Contemporary Novelists And The Aesthetics Of Twenty First Century American Life

Download or read book Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life written by Alexandra Kingston-Reese and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Download or read book Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life written by Alexandra Kingston-Reese and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Download or read book Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction written by Thom Dancer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity can feel impossible to solve. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction argues that contemporary fiction helps those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems — not, as usually assumed, through the ambitious search for grand solutions but rather by cultivating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction advances a claim for the value of temperament in general as a crucial analytic for understanding contemporary experience as well as for a particular temperament of critical modesty as crucial in negotiating the limits of critical and human agency that constitute our daily lives. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, this volume makes the surprising case that by adopting a modest stance, the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, it offers an engaging response to the debate over critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Download or read book William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture written by Mitch R. Murray and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It is high time for a book that explores the significance and wide-ranging impact of Gibson’s fiction. In the 1970s and 80s, Gibson, the “Godfather of Cyberpunk,” rejuvenated science fiction. In groundbreaking works such as Neuromancer, which changed science fiction as we knew it, Gibson provided us with a language and imaginary through which it became possible to make sense of the newly emerging world of globalization and the digital and media age. Ever since, Gibson’s reformulation of science fiction has provided us not just with radically innovative visions of the future but indeed with trenchant analyses of our historical present and of the emergence and exhaustion of possible futures. Contributors: Maria Alberto, Andrew M. Butler, Amy J. Elias, Christian Haines, Kylie Korsnack, Mathias Nilges, Malka Older, Aron Pease, Lisa Swanstrom, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sherryl Vint, Phillip E. Wegner, Roger Whitson, Charles Yu

Download or read book Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature written by Katherine Ebury and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Download or read book Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences written by Edward Allen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed? At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Download or read book Profiles and Plotlines written by Katherine D. Johnston and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot points in tales of the political economy. In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.