The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction PDF Download

Author: Gordon Slethaug
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809318414
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan's minimalist metafictive parody of the double depicts our narcissistic view of reality. In Double or Nothing, Federman subverts the conventional double, exposing its gamelike structures and traditional views of life and text.

Author: Emily M. Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100907962X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Addressing the question of why many Latin American fiction authors are writing about Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust now, this book charts the evolution of Latin American literary production from the 19th Century, through the late 20th century 'Boom', to the present day. Containing texts from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, it analyses work by some of the most well-known contemporary writers including Roberto Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Volpi, Lucía Puenzo, Patricio Pron and Michel Laub; as well as notable precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Ricardo Piglia. Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Contemporary Latin American Fiction argues that these authors find Nazism relevant to thinking through some of the most urgent contemporary challenges we face: from racism, to the unequal division of wealth and labour between the Global 'North' and 'South'; and, of course, the general failure of democracy to eliminate fascism.

Author: Juliana De Nooy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Stories of twins are told with astonishing frequency in contemporary culture. Films and novels from recent decades repeatedly tell of the stranglehold of brotherly love, the evil twin who steals her sister's lover, the homicidal mutant twin, the reunion of twins separated at birth, warring twins, and confusion between look-alikes. Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture asks why we keep telling twin tales and how these have been transformed in recent retellings to reflect the preoccupations of the times.

Author: Tracie Church Guzzio
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. Guzzio argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman's work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman's personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman remains under-studied. Of particular value is Guzzio's analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman's challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, and his allowing past, present, and future time to remain fluid in the narratives, Guzzio finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

Author: Aimee Lynn Pozorski
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170619
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Roth and Celebrity is composed of 10 original essays that consider the vexed and ambivalent relationship between Philip Roth and his own celebrity as revealed both in personal interviews as well as in the fiction that spans his publishing history. With its simultaneous interest in American popular culture and the work of the most important living American writer to-date, the collection will hold wide appeal to advanced readers in American studies, literary scholarship, and film.

Author: Eran Dorfman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000763293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic literature. Far from being a merely esoteric entity, however, this book argues that the double, although it mostly goes unnoticed, is a widespread phenomenon that has significant influence on our lives. It is an inherent key element of human subjectivity whose functions, forms, and effects have not yet gained the serious consideration they merit. Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and combining a personal story with theoretical interventions, Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference, philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.

Author: Claire Taylor
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1904350127
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Considers the novels of three Latin American writers, the Argentinian Griselda Gambaro, the Colombian Albalucia ngel, and the Mexican Laura Esquivel, and examines their work in relation to the formation of feminine identity.

Author: Gordon E. Slethaug
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791491730
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Beautiful Chaos is the first book to examine contemporary American fiction through the lens of chaos theory. The book focuses on recent works of fiction by John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone, all of whom incorporate aspects of chaos theory in one or more of their novels. They accomplish this through their disruption of conventional linear narrative forms and their use of strategic tropes of chaos and order, but also—and more significantly for an understanding of the interaction of science and fiction—through their self-conscious embrace of the current rhetoric of chaos theory. Since the publication of James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science in 1987, chaos theory has been taken up by a wide variety of literary critics and other scholars of the arts. While considering the relationship between chaos theory and recent American fiction, Beautiful Chaos details basic assumptions about orderly and dynamic systems and the various manifestations of chaos theory in literature, including mimesis, metaphor, model, and metachaotics. It also explains particular features of orderly and dynamic systems, including entropy, bifurcation and turbulence, noise and information, scaling and fractals, iteration, and strange attractors.

Author: Brett Ashley Kaplan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150132473X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
"Uses Roth's novels as springboards to illuminate larger problematics of victimization, gender, racism and anti-Semitism"--

Author: Karen Dillon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476666962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently offer the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikeness--standing side by side, speaking and acting in unison. Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines the historical narrative--within the discourses of experimentation, aberrance and eugenics--and how it has shaped their representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.