alternative masculinity. The texts simultaneously criticize and present fantasies of hegemonic masculinity and as such provide a space for ambiguity and evasion. While providing readers with an in-depth study of the works of the authors Daniel Kehlmann, Doron Rabinovici and Arno Geiger, Matthias Eck elaborates the concept of strategic evasion. In order to bridge the gap between the ideal of masculinity and reality the male characters adopt two strategies of evasion: evasion to hide a softer and gentler side, and evasion into a world of fantasy where they pretend to live up to the ideal of hegemonic masculinity.

Author: Frauke Matthes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031103181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.

Author: Katharina Donn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000074269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

Author: Susana Onega
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000060144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

Author: Tymon Adamczewski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000195872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World offers an important contribution to thinking about the artist and his work. Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, the volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic artist. The chapters, organized around three broad thematic sections (Geographies, Receptions and Perspectives), address the notions of audience, performance and identity, allowing to map out the structure of feeling and authenticity, both, in the case of the artist and his audience. Taking its cue from the collapse of the so-called high-/ low culture split following from the Nobel Prize, the book explores the argument that Dylan (and all popular music) can be interpreted as literature and offers discussions in the context of literary traditions, or visual culture and music. This contributes to a nuanced and complex portrayal of the seminal cultural phenomenon called Bob Dylan.

Author: Karl A. Plank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000338967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace’s masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace’s theology of a "boneless Christ," The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank’s work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.

Author: Grant Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Étienne Balibar writes that today we are at the end of capitalism. This is not because capitalism has run its course or has met an irresistible force, but because there can be no purer form of capitalism than the one we have today. Taking seriously the idea that this strain of capitalism has not only seized the urban environment but is the urban environment, works by Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Penelope Lively, Peter Ackroyd, and J.G. Ballard are read as representative of a loosely allied group of London writers who have anticipated, critiqued, and offered up various avenues of resistance to the deleterious effects of this most vigorous strain of capitalism. Writing on the city by charting a politics of reconnection to the real that necessarily unsettles the epistemological and ontological ground upon which both modernity and capitalism sit, this stable of writers makes clear the ways in which the sheer materiality of the urban environment profoundly influences the being and thinking of individuals. In so doing, these writers produce works which when read together give the coordinates of an altermodernity that might just allow capitalism to reach its final conclusion.

Author: Beatriz Pérez Zapata
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000407152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This monograph analyses Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time as trauma fictions that reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political facets of trauma. Starting with Smith’s humorous critique of psychoanalysis and her definition of original trauma, this volume explores Smith’s challenge of Western theories of trauma and coping, and how her narratives expose the insidiousness of (post)colonial suffering and unbelonging. This book then explores transgenerational trauma, the tensions between remembering and forgetting, multidirectional memory, and the possibilities of the ambiguities and contradictions of the postcolonial and diasporic characters Smith depicts. This analysis discloses Smith’s effort to ethically redefine trauma theory from a postcolonial and decolonial standpoint, reiterates the need to acknowledge and work through colonial histories and postcolonial forms of oppression, and critically reflects on our roles as witnesses of suffering in global times.

Author: Josep M. Armengol
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030715965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book focuses on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, including shifting perceptions of physical and sexual prowess, depression, and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, as well as new affective patterns. The collection also incorporates factors such as race, sexuality and religion. The volume includes studies, amongst others, on Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Edmund White. Ultimately, this study proves that men’s aging experiences as described in contemporary U.S. literature and culture are as complex and varied as those of their female counterparts.

Author: Rebecca S. Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527565602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the changing history, rhetoric, politics and representation of crime and madness in modern Austria. From the emergence of Viennese modernism to the post-modern moment, the myths, metaphors and realities of crime and madness have unfolded in the shadow of larger cultural questions regarding cultural norms, gender, war, and national identity. Historically based contributions illuminate such diverse cultural realities as the evolution of psychiatry as medical practice, asylum practices in the early twentieth century, and Austrian participation in and responses to terror and war crimes. From these investigations proceeds the clear insight that cultural responses to crime and madness are often steeped in mythmaking as much as objective policy and practice. Conversely, literary and metaphorical representations of crime and madness reveal attitudes and cultural realities about the Austrian society that produced them and which they reflect. Specialists from the fields of Austrian history, literature and culture studies have collaborated to produce this truly interdisciplinary volume, which responses to crime and madness are often steeped in mythmaking as much as objective policy and practice. Conversely, literary and metaphorical representations of crime and madness reveal attitudes and cultural realities about the Austrian society that produced them and which they reflect.